Hey there folks. For those of you who have not been listening to the various “Uncut” shows around here, there is a MAJOR announcement coming in the upcoming days regarding The Movie Blog and its future. Everything is about to change. No, I’m not talking about a redesign or adding another writer… The Movie Blog as you know it is preparing to come to an end. I’ll give more details in the coming days when I’m able.
Anyway, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look back over the last 4+ years and list down the top ten most defining moments in the Movie Blog’s history. A lot of great things have happened, but these are the ones that I feel helped shape and define what The Movie Blog has become. So here we go:
#10 – Live Shows
The live version of The Movie Blog Uncut has less than a fraction of the listeners the main Monday Round Table does, but doing the live show and having the ability to interact with the other members of The Movie Blog community was a huge thing for us. I think it did more for me in understanding the site more as a community of fans than just a blog and that has been extremely valuable.
#9 – 2007 Podcast Awards Nomination
No, The Movie Blog Uncut did not win the podcast award this year, but being nominated was an important event for us. It signaled that winning Podcast of the year in 2006 was no fluke. It told us people were still listening and that we hadn’t lost our voice. Oh it sucked to lose… but just being nominated was fantastic for us.
#8 – Oliver Stone Interview
No, Oliver Stone isn’t the biggest name in Hollywood by any stretch of the imagination, but he was the first significant filmmaker that I was ever invited to sit down one on one with to discuss a new film project of his/hers. It signaled a shift in how The Movie Blog was perceived by Hollywood I think. I basically don’t accept interview invites anymore (because I find interviews boring untiless it’s with someone I really like or have some sort of vested interest in), but that first one was HUGE to me. Man, I can’t even begin to tell you how nervous I was getting ready to walk in that room and meet Stone. I’ll always remember that.
#7 – July 24th 2003, The Movie Blog is Born
I will never forget that night. I was sitting in a friend’s basement and getting ready to turn my regular blog into a film blog since all I was doing was talking about movies anyway. To my shock and amazment, “The Movie Blog.Com” domain name was still available, so I snatched it up… and on the evening of the 24th I put up my very first Movie Blog post… a post about Seabiscuit of all things. And so it began.
#6 – 2007 MTV Movie Awards
Covering awards shows isn’t really my idea of a fun time (unless it’s the Oscars), but there were two really significant things about being invited to cover the 2007 MTV Movie Awards. 1) The Movie Blog was the only Online Media Outlet invited to be on the Red carpet. 2) The Movie Blog was the only Canadian Media Outlet invited to be on the Red Carpet. It was a tremendous honor… and even though I was the VERY LAST person in line on the carpet, I got to meet and photo just about everyone there. I got sunburnt, but had a WONDERFUL time, and I got some fun pictures.
#5 – Todd Brown Branching Out To Form Twitchfilm.Net
Those of you who haven’t been around long enough may not realize that Todd Brown of the amazing TwitchFilm.Net got his movie blogging start here on The Movie Blog. As he does now, Todd gave amazing coverage of asian and other foreign film… but the site was too diverse and we both knew it. It was agreed he should branch out and launch his own site (hence Twitch came into being, and the internet movie community is a much better place for it). This was significant because it focused The Movie Blog on it’s mandate… popular film. Yes we talk about some foreign and smaller film from time to time… but our main focus is mainline Hollywood film. That’s our arena… and once we focused more on that, the traffic to the site started to grow significantly, and with Todd focusing on his niche, TwitchFilm has become one of the very best film sites on the net. Todd and I are still friends and I count myself as a big fan of his.
#4 – 2007 Comic Con
The 2007 Comic Con has been one of my all time favorite experiences. It’s where I really understood how much the online movie community has grown in size and influence. Walking around San Diego I had to have been stopped at least 15 times by fans of The Movie Blog who recognized my ugly mug and went out of their way to come up to talk to me. That was such an honor. A VP from Universal recognized me and grabbed me, I got to MC the Sunday Comic Con Panel for the up coming Lakeshore/MGM film Pathology in front of 3000 fans, I organized 2 fantastic parties, met and hung out with some FANTASTIC movie webmasters, and just in general had a blast. Comic Con will be an annual event for me now.
#3 – Time Magazine
It was almost surreal. Back in April I picked up a copy of the most widely read news magazine in the world… Time Magazine, opened it up there there was a full page picture of yours truly fronting an article about how online movie pundits are growing more and more in their influence with Hollywood and the film industry in general. It was like a moment of Zen, or reality for some of us online guys. It was the moment where we said “this isn’t just in our heads. People really are paying attention to what is going on with the online movie world”.
#2 – Paramount Shuts Down The Movie Blog
This was huge. From the first day Transformers had been announced, no site on the web has been cheering it on more than The Movie Blog. Then I woke up one morning to discover The Movie Blog had been shut down by the legal department at Paramount Studios over a Transformers picture (that was just of some cast standing around off camera… it didn’t show ANYTHING from the film). I wrote an open letter ripping them a new one… it got picked up by Digg, and then within 6 hours just about every major news outlet contacted me about the incident. 1 hour after that a Paramount Lawyer called to apologize. I DID NOT accept. The next day the Vice President of Paramount called to apologize for the incident.
The Paramount issue was a flare shot into the sky. The online Movie Community was now a significant presence and studios would now… for the first time… really have to start being cautious about how they dealt with online sites. To their credit, Paramount did what they could to make up for the incident… and Transformers turned out to be amazing.
#1 – Launching The Podcast / Winning Podcast of the Year
Without question the single most fun thing about the regular routine of doing The Movie Blog has been doing the Audio Edition/Uncut podcasts. on November 10th 2004, I was joined by my friend Doug Nagy to launch the very first movie related podcast on the internet… The Movie Blog Audio Edition. We knew it was by far the best thing going on the site… but it wasn’t until we beat out TWIT, the most widley listened to and popular podcast on the net for the 2006 Podcast of the Year award that we realized other people thought we were doing a pretty good job too. To this day, The Movie Blog Uncut is the single continuously longest running podcast and still my favorite part of doing The Movie Blog. Darren Doug and Bruxy just make it so much fun.
So there you have it folks, the most defining moments of The Movie Blog’s history. Stay tuned over the coming days as we make the announcement that will change everything around here. As the final Star Trek: The Next Generation episode was titled: “All Good Things….”
