Hey there guys. For those of you who have been reading The Movie Blog for at least 2 years or more, you may remember that at one point I signed a small book deal with an even smaller publisher to write a book that I was calling “The Silver Screen From Where I’m Sitting”.
The book was supposed to just be a coffee table book about movies and the movie world where you could just pick it up and turn to any chapter and start reading. Each chapter was just it’s own isolated topic and thus the book didn’t have to be read in order.
Ok anyway… I got several months into the book, sent it off to the editor a couple of times along the way… but eventually I just got too busy. The book got delayed, and then last year I started work on my upcoming Documentary movie “Prince of Peace – God of War” and any time I had was just flushed away. The publisher was very nice to me and understood my situation and we just decided to cancel the book.
So now here we are, and I’ve got 7 chapters that I wrote just sitting here. That’s when I decided I might as well just release some of what I wrote for the doomed book here on The Movie Blog. So for the next week, I’ll be releasing a chapter a day here on the site (the ones that don’t suck too much anyway).
The first chapter was the introduction to the book called “The Evolution Of The Movie Blog”
It’s just basically a chapter about why I love the movies and a brief history of The Movie Blog and how it came about. I hope you enjoy it. Continue on to read the Chapter. Part #2 comes tomorrow.
Chapter 1
The Evolution Of The Movie Blog
John, meet Luke Skywalker
Most of the favorite things in our lives (professions, accomplishments, milestones, goals) are born out of a passion. I know a young woman who has been a science nut her whole life. Today she studies for her PhD and MD at the same time. Her passion has taken her to where she is now, and where she is heading in the future. For those of you who are hockey fans (which you all SHOULD be), you’ve seen the footage of a VERY young Wayne Gretzkey skating on the rink in his back yard in Brantford Ontario that his dad made for him. Even in those early home movies you could see it in the young boy’s eyes. A passion for the game. That passion carried him to being perhaps the greatest athlete the world has ever seen in a professional sport. I even know a man who always wanted to be a bus driver. Seriously. Today that is what he does, and couldn’t be happier.
I’ve discovered that in our lives we can hold many passions and loves, and these can change over time. The ones that stay with us during the majority of our lives tend to play a small part in defining who we are. Big things, small things, important things, insignificant things, it almost doesn’t matter what the subject of our passion is. I’ve found that the happiest people I’ve ever met are those who have a passion for something, and allow that thing to play a part of their lives. Stamps, painting, singing, cars, video games, history, math, science, Elvis, Star Trek, shoes, fine foods, fast food, skateboarding, clothes, faith, volunteering, animals, travel, medicine, service… the list is literally endless.
For the beginning of my first passion you have to go all the way back to 1977. No, I’m not that old, I was only a child at the time, but it is the earliest fuzzy memory I have. My mother (God bless her soul) took me to see a movie. The movie was Star Wars, and to this day it remains my favorite film of all time. I can still remember the feelings and emotions I felt as a little kid seeing that big screen and the adventure that unfolded in front of me. I was immediately enamored with the movie and forced my mother to take me again and again. I couldn’t get enough. My life became a living tribute to the film, from Star Wars bed sheets to pillow cases… heck, I even named my cat “Luke Skywalker” (the cat eventually ran away… for good reason).
I still remember exactly where I was, the time of day and weather outside when I first heard there was going to be a second Star Wars film. If I ever wanted proof that there was indeed a God, to my young mind, THAT was it! My imagination raced in euphoric glee trying to imagine what on earth they could do next. Would Darth Vader be back? Would Luke marry Princess Leia? Would Chewbacca talk? Would they come to earth? Hey, these are the questions an 8 year old asks! My aunt Pina had the privilege of taking me to The Empire Strikes Back… and the effect on me was no less than the first. I could go on (and I will a little in the next chapter), but for now it suffices to say that Star Wars introduced me to my love affair with the movies.
As a teenager I spent every last dollar I could get my grubby little hands on at the LimeRidge Mall theaters. The first movie I ever went to without a parent or relative was a truly terrible little film called Six Pack starring Kenny Rodgers as a semi-washed up race car driver who takes care of a group of orphaned kids who then work as slave labour as his pit crew. Oh my that was a bad one… but I still loved watching it at the time. It’s funny what pure enthusiasm can make you think you enjoy.
Even socially my interest in film always came out. In any conversation, at some point I would turn the topic to movies. “Wow, sorry to hear about your mom’s car accident… have you ever seen The Ice Pirates?” Obviously I was annoying, but at the time I seriously thought everyone was just waiting to bring the topic up. So being the natural leader that I am… Nope, as it turns out I was just being annoying. But it’s what I loved, and we all like to talk about the things we love. I was no different.
In the beginning there was Movie-Reviews.Org
Fast forward now to roughly 1998. I was living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada running a web design company (wasn’t everyone a web designer at one point or another in the late 90’s?) when I finally decided to take all of my pent up energy/enthusiasm for movies and put it in online print. This took the form of Movie-Reviews.Org, a site that was really just a place for me to write movie reviews. That’s it.
Joining me on M-R.Org was my good friend Day-Vuh (not his real name, but that’s what he called himself on the site) who was a simply hilarious writer. His reviews were always just as good as mine, only a whole lot more entertaining to read. Easily his best review on M-R.org was for the excruciatingly horrible John Travolta film Battlefield Earth. We actually saw the film together with some other friends, but afterwards he insisted that he would write the review. I’m glad he did. The following is an excerpt of that legendary review, the significance of which I will expand on later:
The Main Thing:
Okay, see, this big nasty, un-scary alien race who acts just like people, but with a dead 6th finger and hair that has been through the rasta-machine one too many times, somehow took over the human race (in 9 minutes) over 1000 years ago. Then, a thousand years later, when humans are all mental, suffering low self-esteems from the big-bad alien’s repeated and absolutley UNTRUTHFUL overuse of referring to them as “man-animal” and “rat-brain”, they decide they’ve had enough. And look, they take the world back into their hands in mere moments thanks to zippy alien stupidity and supernova plot-holes.
The Rest of It:
Well, since the main-overview bit pretty much covered it, I guess I could shut-up, but why waste Internet space when I could use it up with words and phrases that will inform you, the reader, as to just how bad this thick vein of movie-spew really is?
9:40 pm. – The movie started
9:59 -I mentioned that if the movie didn’t get better, I was leaving
10:00 -I realized I was witnessing rotten-movie history and I would only be a fool to let this red-letter date of movie-media-horror go by without watching the entire thing.
10:10 -A plot-line was introduced
10:14 -The plot-line was re-canted by something else. Once again, plot line equals ‘not there’.
10:25 -The big mean aliens find one human to be very smart.
10:26 -So they give said smart human language lessons, a key to the compound, an airship and two weeks free time. I’m serious.
10:27 -The big mean aliens haven’t clued in that educating your enemy is not a bright idea.
10:35 -I think someone was fighting here but the filming was so bad (not to mention ALWAYS on an angle) you couldn’t tell who was fighting what or, for that matter, who even cared. They might as well have shoved the camera in some actor’s crotch and told him to jump on some guys for 45 seconds while throwing in the occasional “grunt” sound just for fantastic effect.
11:15 -After more than an hour and 15 minutes, a plot and a plan was actually devised and explained to the viewer (this part is actually true… It really did take this long.. Trust me, I timed it.)
11:25-35 -I spent this time re-evaluating living.
11:36 -Checked my watch. (Just for fun)
11:45 -A few impossible things happened here. Something about Neanderthals taking a crash course in modern avionics. Followed by a scene-rip off of the Matrix. — The human fella running through a hallway with pillars all around; all blowing up around him making lots of debris. That’s so “Nineties”.
11:55 -To everyone’s surprise, the movie stopped and credits rolled.
12:20 -Everyone woke up.
12:21 -I finally could stop the “hands-covering-my-ears-and-screaming-in-agony” pose.
12:25 -Everyone left and have been complaining about it since.
Well worth your money if your due for a good whack in the head with a hammer.
(https://www.themovieblog.com/archives/2003/09/classic_battlefield_earth_review.html)
Besides being side splittingly funny, Day-Vuh’s Battlefield Earth review made me realize something very important that has stuck with me ever since. Up until that point I had written reviews from an educator’s point of view. I was writing to INFORM my readers. My preconception was that people were coming to my website to learn, to be informed, to glean even just a little bit of my vast wisdom. It was that arrogance, stupidity and boring approach to writing about film that ensured people wouldn’t return a second or third time to the site. Heck, if they really wanted an in-depth examination of the themes, plot structure and story progression of a movie they could always turn to Leonard Malton on Entertainment tonight or visit one of the other ten million sites out there that did the same thing. Day-Vuh’s review was engaging to read because he didn’t inform or teach or educate. He just TALKED about the movie as if you were standing right there with him in front of a water cooler.
The Battlefield Earth review made me remember that I didn’t love being a movie expert (which I’m not really), I loved TALKING about the movies. So why was I writing as if I was something that I wasn’t? Why was I wasting my time pretending to be some mountaintop cinematic guru spewing my intellectual philosophies upon the blessed wretched masses gathered below? I’m not a film critic… I’M A MOVIE FAN! So it was time to start writing like one.
Changing my position from being a film critic who would write about the merits of a film to being a film fan writing about his own personal enjoyment (or lack thereof) of a movie suddenly made M-R.Org infinitely more enjoyable to work on, and people who read the site (all 500 of them a month) now felt like they were talking to someone about a movie rather than being talked at. We all want to talk about the movies, not have someone lecture us about them. That’s an important distinction. It is a lesson I have never forgotten, and to this day it is the driving philosophy behind The Movie Blog. So I guess you could say that at least one good thing came from Battlefield Earth.
Sadly, even though there were three of us (My friend Rodney was also writing reviews for the site), it just became impractical for us to see 3 or 4 new releases a week considering how much it costs to go to the movies these days (but we’ll have a whole chapter on that subject later) and the sheer time commitment involved in watching that many films and writing reviews for them. Thus, we eventually closed down M-R.Org. But you know what they always say, for something new to begin, something old must end.
The birth of the Blog
Having been a web designer (like everyone else) I was always interested in seeing the new internet tools that were popping up almost daily. In 2001 a good friend of mine in Saskatoon named Jordon Cooper (www.jordoncooper.com) introduced me to the world of Blogging. Perhaps a brief description of what a “blog” is would be appropriate at this point.
A “blog” is a term used to refer to an online web journal. A personal log kept on the web. A web-log if you will. Shorten that up and you’ve got “blog”. A blog is basically an online web journal for putting your thoughts, opinions, activities and interesting links online for others to read. Many people put up several new posts a day on their blogs, and others put up one or two a week. Many people blog about the daily events in their lives, others blog about specific topics (Politics, World events, Television, their town, cartoon characters… literally anything under the sun).
So, following Jordon’s lead, I thought that being from the Hamilton/Toronto Ontario area and living in Saskatoon Saskatchewan at the time that it would be a good idea to start a blog as an easy way to keep everyone back home up-to-date with the events in my life. Seemed like a good idea… and it was. Pretty soon I was putting up 2-4 new posts (a log entry) a day with things that I was doing, interesting stories on the internet I came across and pictures. It became mildly addicting actually. What made it even more addictive was the fact that people were actually reading it. On average about 75-100 people a day came by to see what I had to say today, or just to look in on my life like some sort of scene from The Truman Show.
Fast forward to early 2003. I began noticing that the topics of my posts were about movies more times than not. This spawned the idea of starting a new blog completely dedicated to talking about movies. It would be a place where I could just ramble about my thoughts and opinions of movies and movie news of the day. After all, I loved talking movies, so why not a site dedicated to just that? I decided to call the new site “The Movie Blog” (not very creative, but at least descriptive). So one evening in July of 2003 while sitting at my brand new laptop (the one I still own and am using to write this book) I registered the domain name www.themovieblog.com, which to my surprise was still available. Two days after that, on the evening of July 24th, 2003, I posted the very first entry on The Movie Blog. It was about the marketing for a new little upcoming film called Seabiscuit:
Suddenly Seabiscuit thinks it’s The Matrix
I’ve been looking forward to seeing the new Jeff Bridges film “Seabiscuit” ever since Jeff Blogged about it on his website last year. The trailers have looked promising and my anticipation has been building. Then, yesterday I caught the newest trailer on television and I moaned out loud. The new trailer features high intensity “Matrix” type music giving the impression that Seabiscuit will be some sort of high intensity action Kung-Fu film. What was looking like a wonderful little story of the human (and not so human) spirit, is now trying to pass itself off as a summer block buster. Good grief, pass me the sick bag.
(https://www.themovieblog.com/archives/2003/07/suddenly_seabiscuit_thinks_its_the.html)
As a side note, I ended up LOVING Seabiscuit.
Eventually I stopped doing my own personal site and dedicated all of my blogging time to The Movie Blog. It’s not that I stopped enjoying blogging on my personal site, it’s just that movies were what I wanted to talk about, and most of my blogging time was being dedicated to The Movie Blog anyway. I set up a domain redirect to take anyone looking for johncampea.com directly to themovieblog.com. That was that. All of my proverbial eggs were now in one blog basket.
Since July of 2003 many things have changed at The Movie Blog. Different blog tools (I went from using TypePad to Movable Type), different designs (no less than 5 totally different looks), different hosting providers (5 of them), different traffic (from about 100 visits a month to over a million a month) and different contributors helping me out along the way, a couple of which I would be remiss not mentioning.
First and foremost was Day-Vuh who jumped on board with me immediately when I started The Movie Blog. To this day he remains the funniest and most entertaining writer the site has ever had. Todd Brown (aka Bubba, now the editor of TwitchFilm.Net) has probably been the most film knowledgeable writer to contribute to the site. Todd was also responsible for taking the blog to a new level of activity. Before he came on board we were posting once or twice a day to the site… Todd sometimes put up 10 posts a day by himself. Richard Brunton hails from Scotland and had been an active contributor to the site in terms of both posts and programming. His help was wonderful and his posts were always on interesting stuff. Rodney Brazeau is the greatest deository of Comic Book knowledge that I’ve ever met. Stand up comedian Doug Nagy had been my regular co-host on the new “Audio Edition” feature on The Movie Blog and is the sole reason any semblance of entertainment exists on the program. These are only a few of the people who have contributed their time, energy and creativity to The Movie Blog. To all of them, and the rest, I am grateful.
Where The Movie Blog is and will be tomorrow
To this day the mantra of The Movie Blog is still “Thoughts and opinions on movies and movie news”. Still remembering the lessons learned from the Battlefield Earth review, to always write as fans talking to fans rather than critics lecturing the uneducated masses.
This passion of mine has found different ways of expressing itself in my life. I was the Director of Client Services at a 3D Animation and Visual Effects company (Satellite Studios) for a couple of years where we worked on several major motion pictures and a few television shows of note, I’ve written and produced a short film with a few close friends that got some play in the media and a film festival. But most recently and probably most significantly my personal passion for movies has manifested itself in The Movie Blog. Why more significantly than working in the film industry or creating my own film? The answer is simple. Because it involves other people from all over the world joining in the conversation with me and talking about my passion. And after all, the best passions in the world are the ones that are shared.
This book is meant to be an extension of the passion many of us share. I hope you read it as a conversation from one film fan to another. I have no interest in educating, enlightening, preaching or teaching. I just wanna talk movies. I’m glad you decided to join in the conversation. So may the force be with you and all that jazz.
