Shooting the Survivors
Donation protected
Hello, friends, relations and readers.
A little resume: since 1985, I've been the main film critic at the locally owned Metro Newspapers. Still the biggest weekly paper in the San Jose area, it's the key part of a chain that reaches from Sonoma County to Santa Cruz.
I’ve written in anthologies, including an essay on the Planet of the Apes movies of the 1960s and 1970s, in Gregg Rickman's The Science Fiction Reader, still used as a college text book, and a book on the making of the animated movie Megamind. I've also written for n+1, Entertainment Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seminole (OK) Producer.
My project is a book: Shooting the Survivors. The title comes from a complaint by Ernest Hemingway: “Critics watch the battle from a high place and then come down and shoot the survivors.” This will be a collection of some 500-700 reviews I did over the course of my first 30 years at Metro.
Critics are always trying to impose order on the chaos of movies--it's how the auteur theory began. I think an alphabetically-ordered guide is most useful to the film fan trying to research a movie they know little about.
The format has worked for books I use frequently: Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies, the Halliwell guides, and Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.
The reasons for this crowd funding request: I’d like to keep some of these writings alive. It's a chance to retrieve the best of the work I've done over the last 30 plus years. Some of it is on line, but the Internet has lapses of memory. I've lost almost all the columns I wrote for Cinematical during the first years of this century, for example, as well as the work I did for the East Bay Express over the course of the years. The former occurred because of site-housecleaning under new management, the latter because of a typesetter spilled coffee on some floppy disks, if you remember those things.
I’m not expressing technophobia here… but as soon as websites last as long as books, we can talk.
The goal of $6000 is to pay for the printing of 300 copies, as well as for income for the several months I’ll need to choose and re-edit the work for publication.
I do disagree with Hemingway. He’s right, it is a battle. Film criticism reflects a fractious art, made under stress: films competing with one another, directors versus the studio and actors versus the directors. And then it's critic versus critic after the release...
Looking back, I hope that this work isn't all about finishing off wounded works of art. The other part of the task should be clear: a good critic shelters and nurses the memory of a film wounded by neglect, until the world is ready to understand and love it.
Donors over $25 will get a copy of the book when it is published later this fall. All other donors will get the Kindle version. I appreciate your help, and thanks for reading...
A little resume: since 1985, I've been the main film critic at the locally owned Metro Newspapers. Still the biggest weekly paper in the San Jose area, it's the key part of a chain that reaches from Sonoma County to Santa Cruz.
I’ve written in anthologies, including an essay on the Planet of the Apes movies of the 1960s and 1970s, in Gregg Rickman's The Science Fiction Reader, still used as a college text book, and a book on the making of the animated movie Megamind. I've also written for n+1, Entertainment Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seminole (OK) Producer.
My project is a book: Shooting the Survivors. The title comes from a complaint by Ernest Hemingway: “Critics watch the battle from a high place and then come down and shoot the survivors.” This will be a collection of some 500-700 reviews I did over the course of my first 30 years at Metro.
Critics are always trying to impose order on the chaos of movies--it's how the auteur theory began. I think an alphabetically-ordered guide is most useful to the film fan trying to research a movie they know little about.
The format has worked for books I use frequently: Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies, the Halliwell guides, and Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.
The reasons for this crowd funding request: I’d like to keep some of these writings alive. It's a chance to retrieve the best of the work I've done over the last 30 plus years. Some of it is on line, but the Internet has lapses of memory. I've lost almost all the columns I wrote for Cinematical during the first years of this century, for example, as well as the work I did for the East Bay Express over the course of the years. The former occurred because of site-housecleaning under new management, the latter because of a typesetter spilled coffee on some floppy disks, if you remember those things.
I’m not expressing technophobia here… but as soon as websites last as long as books, we can talk.
The goal of $6000 is to pay for the printing of 300 copies, as well as for income for the several months I’ll need to choose and re-edit the work for publication.
I do disagree with Hemingway. He’s right, it is a battle. Film criticism reflects a fractious art, made under stress: films competing with one another, directors versus the studio and actors versus the directors. And then it's critic versus critic after the release...
Looking back, I hope that this work isn't all about finishing off wounded works of art. The other part of the task should be clear: a good critic shelters and nurses the memory of a film wounded by neglect, until the world is ready to understand and love it.
Donors over $25 will get a copy of the book when it is published later this fall. All other donors will get the Kindle version. I appreciate your help, and thanks for reading...
Organizer
Richard Von Busack
Organizer
Richmond, CA
