Movie Writing

Back in the late 90s, I did some freelance writing about movies for a few different publications. Notably, this was the first time I had ever been paid for my writing.

Rough Cut Article(s)

This was a web magazine from TNT (the cable channel). I wrote for their “Pick a Genre” column, which was a listicle around a selected movie genre.

I can only find one of these, sadly. I pulled it off the Wayback Machine.

I created a section for this, because I know there were more (for example: there was one about Mother’s Day movies that they titled: “Drama for Your Mama”). Perhaps someday I’ll find them.

Anti-Patriotic Movies

For July 4, they asked me to write an article about movies which portrayed America negatively.

MSN and Entertainment Weekly Movie Reviews

In the summer of 1996, I reviewed movies for two outlets – “The Movie Forum” on the original Microsoft Network, and the print magazine Entertainment Weekly. I was paid $250 a month and got a free internet connection for the former. For the latter, I think I got $50-60 per review (they were short-form reviews).

Here are the 19 films I reviewed that summer. I pretty sure that the single-paragraph reviews were for ET, but it’s been over two decades, so I can’t really remember.

ET required me to put a letter-grade on the film, I think I just carried that convention over for the MSN reviews. It’s pretty arbitrary.