Everybody’s a Critic

"I Was a Teenage Film Critic” sounds B-movie-ish, but it’s the truth. In 1966, Brother Thomas Allen, S.C. started the Bishop Reilly High School Film Society, and that’s where I became a dedicated lifelong film nut. Brother Thomas worked out a deal for half a dozen of us to review movies at local theaters after school each Wednesday, write reviews overnight, edit a weekly newsletter on Thursdays, copy it and hand out The Reilly Reviewer in school on Friday in time for the weekend. It was a Tinkertoy version of what actual film critics did, but when you got a strong positive reaction on Monday morning from people who followed your advice, it sure felt like the real thing. There’s the same impact when—let’s face it—they didn’t like the advice. Either way, you learn fast.

The first lesson of a reviewer: my opinion is no better or worse than yours. That’s a cold fact. But you can describe and discuss a film entertainingly without ever being able to flat-out prove its worth. Like most areas of life, experience usually counts for something. Seeing a lot of movies helps with comparisons that tell a potential viewer how the subject of this week’s review may fit in, or not, with other ones they liked, competing for their dollars and/or time. Do ‘em right, and they’ll read you every week.

Reading the reviews now, mine and others, they aren’t bad. Most of them, anyway. We did a good job describing what was good or bad about movies like Planet of the Apes, You Only Live Twice, Madigan, and In Cold Blood. You learn, at first, by imitating, consciously or not, and our teenage prose echoed the punchy style of the Daily News, New York’s blue-collar tabloid.

After school on other days of the week, we screened borrowed 16mm copies of old movies like Double Indemnity, Red River, and The Big Sleep. Although these films were then only twenty years old, they were already from a vanished world of the past. Those of us who also hoped to make films someday started teaching ourselves the craft, in 8mm and Super 8. There were surprisingly few books about any of this back then; that would all change, big time, and soon.

The postwar era was a golden one for American Catholicism. Our numbers, and our wealth, were booming. JFK-era Catholics were no longer just Father Flanigan and the East Side Kids; we were setting trends and going places. Modern communications were a Church specialty, and Reilly was no exception, with lots of film-based instruction and even a pioneering, Archdiocese-wide closed-circuit microwave TV network. The instigator of that network, Father John Culkin, Cardinal Spellman’s advisor on mass media, was on the founding board of the brand-new American Film Institute. On the West Coast, his counterpart was Father Ellwood “Bud” Kieser, a benevolent agitator in Hollywood (and six-time Emmy winner!). Kieser and Culkin had cultural clout. Hard to picture that precise situation today.

Film critics were not that big a deal back then. Your hometown newspaper had one, or ran a syndicated column. Time and Newsweek had some film reviews. But there really weren’t any nationally famous ones. Siskel and Ebert were still 20 years in the future. The first coast-to-coast film reviewer was Judith Crist, who appeared on The Today Show from 1964 to 1973. (Her television reviews continued in TV Guide.) She was the first critic whose word could move millions of dollars.

She wasn’t a great writer—her one book fizzled—but Crist had a wicked entertainer’s touch for the well-aimed stiletto, the mean joke, the career-crippling dismissal that got repeated around the water cooler later that morning. Studios feared her. Her press screenings had to be solo, no other critics; and in her heyday, she was known to interrupt a film to take a phone call, an arrogant breach of professional courtesy so blatant that she’d be blackballed now. And no, they aren’t all like that.

I’ve been asked, are film critics corrupt? In some cases morally, no doubt, but no, in the usual mercenary sense they weren’t. Studios couldn’t buy Vincent Canby of The New York Times. They couldn’t or didn’t even try to buy the critics of Sheboygan, WI; Utica, NY; Altoona, PA or Provo, UT; although in the old days, it was not unheard of for grateful bottles of studio Scotch to appear at Christmastime. (Well, okay, not in Provo.)

ABC’s Rona Barrett was a media reporter, not a critic, but as her fame rose in the Seventies, a nationally televised minute with Miss Rona became a desperately sought-after Hollywood prize. Rex Reed combined the roles of reporter and critic, as well as the roles “photogenic” and “bitchy”. Gene Shalit became famous in Judith Crist’s former chair on NBC. Finally, the real game changer came when Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s Sneak Previews appeared on PBS from 1975 through 1982. The show jumped to commercial television and became At the Movies in 1986, making its hosts the most influential film critics of their time.

I’ll say this about Roger Ebert; although he was at the top of the field, fame-and-fortune-wise, he stuck to the basics and did the work. When I was at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990, I’d see him ignoring onlookers, nodding to a couple of friends as he sat at breakfast in one of Park City’s diners, marking up his day’s screenings schedule, just like the rest of us. No Judith Crist behavior for him.

Jump back to 1976. I’d graduated college by then, and working at the Bleecker Street Cinema in downtown Manhattan. I was also one of the film reviewers at the Soho Weekly News, a grittier junior rival to the Village Voice, New York’s established alternative paper. As a second-string critic, I had my pick of bargain basement movies, horror movies, and one-shots aiming for their big chance. It was interesting work, and fun.

I’ll post scan captures of a couple of those Bicentennial-era reviews in the comments section. One that I especially enjoyed doing was Futureworld, a low-budget sequel to 1973’s Westworld. The original film, a modest hit, was a Michael Crichton script and his first directorial job. (Two decades later, he’d write a more elaborate and more successful story about a science fiction theme park turned deadly, Jurassic Park.)

American Independent Productions, Roger Corman’s former company, bought the rights, and did ol’ Roger one better at stretching a dollar. They managed to get the enthusiastic cooperation of everybody and every futuristic-looking location in Texas. It gave the film high-tech production value far in excess of its budget. Futureworld was, let’s be honest, a wee bit cheesier than the original, but it looked better, and above all, it was funnier than its glum predecessor. I filed my review.

Two days later, I got a phone call from my mother. “Gary, your name is in the Times!” “The New York Times?” I said, incredulously. She said a film ad quoted me. This was baffling because that week’s Soho News wasn’t even in print yet. I ran out and bought a copy of the Times, and there it was, right there in pole position, the left-hand top of the ad. “It’s a Good Deal Better than Westworld…Futureworld Should Provide an Entertaining Time”—Gary McVey, Soho Weekly News.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material, but for a 24-year-old, it was hot stuff. How did it happen? Unbeknownst to me, papers sent proofs of the reviews to the studio days in advance as a courtesy, for reasons just like this. Sure, it was a positive review, but the reason that I got a “pull quote” was I’d innocently stumbled onto a specific goal of the publicist: get people to see the independently made Futureworld as a worthy, even livelier film than its studio-made successor. Later on, I’d realize how many smaller-time reviewers pimped themselves out solely to see their names in quotes. Spy Magazine invented mocking fake reviews to show how easy it was.

Film critics once strode, high and mighty, over Hollywood. Today, a few are still high, but very few are mighty anymore. The rise of social media reduced the gatekeeping role of the legacy press. Rotten Tomatoes is a more useful guide to a film’s prospects than The Atlantic is. Any reader of this website knows that well-informed critical intelligence is more widely distributed than the gatekeepers ever believed.

I worked for the Los Angeles Film Festival, the American Film Institute, and the American Cinema Foundation for almost forty years. Few people I encountered there could have matched, let alone topped, the movie knowledge I’ve admired among computer programmers, retired military, Baptist philosophers, policemen, graphics designers, moms and dads. Because everyone’s a critic. Some people are especially good at it.