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The Nirvana of Film Industry Fandom
Russell Goldman
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“Good weekend, movie fans, and welcome to my final take of predictions of the 81st Oscar awards. A lot has changed in the race over the past three weeks, as- who am I kidding? Hardly anything has changed. ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is virtually guaranteed to win everything in its path, and its number of potential trophies just keeps getting higher and higher. And we pretty much know who will win all of the other awards. But who will they be, exactly? Let’s find out…”
I wrote this in middle school.
My blog MovieJacuzzi (2008-2009) was designed for me to produce movie reviews, previews, awards predictions, and, apparently, “commentaries about Hollywood rumors and buzz.” I would review movies on a scale from boiling hot – 100 degrees, or 138, if I really liked it – or freezing cold (sub-30 degrees Fahrenheit).
I, a middle school student in McLean, Virginia, wanted to one day become a filmmaker. But today, I wanted to be a news and editorial source on film for the world. It was time to expand outside of middle school, where film news was decidedly worthless. I’d already tried talking to my partner in Chemistry about The Reader’s surprise appearance in the Best Picture category. He didn’t give a shit.
My ascension would be easy. I already knew everything. My diet at the time was comprised solely of Variety, Entertainment Weekly and Box Office Mojo. I spent my afternoons lurking in an online forum for box office trackers because my parents wouldn’t let me make an account. I knew The Dark Knight was a shocking snub in Best Picture, which made the Oscars seem less relevant to what was happening in cinema than ever. Benjamin Button was a bit too divisive to be the late-in-the-race showstopper everyone was expecting. The well-regarded Slumdog Millionaire had a clear path to victory. Sean Penn would win his second Oscar in five years for Milk because The Wrestler’s Mickey Rourke had a bad reputation in Hollywood, even though The Wrestler was Rourke’s best performance to date. I wrote that last statement having never seen a movie starring Mickey Rourke—the horse-race itself gave me enough of a rush. With Movie Jacuzzi, the time felt ripe to make a blog that with patience and just enough time in between take-home algebra sets I could make an internet staple within a year or two.
I was passionate enough about the industry for it to be a massive part of my childhood. Today, I wonder now how healthy that fandom was. Today, the article I wrote in 2009 sounds surprisingly cynical— Who am I kidding? We pretty much know who will win all of the other awards. Who was ‘We’? Certainly no one I’d met in person. I suppose I wanted to sound like all the film critics I idolized—they were exhausted by the predictability and lack of enthusiasm for the 81st Academy Awards. Yet as a result, I mirrored that defeatist tone and gave myself very little to say. Every now and then I’d have a moment of clarity and remember that I was theoretically interested in all of this because I wanted to be a filmmaker. Was the film industry just a distraction?
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Every origin story from notable film directors starts with how young they were actually making movies. Spielberg developed his soon-to-be-iconic tracking shots when he was 16. Ang Lee formative experience with Ingmar Bergman movies or Scorsese’s with Duel in the Sun shot some kind of cinema mythos into their bloodstreams. Even the early work of Seth Rogen and Edgar Wright shamelessly borrowed from movies they loved. I had my flashes of this kind of purity— discovering Toy Story, making short films in high school—but in my memory they stand out as exceptions to the rule of obsessing over the industry of it all. Of siting in a basement somewhere in Virginia where I used my love of movies to evaluate their commercial worth against each other in an awards show nobody cared about that year.
A decade has passed. I now work in the film industry I used to obsess over. I’d like to think I’ve developed a few more opinions about myself and the world around me, which I’ve put towards making my own passion projects. I no longer want to write in film news—I felt I’d sworn it off years ago—but I still adore consuming the discourse and arguing about the ‘business’. To have a Twitter account where I’ve gradually followed critics and creatives of all shapes and sizes means having every opinion imaginable as soon as I refresh my feed. My Movie Jacuzzi youth would cry if he knew I could spend a whole day reading gossip about Benioff and Weiss’ split from Star Wars, the behind-the-scenes drama with Apple’s TV launch, ominous box office predictions for Terminator: Dark Fate… and still not get to everything by the end of the day.
It’s become unfortunately easy for me to switch back into Jacuzzi mode. A tweet is much easier to write than a blog post. Reading Martin Scorsese’s third statement about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is much easier than reading something off the stack of books I’d promised myself I’d read by now. And to this end, writing about my natural instincts to immediately consume the least nutritious content at my fingertips is easier than, I dunno, deleting Twitter and focusing on my work.
I don’t write this to mourn the loss of a ‘simpler’ era with no phones, fewer voices and worse content; my addition existed well before Twitter did. More so, I feel guilty about how much frivolous information fills my headspace. About how I spend so much time dreaming of Oscar and box office stats when it’s not my job to, or something that could benefit anyone else. This is a lonely feeling, too. Even in LA, it’s much easier to read all this news than find somebody to talk about it with.
But also, every now and then, there’s a John.
John is a guy I met at a party. He’s an freelance awards columnist. He did the thing I didn’t have the stamina to do, because he knew why he liked it. At this party, John told me I could name any Oscar year this century and he could tell me everything the nominated movies meant to him that season. That we don’t talk about 20th Century Women enough, or Toy Story 4. That it’s ridiculous a performance as good as Elizabeth Moss’ in Her Smell won’t get nominated because its distributor is too small to spend on a big campaign. That if he hears someone say unprompted “My aunt used to live in Paris” he’ll burst out laughing.
It wasn’t even that I agreed with all his opinions—though these ones I absolutely did. It’s that I absolutely understood his language. We were submerged in the same subculture, one that could move beyond surface-level film news into intricate discussions. And that week—one I’d spent holed up in my own work, distracting myself with all this industry stuff, not connecting with almost anybody—I felt like to understand how somebody new thought. And they got to understand how I thought.
Connecting with John helps me admire the obsession the younger me had. It makes me that nerding out over the streaming wars or the future of high frame rate projection can be a hobby—I don’t think I could be a healthy news writer—that I can share with other people. Here’s to more Johns, fewer late nights on Twitter, more making things with others, fewer attempts to digest everything about Hollywood on a daily basis, and more of an understanding of how to like the things that I like.