More than anything else, the best and most frequent word of advice for young writers looking to become film critics is don’t.
The point here is not, “give up,” but the sad realization that being a film critic is not actually a career and just about no one in the 21st Century makes a living just watching and reviewing movies. David Bordwell actually put this advice best:
“Forget about becoming a film critic. Become an intellectual, a person to whom ideas matter. Read in history, science, politics, and the arts generally. Develop your own ideas, and see what sparks they strike in relation to films.
Some critics go the route of grad school and being a professor or author for a living. Some find passions in programming for festivals or art house theaters. And others take up journalism and learn how to edit or report as well as write. Although the other sad realization is that becoming a journalist is not that much more lucrative a backup plan.
That’s why it hurts to see great, versatile writers and critics lose their jobs seemingly every week. Just this past April it was one of the legends, Owen Gleiberman over at Entertainment Weekly. You wonder how anyone can get into the game if even the people you admire can’t make it work.
The conclusion for why its so bad out there for the movie critic is predictable: the Internet pits criticism in a losing battle against cat videos, Justin Bieber and listicles, and it’s a damn shame that the world just doesn’t respect or value film criticism as much as the rest of us.
But recently Dustin Rowles wrote a post over at Pajiba that was the first to put the whole world is ending mentality into perspective. His article, “The Economics of Movie Reviews, or Why So Many Film Critics Continue to Lose Their Jobs,” was an insider baseball look at the tough decisions that publishers have to make when it actually comes to firing critics and axing reviews in their publications.
Rowles clarifies the difference between firing a critic to “save” money and letting one go because criticism is “losing” too much money. His point is that criticism often isn’t profitable in pageviews and social shares in the way other content is, and the only reason they’re able to continue doing it is because the critics who write for Pajiba are multi-faceted and pay the bills in other ways, be it news, commentary, interviews or editing.
The important distinction to reiterate is that criticism isn’t being lost because editors and publishers scoff at intellectual discussion of high art, but because most publications simply can no longer afford to continue running it.
This concept can be seen across all media publications, and not just in film criticism. But it can also be seen in just about any business, not just the media.
In business, there’s such a thing known as a “cost center,” which Wikipedia defines as “part of an organization that does not produce direct profit and adds to the cost of running a company.”
In the manufacturing industry, physically building a product on a factory floor eats up money, time and resources and does not directly generate any profit for an enterprise. They earn their money on the sales and marketing of that product, not the making of it. But inherently, manufacturing a product is a mission-critical component of a business staying afloat. They can’t just get rid of it.
Often the ongoing solution is to try and simplify or change processes, people or technology to reduce costs and speed up production as much as possible. That saved revenue can be put back into research and development and innovative new technology.
Departments like R&D, IT, PR and more all produce an intangible return on investment for a company, something that’s invaluable even if it doesn’t have hard dollars to show for it.
Criticism may just be the cost center of the media business. It doesn’t drive the pageviews or ad sales the way hard news or other features do, but if a publication prides itself on intelligent, thought provoking discussion, losing that branch of the publication may just damage the brand and image that makes a publication unique. It loses that special sauce that the most dedicated readers keep coming back for, even if it doesn’t always bring more flies to the honey.
For Owen Gleiberman, he has worked with EW for as long as the magazine has existed, and his legacy byline provided valuable brand recognition for EW as a serious place to read about the movies. They may find in the long run that in losing him, people may simply stop reading without him or other respectable writers in their ranks.
While it’s not always true at smaller, film-dedicated websites, larger publications simply have fewer of the high level publishers and editors who will really go to bat for film criticism. They’ll have less of a problem in giving the entire arts section the ax if it’s not creating profit, and we’re seeing this everywhere from Variety to People to EW.
Just like in managing costs of any cost center, publishers’ focus should be on how to either reduce the cost of writing film criticism or finding a way to make it profitable; trying to generate more and more other revenue around it just to support criticism isn’t working.
While writers are always striving to cover new things in new, creative ways, the business side has to get involved in really driving radical change. The reviews need to change, the marketing supporting it needs to change, the broader industry and audience needs to change, or a combination of all three needs to happen.
Right now The Dissolve might be the best case study for a serious, film-dedicated website that’s making creative forms of criticism valuable for their brand, but even they are still a small publication trying to break out of the very selective cinephile niche without losing their brand or their head.
Film critics can preach and moan on a soapbox all day long about the declining state of our profession, and publishers can continue to stand idly or say there’s nothing to be done. But if change is going to happen in film criticism, it has to come from the top.