Who is writing this

I spent twenty years inside this business. I've seen and done a lot of...stuff. I am fairly accurate at being able to tell the difference between somebody making a bad choice and somebody running out of hours or money and being forced to make it work, and I will tell you which one I think you are looking at.

I have 20 minutes a week phone screen time. I have 100+ hours a week silver screen time. Features, television, documentaries. The famous disasters, the ones nobody bothered with and the ones everyone can't seem to shut the hell up about. I take detailed notes while it runs, in real time. Then I watch it again to see what I missed.

Those notes do not always start at the beginning of whatever I am watching. I do not start writing until something makes me, and sometimes that is two minutes in and sometimes it is twenty.

I started this collection because most people writing about movies these days have never stepped foot on a set, they only know what one looks like because of behind the scenes footage and what they drudge up on YouTube, so they end up grading a film against other films instead of against the craft itself and the problem the crew was actually trying to solve to make it believable.

So that is the work. Here is the person doing it, because you are going to run into them either way.

I am not going to sand down my rough edges for this. I curse. I use descriptive phrases that tell you exactly how I was feeling at the time, good, bad or otherwise. If something was garbage I am going to say it was garbage, and if something broke my heart I am going to say that too.

That is not me being an asshole behind a monitor for the sport of being an asshole. I am on the spectrum, like a whole lot of people in this business are, and it comes with some pretty hefty auditory markers and a penchant for obsessing over the smallest details, the ones I think make or break an entire screenplay, a sound cue, or a single visual on screen. A continuity miss nobody else in the room caught will cost a film a star with me. That is how I am built and I would rather you know it going in.

There is a look I like most and there are genres I like most. I leave both of them all the time on purpose and put on things I would never otherwise watch, because craft study does not happen inside a comfort zone.

Past that, who I am is nobody's business.

All posters, stills and promotional images on this site are the property of their respective copyright holders and are reproduced or linked here for the purpose of commentary and analysis. No ownership is claimed and no affiliation or endorsement is implied. Rights holders who want an image removed can say so and it comes down. Remove my shit, please[email protected]