Film criticism has never garnered the level of mainstream interest that I would have liked, but with the passing of Ebert and now Maltin’s retirement of The Movie Guide, are we never to see film critics hit the mainstream again?
As a kid, I remember climbing up on the bookshelf to pull Maltin’s Movie Guide down so my parents and I could look up the movie we were watching. It was an invaluable resource that is no longer as necessary as it once was.
via io9:
Reading Robbie Gonzalez’s article about Mat Honan’s lament for the iPod Classic made me think of another entertainment colossus that was recently, and just as quietly, retired: Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which is ending with the 2015 edition published just last month.
Maltin was, like his contemporary Roger Ebert, a crucial figure in making classic movies and the language of film criticism accessible to a mass audience, and like Ebert a big part of that appeal was personality. If you saw him on Entertainment Tonight orThe Today Show, he was clearly a fan who could communicate his enthusiasm for the medium to readers in plain language. And he probably couldn’t have gotten the Guide published in the first place if he hadn’t been a fan. He assembled the first edition of the book, titled TV Movies, in 1969, at the age of seventeen, before the Internet, before personal computers, before the era of home video or cable, relying almost entirely on memories and handwritten notes. It was a remarkable achievement for one so young, but it also represented a radical idea: that the entirety of movie history could be captured in a thick, but not especially unwieldy paperback book, kept close by the TV for quick reference. (Not unlike the idea of carrying one’s entire music library around with them in a pocket-sized device.) The book was aimed at folks who wanted to know if the Late Show airing of Red Dust, Murder, My Sweet or Mothra was worth sitting through, but it also appealed to people who were curious about the other movies Maltin mentioned, who would scan the listings to see if they were on that week, and in doing so, helped to create dedicated movie fans out of casual viewers. The book would go through two more editions in the ’70s, before video became widespread; after 1978, the Movie Guide became an annual publication, and remained so until August of this year.
The ’80s and ’90s were a Golden Age of Maltin-style guidebooks, and I got interested in them just around the same time my parents bought our first VCR, in 1984. In addition to the Movie Guide, there was Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion, Mick Porter and Marsha Mason’sVideo Movie Guide, Pauline Kael’s 501 Nights At The Movies, Halliwell’s Film Guide, and many others, including Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, John Stanley’sCreature Features, and Danny Peary’s Cult Movies and The Guide For The Film Fanatic. They varied in quality and type, but they taught me that it was possible to examine movies critically, to have an articulated opinion about them beyond just “It sucked” or “I kinda liked it.” By the time I graduated high school I had a whole shelf of the things, which I consulted frequently and obsessively. As recently as ten years ago, most of these books were still in print, many in updated editions. But the speed and accessibility of the Internet, and the rise of free online resources like IMDb and Wikipedia, effectively made them redundant and instantly out-of-date.
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