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.
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.