Why a Substack

At the end of 2021, I left the only adult job I had ever known. For the past 15 years (14 of which were spent at Collider), I had somehow lucked into writing about movies for a living. And the reason I left Collider was that my dream job came along: working for Turner Classic Movies, a network I’ve loved since I was in high school and is based in my hometown of Atlanta.

But after six weeks of being out of the game, I started to feel restless again. I would watch a movie or a season of a TV show and there was no place for me to share those thoughts at length. There was no place for what I was thinking about The Book of Boba Fett or why I value movies like Moonfall. I needed to find an extra-curricular means of expressing myself.

Criticism is a creative endeavor. It’s a supporting one—after all, I can’t create my critiques if there isn’t a work to explore in the first place—but a creative endeavor nonetheless. I’ve long believed creativity is an impulse. Those who create do it because they must. Earning a living off it, finding an audience, etc. are concerns, but the person who sits down to write a novel does it because they have a story to tell. The person who paints a painting does it because they can’t get an image out of their head. As I’ve found the past six weeks, simply limiting myself to tweets and private Slack conversations with friends doesn’t scratch the itch for me. I need to write about the art I see in the world. I need a place to opine.

This Substack is for me, which I admit is an odd thing to say about a newsletter. But I’ll let you in on a little secret—for those 15 years, I was writing for me. The topics I was writing about were based on what got traffic, but I never wrote a word thinking whether or not that opinion could make the line go up or down. I couldn’t go in with an agenda, and the only way to foster and ultimately grow an audience was with honesty, even if my opinion on a superhero movie wasn’t received warmly by readers. It was my creative impulse. As a wise man once said, “I did it for me. I was good at it. I was really…I was alive.” (Don’t look up who said that or what it was in reference to.)

So if this is for me, what do you get out of it? To be blunt, I always felt like my work at Collider could have been better. If I had just a little more time, even an extra day, I could have really nailed an editorial, but I was always up against the clock. The media landscape is such that if an episode runs on Wednesday morning, you better have your piece ready by Wednesday afternoon or Thursday at the latest, and a few days later, the audience has moved on to the next thing. I could play that game, but I’m excited for the opportunity to spend more time on a single piece even if it may come a few days, weeks, or months after The Discourse has died down. I think that gives you a better piece of writing, and it gives me the satisfaction that I’ve had time to seriously edit a piece before shoving it out the door in the hopes that it can appease the SEO gods or land on social media.

I’m going to be fine if this newsletter has 1 subscriber or 100. If you’ve signed up, then I’m happy to have you here. My goal is to deliver this newsletter once a week, every Sunday at noon. It may increase in the future, but right now, this is purely a hobby and my main focus remains succeeding at TCM. But if you’re curious to know what I think about the state of film criticism or my thoughts on Star Wars, then you’ve come to the right place.