Awesome interview over at Pajiba with Kevin Smith. If you’re geeked about his movies, or even about super hero moves or movies in general, go read it (then come back here).
In the interview, Smith says the following. It’s long, sorry, but the context was necessary. I’ve bolded the parts you need to read.
Circa ‘94, when I came up, there was no such thing as an online critic. Sure, the folks who had the most primitive forms of dial-up could talk about movies on Dalnet or someplace, like that back then, but they weren’t being read outside their small community. So all I had to go by was the print critic. I mean, picture this: There was this NY Times ritual that John Pierson introduced me to that had us going down to the NY Times building at 2 in the morning the day of release to get the first copy of that day’s Times so we could read the review. Can you imagine that? Now, you click on the Times link the day before the flick comes out, and you can read what’s what. We’re talking about an era in which there were maybe 75 to 100 legitimate people who, in print, would tell you whether you rocked or sucked. That’s the world I came from, because that’s how it was done when I first got into the business.
Now, there are more like 7,500 to 10,000 people who’ll tell you whether you rocked or sucked (oftentimes before they even see the flick) and they’re all legitimate. And I gotta be honest: That’s better for any filmmaker. You get more bites at the apple. If those original 75 to 100 didn’t like your flick, you were fucked. Now, 500 critics can dislike your flick, and there’s still many more voices to be heard who might save you from a box-office disaster. The democratization of film criticism, thanks to the internet, has been a huge boon for filmmakers. It’s also been a huge bane, because now literally everybody’s a critic.
I always go on about how the wine technology revolution trails actual technology by 5 to 7 years. The world got ecommerce in the late 1990’s, but ordering wine online is just beginning to blossom. Bloggers were largely unheard of before 2000 but they have gained in legitimacy since. Wine bloggers, though, are still insecure, snarking amongst themselves for popularity, and kicking in the door for respect.
Kevin Smith summed it up with this quote though. The Internet made a film critic out of anyone who wanted to be one. Now, the Internet has made wine critics out of a lot of people who would never sniff a desk at Wine Spectator. Replace “filmmaker” with “winemaker” in Smith’s quote and you’re pretty much there.
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