It’s not easy to start over when you can see 50 bearing down on you like a freight train, and less so when you’re pushed to do it before you’re ready. Now that I’m closing in on the end of my first year publishing my own work directly to the public, I feel like I’m just starting to get a handle on what it is that I’m actually doing, and I think it’s important to be honest with you, the readers of Pulp & Popcorn, because more than any readers I have ever had, you have made the choice to be here. You ponied up, you paid some money, and you made the decision that you care what I have to say. And I cannot tell you how much that means to any writer. I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit lately because I see it everywhere. Every writer I know is either working to better define their corner of things or they are floundering. I hate marketing speak, and I hate thinking of art and entertainment in terms of widgets and units, but you can either hate something and act like you’re above it or acknowledge that the world works a certain way and you can get busy figuring out how to live in it. So, yeah, I think it’s terrible to refer to yourself as a “brand,” but the underlying idea that you have to tell an audience “This is who I am” so they show up when you release something has never been more true. This was taught to me innately because I grew up loving art and then learning about the artists behind it. The thing I fell in love with first, even before the epiphany of Star Wars, was the double-header of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Those shows taught me to read, and at age three, I was able to read the front page of a newspaper to my parents, who were flatout startled to realize how effectively I’d absorbed everything those shows were teaching.
Beyond that, they taught me that communities were full of diversity. White people and brown people and monsters and talking birds and gay puppets and imaginary elephants and tiny tigers and kings and owls all lived side by side and had to learn how to deal with each other in order to make things work the right way. And even beyond that, they taught me how important the voice behind the thing could be. Fred Rogers and Jim Henson spoke directly to me as creators, and the work they made wired me permanently and shaped who I am even today. The same thing was true of George Lucas a few years later, and then Steven Spielberg, and then more and more and more artists. Stan Lee. Jack Kirby. Steve Ditko. Stephen King. H.P. Lovecraft. Mark Twain. Isaac Asimov. Robert Heinlein. Blake Edwards. Chuck Jones. More and more often, I found myself choosing to watch or read or listen to something because of who made it more than what it was about, and that is still true today. The next step in that evolution has been on my mind lately as I’ve been reading books like Matt Ruff ’s Lovecra! Country and Victor Savalle’s The Ba"ad Of Black Tom, because it is important after finding your artistic heroes to realize that they are human, and that they will disappoint you as often as not. Sometimes, the artists we love turn out to be great people in addition to great artists. Sometimes, they are terrible human beings, and yet they still manage to create wonderful things. So it’s possible to choose to read something because of who someone is and also choose to read that same thing in spite of who someone is. Reading someone’s work is not an automatic endorsement of everything that person has ever done and every thought they’ve ever had, and we seem to be losing track of that in the larger cultural conversation. I’ve had some people cancel their subscriptions to Pulp & Popcorn because they were unhappy with how strident I’ve been about things that bother me socially or politically.
I have to accept that if I plan to survive as an independent publisher. I’m going to push some people away, and if I want that to stop, I have to utterly submerge my personal views, something that is impossible for any writer who actually puts anything of themselves into their work. Then again, I’ve also had some people cancel their subscriptions because of my unreliability, and that’s a whole different issue that I am having to address if I plan to move forward publishing on my own. I had started considering what my future was going to look like before my time with HitFix ended, and it’s something that weighs heavily on me. I feel like I sacrificed a lot of what I wanted to do to the job I was doing, burning down relationships both overtly and inadvertently. In the last year, I am somewhat haunted by how many people have looked me in the eye and told me, “I can’t hire you because my boss hates you because of this thing you wrote eleven years ago.” The reasons I am impossible to hire change from person to person. In some cases, the person won’t even bother having me into a room to tell me that they can’t hire me. They can’t even have me in to talk. I am a political disaster. That breaks my heart, but I can’t get upset about it. When I left Ain’t It Cool to go to HitFix, I did it with the intent of making something special. It wasn’t just a new job. It was my chance to help define how I thought online movie news and reviews could evolve. Ain’t It Cool was designed to agitate. When I first started contributing to the site in the early days, I did so as a disruptor. I wanted to do one thing above any other: I wanted to drive NRG out of business and I wanted to make Joe Farrell absolutely goddamn miserable. Little by little, though, I got seduced by the potential for what else Ain’t It Cool News could be. I got seduced by the idea that people wanted to read what I had to say about the industry that I loved. By the time the site started, I was already working in the industry as a writer. I joined the WGA back in 1995, and it was only after my first job that I even bought a computer so I could get online.
I got pulled off-course by the Internet, and these days, I feel like I got so far away from what I wanted to do do that it’s almost infuriating. The last five or six years of HitFix in particular, I feel like the industry had transformed around me in a way that led me to do things I regret, that led me to be a person I was not happy to be. The major Hollywood studios are full of very smart people whose job it was to co-cop the entire online community, and they did it in a way that made everyone feel like they were winning, even as they were selling out everything good about film journalism. Access is everything, and as a result of having built a well-oiled machine, the studios have taken full control of the conversation and the calendar. Any of the major news sites you want to name, no matter how “independent,” all operate on the same schedule. They offer up a signal boost to every piece of marketing material released by the studios, whether they think it’s good or bad, whether it’s for a film they want to see or not. Every trailer. Every poster. Every commercial. Even when there are commercials for commercials, they are covered as if they are news. Casting. Publicity photos. Photos from the location. That’s not even taking into account the set visit, or the editing bay visit, or the early footage preview, or the fan event featuring a full half-hour of footage or the Comic-Con panel or the WonderCon footage or the D23 presentation or the junket or the red carpet or the opening weekend Q&A or the special exclusive home video preview or the exclusive Blu-ray interview. All of that, every bit of it, is marketing. It was when I did it, and it is when other people do it. It’s marketing, no matter how well you do it, no matter how earnest your love of film, and no matter how pure your intent. The machine exists to create a permanent state of hype in filmgoers. From the moment they announce they are making a movie to the moment you buy it and put it on your shelf, the studio wants to make sure that they keep you engorged.
They have mastered the fine art of tickling the consumer’s balls for a full two year cycle, pitch to purchase, and it doesn’t matter if the studio is or isn’t paying a particular film journalist. If you’re working in the system, and you’re writing on that cycle, you are part of it. You are selling their movies for them. You are their partner and their employee, and the only truly shocking thing about that is how many people do it for little to no reward. Even if you own a publication or a website, even if you feel like you set your own agenda and you’re the one who manages to avoid being complicit, you’re fooling yourself. You’re part of it. And in order to keep the proverbial doors open and lights on, that’s the way it has to be. People buy into that cycle because that’s what everyone does. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you want to stay afloat. The sites that try to break loose of that cycle simply can’t find the money out there to support that independence. I recently agreed to publish two reviews per week at MyTrackingBoard, and the only reason I can even stomach the proposition is because they’re just reviews. I’m not doing anything else. I’m not writing news. I’m not doing previews. I’m not playing the game at all anymore. I am done selling other people’s work for them, and I am done working in marketing. One of the things that makes me happiest about ‘80s A" Over is that we’re talking about movies from almost 40 years ago. The stakes couldn’t be any lower. At most, maybe Shout! Factory or Warner Archives has a new Blu-ray coming out, and we can point people to the best transfer of something, but the politics that surround anything new I publish are so fraught at this point that I find it all intensely unpleasant. I love film, and I even love this weird dysfunctional industry; I’m gradually making peace with the idea that it may not love me back. In all of this, my first passion remains Pulp & Popcorn and self-publishing, and part of the problem (if it is indeed a problem) is that there are too many things that I want to get to, and I started trying to make the magazine into an all-purpose clearing house.
That’s a mistake, and now I can see why it’s a mistake. It means that the magazine’s actual purpose is getting lost, and that frustrates me. I named it very specifically because it is meant to focus on two things I love dearly: original pulp fiction and writing about movies. So I’m refocusing the magazine, but in doing so, I’m also going to separate out a number of the specific pieces of fiction so I can publish those as stand-alone stories. If you are subscribed to the magazine, here’s how I plan to add some value for you as I move to a monthly magazine: each and every book I put out (with the exception of the Film Nerd 2.0 book Our Kids Deserve Better) is going to be sent to subscribers. I’ll be selling the books individually and in bundles and in all sorts of different ways, but magazine subscribers will get one free digital copy of every book I put out. The plan is for books and smaller stand-alone pieces to come out in the middle of the month, with the magazine at the start of the month. And the magazine is going to get a roster of ongoing rotating pulp characters, with Commander Future at the heart of the magazine. This coming month, I’m going to be sending you a number of smaller pieces, exclusively for subscribers, as I gear up for the November 1st launch of the new version of the magazine. These will be more like newsletters with film reviews and some new content, and you’ll be getting passwords that will allow you to access private parts of the site. I’m learning as I work on ‘80s A" Over that I love big projects with lots of research. There’s a Saturday Night Live-related project that is so big that I’m not sure it’s even really possible, but I’m chipping away at it. There’s a collection of reviews that I am very excited about. And, in the most exciting news, I may even start publishing other people’s work. We’re almost one year into Pulp & Popcorn Publishing, and I feel like I’ve learned a ton. Getting pushed out of the nest forced me to try to fly.
How well I’ve done is something only you can say. Your first special Pulp & Popcorn mailing will be in your inbox on August 31st, a major Hindsight tribute to the great Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Your next one will appear on September 5th, a look back at Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and a further exploration of the new episodes of the show and the larger world of Twin Peaks that David Lynch and Mark Frost are building. See you then! Drew McWeeny August 23, 2017 Los Angeles, CA