Is “inside baseball” too much of an inside-baseball term nowadays? An old phrase for information comprehensible only to the participants in an event, “inside baseball” could profitably be replaced by “inside blogging,” capturing the relentless outpouring of “what my job-my day-my dreams are like” writing that constitutes a lot of web-based reportage. My saturation point came at Sundance 2006, where I struggled to find a way to write about films and filmmakers and the swirl of events that wouldn’t sound like all the other shiny, whiny, solipsistic stuff getting pixilated by the virtual pound. (I wound up posting many more photographs than words.) Collating coverage for Movie City Indie, I find myself awash in procedurals of the daily routines of filmmakers, film crickets, and other Keepers of Word and Image. In a worthy instance, Caveh Zahedi‘s prickly indieWIRE-based postings about the pre- and post-release matters of I Am A Sex Addict have been unusually forthright, or foolhardy, depending on your perspective. On Sunday, Zahedi pointed out that the film’s gross had reached $43,600; on Monday, he reviews Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review: Lane, Zahedi says, “He has a slithery ease with the pen which is almost reptilian in its meanderingness. If one loves the intricacies of prose (and I, for one, do), then one can read his reviews with real enjoyment… The problem with Mr. Lane’s reviews is that they don’t tell one much about the film… He is like the court jester trying to spin everything into a joke, no matter its gravity or urgency or true import. This has, unfortunately, become the norm in film criticism… The ideal, it seems to me, would be a review in which content and form were one, but here content has been abandoned as too difficult, too demanding, and too much of a party pooper. So instead, critics don their party hats, and blow on their noisemakers, and act drunk. It’s alll fun… The breezy, ironic tone of most film critics (of whom Mr. Lane is only one of many, unfortunately), while arguably entertaining, in the end serves no one, but only contributes to the on-going debasement of public discourse. It makes one nostalgic for the film criticism of a James Agee, or a Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose reviews not only manage to avoid the showoffy fluffiness of a Mr. Lane, but are positively punctilious in their rigor and willingness to actually grapple with the moral and esthetic issues present in [films]. Mr. Lane’s review of my film is not negative, only irrelevant. He neither gets it nor addresses it. It is merely a pretext for him to wax eloquent about nothing whatsoever… You’re very funny, Mr. Lane. Keep up the great work.” Does this help or hurt Zahedi’s cause as a filmmaker or polemicist? Writer Lee Goldberg recently identified a phrase for what seems the underlying urge beneath a strain of blogging among professionals: blog suicide.” Over at “A Writer’s Life, he considers the wages of suicide by blog. “Being too candid on your blog about the happenings in your professional life can have serious personal and financial consequences, which is why I don’t talk much about my current projects (beyond blatant self-promotion).

The anecdotes, rants, and observations that I post here are not about people I’m working with today or might work with in the future, much to the relief of my wife, my writing partner and my two agents, all of whom keep a close eye on my blogging. I have seen too many people I know commit blog suicide by trashing their current employers or co-workers (studios, networks, producers, editors, publishers, etc) or by revealing a little too much about their own insecurities, ambivalence or creative difficulties regarding whatever projects they are working on… You can commit the same sort of career suicide by saying the wrong thing in an interview with a print or broadcast reporter…” Goldberg quotes literary agent Steve Axelrod, who posted on his client, novelist Jayne Ann Krentz’s blog, a post titled “Why Smart Agents Don’t Blog.” Excerpts: “[Dave] Wirtschafter, the president of the William Morris Agency, didn’t blog, but about a year ago, he let himself be interviewed for a long, candid profile in the New Yorker. It made for great reading—it was the real deal—but his candor is widely believed to have cost the agency at least two major stars, Halle Berry and Sarah Michelle Geller, as well as a major director, etc. A few months after… W Magazine interviewed the now-retired Sue Mengers (“Hollywood’s first superagent”) and she [says] something I thought was pretty perceptive: “It’s very tempting for an agent to give interviews. We want a little credit, so it’s hard to say no. But you should.” And I’m starting to believe that what’s true for agents granting interviews is doubly true for agents blogging. Agents should just say No.” Goldberg had first broached the subject in November, with this entry. An author named Sandra Scoppettone had expressed her anxieties about her editor, Joe Blades, leaving her publisher. “This prompted an anonymous commenter to warn her that her very candid blog posts could be damaging to her career. Sandra angrily fired back. Soon, the ugly little argument spilled over to other blogs… it illustrates that even someone who’s been in the business as long as Scoppettone has… can sometimes let things go all too haywire. And it further illustrates the power of blogging in the publishing world—because you never know who’ll be out there reading, passing judgment, and jumping to conclusions. The blog skirmish brings up an interesting issue—how honest should you be on your blog? I have to admit I cringed a bit at some of Sandra’s posts, and at my friend Paul Guyot’s surprising candor about the ups-and-downs of his [television] pilot experience, and at my cousin regularly trashing her employer. [Guyot’s “Inkslinger” blog is currently down.] Sure, it makes good reading and can be cathartic for the author—but is it self-destructive? I don’t know. I just know I don’t want to find out for myself…. I’m clearly not shy about expressing my opinion—but I’m careful about it. I don’t hesitate to criticize fanfiction, self-publishing scams… or people searching the Internet for Lindsay Lohan’s nipples—those are safe. But… you won’t see me trashing a producer, a studio, a network, or a major publishing company. I think some bloggers forget that they aren’t writing a private diary—it’s like a column in a newspaper. You have no idea who is reading it or how your words are being passed around. Blogging is fun, but my career is far more important.” [For non-journo tradecraft dish, War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman‘s “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing,” about movies, Snakes on a Plane, and his recent brush with death, is a small epic; for a splash of the absurdly arcane, I’m fond of Matt Watts‘ modest feats of typing.]

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