So I have a reason other than laziness for not updating lately. In addition to the fact that I don’t really get access to big “summer movie”-type scripts, nor do I have much desire to read them (especially after bearing witness to the travesty called Jonah Hex), I’m making a big push to launch a new site with one of my best friends from college.
“Zuh?” you’re undoubtedly saying. Well, here’s the skinny: longtime readers recall that I once “worked” for a bottom-rung film-review website. My friend Mark also wrote for the site, and both of us left with a great deal of disappointment and lessons learned. So last summer, in the midst of a Vicodin-fueled haze after my wrist surgery, I concocted the world’s greatest idea (according to my drug-addled mind): we’d create our own bottom-rung film-review website. With the myriad lessons learned from our miserable experiences, we’d attempt to carve out own niche in the online world of film criticism.
Once the drugs wore off, this seemed like a terrible idea. However, a stone-cold sober Mark loved the idea and kind of forced me to see it through, by virtue of the fact that I hate disappointing other people (and consequently end up disappointing myself). While I designed the site, Mark and I hashed out what we’d write about — what angle could we come up with to get readers who typically fall through the cracks of film sites? We came up with some ideas that may prove unsuccessful, but we’re going forward out of a combination of stupidity and bravado.
A few weeks ago, we wrote an ad to put up on various work-for-free job boards, seeking reviewers. We decided to make it longer than most ads we see, laying out as many details as possible so as not to mislead prospective volunteers. Usually, we see stuff like, “Writers needed, possibility for pay, e-mail samples.” And that’s it. We wanted to take the opposite approach, even if it yielded fewer responses.
We got around 10 responses, which is not particularly great, but considering we only wanted four contributors, we had a decent pool. We had four great applicants, three okay applicants, and the other three were just sort of embarrassing. One guy literally wrote, “I’m a local standup comic, and I’d like to be a film critic.” That was the entire e-mail. No resume, no writing samples. But I guess beggars can’t be choosers.
Meanwhile, Mark and I started watching movies, as many as possible, so we have a decent amount of content when we launch. I responded to the four great applicants with more details, heard back from only two, so we moved on to the second tier.
I didn’t like this move much, because one of the applicants who didn’t respond after the details graduated from Northwestern’s journalism school and asked all the right questions. Also, she was a chick, and I wanted to have some diversity on the site, to avoid having to buy “SausageFest.com” back from some porn king or another. But we apparently didn’t have all the right answers, so she opted out. That’s fine, but that left us with a second-tier chick who had some fairly bad writing samples. Mark and I agreed, perhaps out of desperation, that we saw potential in her that, perhaps, we could help her tap into. Also, she had experience as a copywriter and a pretty big agency, so we just chalked the samples up to the fact that they came from a blog (which are not known for impeccable spelling/grammar or probing insight, as longtime readers of this blog know). The fact that she didn’t bother to even polish them before sending us links didn’t bowl either of us over, but we figured we should give her a chance.
I assigned her a review during our dry-run period before launch. She sent it to me last night, and it was strangely terrible. She dug deeper, as we requested, and came up with some substantive ideas, but the writing itself was garbled and incoherent. Awful sentence structure, poor word choice, stream-of-consciousness rambling. It really surprised me that she not only worked as a copywriter but had a degree in communications from a reputable university.
So, operating under the assumption that (a) she padded her resume and (b) she was possibly hot, I started Google-stalking. Luckily, she has a fairly offbeat name, making it easy to find hits for her. True to her word, she did work as a copywriter at an ad agency for a few years, but she got laid off. True to her word, she attended the college she claimed to and has a communications degree. And, true to my theory, she is pretty hot.
The conundrum kicks in at this point: I sent the review to Mark, who has no problem whatsoever with cutting her loose immediately, not using her review, and scrambling to find another interested female (Amelia declared her interest, but after the script debacle, she’s a last resort). I argued that she made a few decent points and that the main flaw — her spelling/grammar/diction issue — is something that falls under the heading of “editor.” If it gets obscene, we can have a talk about it. In fact, Mark and I split the writers in half, and we decided I should take our female reviewer and a different male reviewer. Why? Because they’re both local, and Mark isn’t, and (1) we suspected problems with the female and (2) we want to kiss the ass of the male (long story). E-mails, I think, can suffer from a misinterpretation of tone. We figured meeting in-person — something I’d like to do with the staff on a semi-regular basis — might help to gently nudge her in the right direction, rather than alienating.
“Sounds reasonable,” you’re saying. “Where’s the conundrum?” I refer you to the part where she’s hot.
See, I’m a male. I like hot women. I mainly want to bang them, but most of them are too good for me, so I settle for friendship and the vain hope that I can slide in after a bad breakup for some “sympathy.” I’ve succeeded in this twice in my life, so I don’t know why I continue to pursue it, except for the part where I’m a male and I like hot women. So I feel like, not-so-deep down, my main interest in “helping” this writer, and defending her against married Mark’s quick dismissal, is that I want to bang her.
Should I side with Mark, or with my throbbing erection? It’s a question for the ages, and for the moment, I vote “boner.”
Posted by Stan on July 2, 2010 11:37 AM