I am a Box Office Prophet

I hardly think that’s accurate, but technically it’s true.  Back in March I submitted some of the writing I’d done here on Photoplay Talk to a film site I’ve always been a fan of called Box Office Prophets. The site, as you may have guessed from the title, dedicates itself to forecasting and analyzing the current Box Office climate.  In addition to weekly articles predicting and dissecting film grosses BOP – that’s what the cool kids call it – offers up a smorgasbord of reviews, quizzes, trailers, releases schedules and snarky columns.  The latter is where I come in.

Having sent my stuff in, a cover note attached with my review of Medicine for Melancholy, a few days passed and I decided not to keep waiting, disappointed but not surprised.  Then as soon as I had let the notion go, the site’s founder David Mumpower emailed saying he dug my stuff.  Wow.  He then gave me some preliminary assignments to test the waters and see if I would be a good fit.  WOW!   I hungrily polished off the assignments, previews for some upcoming films, in a weekend.  After that I was offered the chance to attend press screenings of upcoming indie films Lymelife and Valentino: The Last Emperor.  Naturally I accepted, in less than a week I had gone from being a pretend-critic with a blog to a sort-of-critic for a mid-level website!

After the screenings, I wrote reviews of both films which you can find here and here.  And while seeing my name in a byline was enormously satisfying the reviews took a huge toll on me.  No doubt my lack of experience in writing concise, intelligent and professional reviews played a huge roll in that, but I also think it’s not nearly as fun as ripping on terrible films that win Best Picture.

The thing I had come to love about Photoplay Talk was that I could take the dizzying array of cinematic musings going through my head at any given time and throw them out onto the Internet instead of on unsuspecting bystanders (they generally don’t appreciate it).

Everyday became about trying to balance my assignments at BOP with my updates on PPT (if they can do it I can too).  It proved to be somewhat overwhelming.  As I completed about ten more previews I saw my average time between PPT posts grow from a week to a month, pretty sad considering my pledge to post once a week was only this past January.

Coming up with ideas for film writings started to become a chore, a hobby that took up more time than I was willing to give.  I should mention that the BOP gig, while giving me much greater exposure than my usual readership that sits in the single digits, did not pay.  And though my ultimate goal in starting Photoplay Talk, eventually using it’s contents to get a higher profile position in the film writing world, had been somewhat attained much faster than I ever could have expected, I felt like I might not be able to handle it afterall.

Rather than deal with that issue I just continued to push on until in May, when my day-to-day schedule became too hectic, I started letting BOP go by the wayside as well.  After about a month, David contacted me and asked if I was still interested in doing reviews for them, and if not, he’d look elsewhere.  Feeling pretty guilty I finally wrote him an honest email about how much I could contribute and what types articles I wanted those contributions to be.  I told him I could do about one review a month as it took a lot of time and effort.  But I also said I wanted to figure out a column idea, David had proposed this earlier, one with a vague enough scope so I could write about pretty much whatever I wanted.   My hope was that I could do the same type of work for BOP as I did on PPT (this acronym thing is so fanboy).

A day or two later I got an email agreeing to my terms, the guy’s super nice, leaving me with the task of coming up with an appropriately broad theme and title for my prospective column.  It had been about a month since I had written anything, nothing had really inspired me of late, probably due to fatigue.  But once I saw Terminator Salvation that was no longer a problem.  My hatred for that movie spawned my first entry which I sent to David.  He liked it and wrote back with two proposed titles, Art vs Commerce and Selling Out (not surprisingly, he thought Photoplay Talk was “a bit archaic.”  Ouch, my ego).

Selling Out ended up being the one we went with.  Which I like it a lot, it provides me with ample room to rip on Hollywood nonsense as well as praise Art-House superiority.  There’s also a nice personal tie-in, while I write about how terrible these movies are I kind of secretly love them, Sell Out.  The first post went up on June 5th.  I got my byline and my snarky attitude.  Mission accomplished.

Having said all that, I don’t intend to abandon Photoplay Talk altogether.  I still plan on using it as a place where I can post links to recommendations, tiny quips or musings and as an outlet for when I feel the need to be, shall we say, a little more colorful than Box Office Prophets allows me to be.  I want to extend my sincere gratitude for the small but substantial support I have received in these short months.  It’s helped open up a truly wonderful new dimension to my life.  I hope you’ll keep following me on BOP and, if the mood strikes you, that you’ll share my work with anyone you feel might enjoy it.  As always, happy watching!