Which means we also just passed five years with me sitting -- in the editor's chair? at the editor's desk? -- at ReelGood.
Both things happened at basically the same time, which I can assure you was not planned. Of course COVID was not planned, but I should clarify that the onset of COVID had nothing to do with the transition.
My previous editor, founder of the site and good friend had, in the months beforehand, told us he intended to discontinue doing the ReelGood podcast, and then that he wanted to step away from the site entirely. He was happy to hand it off to me, or to let it go the way of the dodo if I did not want it. I didn't necessarily want to be the editor, but I did not want the site to go the way of the dodo either, especially since it is part of a brand that includes the ReelGood Film Festival. And since if I let ReelGood die, I didn't know if there was as legitimate of a way to continue thinking of myself as a critic -- or to get the benefits of membership in the Australian Film Critics Association (AFCA), through which I see movies for free.
It is rather remarkable, however, how closely aligned in time they were. On Thursday, March 12, 2020, I posted my first review where I was the guy updating Wordpress and publishing. I was also the writer on the piece. The movie was Downhill, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash's remake of the Ruben Ostlund film Force Majeure.
On Saturday, March 14, 2020, I attended my last pre-COVID public event, a concert by New Order at the Sidney Meyer Music Bowl.
I think it was that Monday, March 16, 2020, where we didn't come into the office for the next, I don't know, six months. Perhaps it was longer than six months. It's all a blur at this point. We either didn't come in that Monday, or that Monday or Tuesday was the last day and then we stopped coming in. Basically, I am posting on pretty much exactly the five-year anniversary of that date.
Now, it is possible that COVID helped get me up to speed on this extra responsibility. If I had been going into the office every day, it might not have been quite so easy to cut my teeth as the editor and achieve lift-off. However, "lift-off" would have to be a relative term because at the same time, movies also stopped coming out. So that first year was a hell of a lot of Netflix movies.
Since the Downhill review -- in other words, during my time as editor -- I have written 410 reviews. That's compared to the 239 reviews I wrote in the five years prior to then. Conveniently, my time at ReelGood is about ten years and five months, meaning the time is almost perfectly bifurcated between when I was both a writer and editor and when I was just a writer. Obviously, I'm doing a lot more writing now.
And that has largely to do with losing my editor's regular output as a writer. He wrote as many, if not more, reviews as/than I did. And then dropped it cold turkey.
In the time since, I've had trouble getting someone as consistent as he was. I've had six to eight people write at least one thing for me during that time. The person who has written the most out of that group has written 34 reviews. So, about 8% of what I've written.
I'd say "It's hard to get good help," but really, I haven't tried very hard. I don't mind mostly keeping this thing afloat myself. Most of the time I don't mind.
The truth is, however, that it is good help. The two people who write for me the most often, I basically don't have to edit their work at all, and then with the others I'm still not having to overhaul them. Sure, I may also not be applying the same standard of editorial severity as they would at a big newspaper, magazine or website -- though lately, it's only the last of those things that really exists -- but I also can't abide by publishing something that isn't publishable.
So strictly as an editor, I've been fairly hands off, and occasionally feel proud of edits I do make to increase the clarity. And I'm very careful, when I do edit something written, not to add anything in my own voice. In fact, I'd be more likely to remove or combine than to produce something that didn't originate from the author, and I think that's what a good editor should do.
As a visionary, though, I'm pretty lacking.
When I started writing, the types of things posted on ReelGood were varied. There were reviews, of course. But there were also opinion pieces, listicles and posting of trailers or other film-related YouTube videos. Except for the videos, I did some of each, before I was editor. I certainly think the site benefitted from not being "just" a review site.
But to be honest, I don't have the energy to assign pieces like that to writers or to write them myself. Listicles can actually be quite a lot of work, if you want to do them well, and there's also a lot of bad examples of listicle clickbait out there. I'd really like to differentiate this site from that clickbait, even if the result is that I don't do them at all.
As for opinion pieces, well, part of my disinterest in doing that is that I already have an outlet for that here, through this blog. On a site like ReelGood, I feel like an opinion piece needs to meet certain standards of timeliness or public benefit, while on The Audient, I'm comfortable writing whatever creeps into my brain because you've already signed off on it by coming here. ReelGood readers have not signed off on my personal, highly eccentric whims for topics to write about, and I don't want that site to become just a reflection of my personality -- even if my previous editor encouraged me to write about anything I'd write about on The Audient, there. I think you can probably understand why I never thought that was a great idea.
But at five years, I'm kind of wondering: Am I really an editor, or am I more of a shepherd?
A reasonable argument could be made that if you are in a position of power or leadership in a publication, and you aren't pushing it forward, you are essentially overseeing its demise. And that is a reasonable thing to wonder about ReelGood. Am I just rearranging deck chairs on a Titanic that will inevitably, eventually, sink? Do the readers we do have silently judge me for just giving them a steady stream of reviews and no other* content of any kind? (*Barely any. We do also preview the ReelGood Film Festival and have special coverage for MIFF.)
I don't really know, and at this point, I'm not trying to worry too much about it. The webhosting fees and the fees for our podcast service (which I still pay for even though we haven't done a podcast in more than four years) come out of my own wallet, and though they are fairly minimal, it does give me the right to determine just how much or how little I do. So really, if I'm "letting anyone down," it can probably only be myself. However, I consider it the price I pay to continue to get my critics card (thereby also offsetting some of the benefit of the critics card) and to continue to be able to call myself a "professional critic" ... whatever that means these days.
If I were monetizing the site and benefitting from that, while someone else paid the bills, well then, that might make me feel shittier. But it has never been the least interest of mine to monetize this site, in part because I know how much work would go into it for such little gain, and in part because that would mean a slew of ads and paid content that isn't actually related to whatever our core identity is. And those options are there ... I get emails from people all the time about it. But I don't want someone to pay me $200 (or whatever it would be) to write a post that very loosely ties movies into an advertisement for some gambling website, or other unsavory things that come to me.
In an ideal world? I find some young person, maybe someone who already works for the film festival (in which I am not involved other than promoting it), who has the vision that I lack, and wants to take the site and make it into something special and new ... or at least to what it was before my editor resigned. That person may be out there. But I am not looking very hard for them. For some of the same reasons I'm not looking at improving the site myself. It all takes work, and I am happier to just muddle along at status quo than to launch some initiative that calls on reserves of giving a fuck that I don't really have. I've got a lot of other things going on in my life and am in my busiest period ever at work, so this stuff has to take the time and mental space I can allot to it.
When I talk about my lack of vision, though, I don't think I'm really pointing an accusatory finger at myself. There's no judgment. If I wanted to have vision and lacked it, well, that might be sort of a tragedy. But all I really wanted to do, when I took over this site in 2020, was to keep it from going dark. To keep the brand alive. To keep an online home for my reviews, one that lends them -- and, by extension, me -- validity. This last seems particularly important now that all my reviews are gone from AllMovie, as I wrote about here.
And I can say I have succeeded in that mission. I have written 410 reviews in those five years, and that's not nothing. In fact, that's a lot, an average of 82 per year. The site is still going. It's still being paid for and it almost never goes more than ten days without an update. That would have to be an unusual situation, though, because updates every four days is much more typical.
In many ways I have been doing the minimum, but there has been a certain maximalism in that minimum. There are a lot of places in life where you get points for showing up, just for being there, and I have been showing up for ReelGood for five years now, when no one else would.
Has it been downhill that whole time? (A good writer always calls back to his opening thought.) Maybe. And there were times I thought about quitting. When I was approaching the milestone of 500 total reviews for the site, I thought, maybe I could just stop there, and put it in the rearview mirror.
But I haven't. Instead I blew past 500, and as another sort of milestone, now I'm at exactly 650. With no end in sight.
So if it's been downhill -- for the site, if not so much for my needs from the site -- then it's been only slightly downhill. We still have readers. We are still a known name. And I know that's not just from the now far more visible ReelGood Film Festival ... which would not even exist if not as an outgrowth of this site that I am keeping on life support.
But as life support goes, it's pretty good support. As it turns out, I am a pretty good supporter.
And there's no end in sight for that either.
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