By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
The Invisible Writer
Just read this very interesting piece by Reid Rosefelt on his career of writing press books — you know, those production notes we all get at screenings that tell us everything about a film. Rosefelt notes in his piece that when he ran into J. Hoberman at a screening recently, the latter commented that he had no idea anyone actually wrote those things. To be honest, neither did I — or rather, obviously I knew that someone wrote them, but I guess I assumed that was a task usually farmed off on some poor unpaid intern working overtime for a publicist.
Rosefelt’s piece got me thinking about how there are a lot of jobs that people do in which the person performing the task is largely invisible to the consumer of the output. I used to work in project management in the tech industry, and I felt that way a lot back then, that me and everyone on our team would work our asses off to meet insane deadlines for disposable websites that were obsolete almost from the moment they went live.
We pushed them out, they lived briefly with no one outside the team knowing or caring who the people were who brought them to life at the expense of countless hours eating meals hunched over a desk, working late away from family, friends, outside life, and then we killed them as soon as the next big project was ready. It was soul-sucking work that paid very, very well, but when I quit to move to Seattle and took some time off to raise babies, I didn’t want to get back into it. Rosefelt seems to have a much better attitude toward the disposable and invisible nature of his work writing pressbooks: He gets paid to watch movies, to talk to the creative people behind them, and, very often, to completely make up the things these creative people supposedly say about their own work. So, cool.
I know the same can be said of the nature of just about any job, including the job we do in writing about movies. We watch a movie, we work hard to craft a review that articulates our thoughts, we read the emails or comments from people who think we’re stupid, and we move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one. During a fest like Sundance or Toronto, especially, it’s a constantly hungry machine waiting to be fed by the next thing on your to do list to write about.
But if you love movies, and you love writing, then getting paid to write about them — even if what your writing is pressbooks — is a hell of a sweet gig.
