When choosing which movie to see, a lot of people turn to newspapers and magazines to help them determine what they should spend their hard earned money (and time) on. They often turn to a source that should give honest opinions about the quality of a film and more specifically on what the films is about and who might enjoy it. But as celebrity becomes more and more of a factor and as movies continues to run from art straight towards big business, our “news” sources are becoming less reliable when it comes to objectivity. Interviews happen with publicists in the room, stories are only given to news outlets who promise the cover and any attempt to hold on to credibility means being shut out of opportunities to talk to the folks who star in and make movies.The Reeler has an interesting editorial from Lewis Beale, “Flack From All Sides”, on this very subject and how it effects readers and the world at large :

Except for a handful of publications — The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and occasionally Entertainment Weekly — almost no one is covering the film industry as an industry anymore, and even fewer are dealing with it as a cultural force whose images influence billions of people around the globe. Needless to say, all of this is shortchanging you, the reader, who is being force fed a steady diet of warmed-over, surface-thin interviews — gossip disguised as news and cheerleading pretending to be criticism.

On the subject of filmmakers being interviewed, The New York Times recently featured a piece on painter, sometimes director Julian Schnabel and his Miramax distributed film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (out this December). The piece isn’t anything special (the film on the other hand really is - check out the trailer below), but give the article a read and be sure to take note of the ending anecdote about Mr. Schnabel, an assistant and some water.