Reporters for Fan Film Sites Are Influential, Busy at Sundance
By Larry D. Curtis Deseret Morning News
Sundance attracts big news media from around the globe. Even the smaller Slamdance has international pull for its big events. Variety, the entertainment industry journal and copies of The New York Times are stacked around the Sundance headquarters and in various festival venues while they report on the festival. The Hollywood Reporter, CNN and all the major news networks and celebrity-driven news shows send crews to record stars and try to get the early word on films to its audience.
But the force covering Sundance is more diverse than just traditional journalists covering a beat. The Internet has provided a way for cinema fan diehards to follow and even report on movies. There are bloggers of course, but fan film sites have sprung up over the last two decades and they are something different.
AintItCoolNews (www.aintitcool.com) was started in 1996, the first of many sites made by film fans reporting on what they loved. Founder Harry Knowles took his movie-fan mentality from news groups to form an official Web site that was both influential and popular. As the site and imitators grew, the Internet suddenly held sway over the opinions of movie viewers and therefore box office dollars.
AintItCool is at Sundance this year in the persona of Eric Vespe, known better by his on-line handle “Quint.” (The name comes from the sea captain of the same name played by Robert Shaw in “Jaws.”) While he and his cohorts aren’t journalists by traditional standards, film studios and Sundance certainly recognize them as such. Vespe had no trouble attaining a press pass.
“There are definitely still people that don’t understand the Internet and view us as kind of stupid fans,” Vespe said in an interview with the Deseret Morning News while traveling to Sundance. “There are a whole bunch of people in the studios that get it. They are being put in as new junior execs and just getting into power; the read us when they were in high school or college and started as a fan of this kind of coverage.
“Honestly even the stalwarts are accepting now that the Net is how people are getting their news.”
Sundance, as in independent festival, is even easier for AICN.
“With festivals there have never been any problems (getting credentials). The filmmakers and publicists usually tend to be readers of the site and know that when we love something we’ll champion it.”
Fan sites can help create buzz for a film that often leads to big box office, and for small films desperate to find an audience, a movie site with loyal fans is pretty attractive.
Despite what some might expect from a self-confessed film geek, Vespe isn’t in Utah to rub shoulders with the famous or the powerful or the beautiful.
“I’ve done about two weeks of preparation, tweaking my schedule, contacting publicity people, trying to squeeze in as many movies as I can. Doing it that way, I’m still only seeing half the movies I want to see. My goal is to see as many films as I can. I am turning down tons of parties in favor of seeing movies.”
Vespe has indeed seen a number of films already, writing about them as quickly as he can to get word out to his readers about as many of them as possible. Unlike the Deseret Morning News, which only runs reviews when a film opens locally for the public, AICN posts them online immediately. While Jeff Vice is the film critic at the Morning News, a tactic employed by most newspapers, Vespe is one of half-a-dozen or so possible critics at his site. His colleagues might review the same films later and even disagree with the initial review.
Ethics of this new breed of news providers has been called into question a number of times. Unconfirmed sources or use of a rumor as fact or even prank stories thought to be factual have given play to completely false reporting. Mainstream news sources have even run with the same stories, giving both the Internet site and mainstream press a black eye.
Despite this, according to Vespe, studios now perceive the fan sites as less of a threat and more of a resource, which ironically has cut back on “spy” information in some cases.
“They have now invited the Internet to take part in a traditional journalist sense, which many feel has impacted the Internet coverage for the worse. I’ve seen some sites go completely corporate and disappear. Some sites are now 100 percent reliant on studios granting them access to junkets, press lines and interviews.”
AICN, which still generates leaks and spy reports, has even lost some of its sources as the need to dispel secrets dried up with ultra secrecy. The end result is that fan sites are closer to traditional news outlets but retain a maverick voice and operating method.
Ultimately Vespe hopes to see great film and let his readers know about it, which is why he braves the snow, ice and hectic schedules. A memory of a poignant experience at the Vancouver Film Festival watching a film called “Before The Storm” left him with a hunger to view independent films whenever he can.
“That film was never given a theatrical distribution anywhere near North America and I believe is on DVD only in Germany. If I hadn’t seen that movie in Vancouver, I would never have seen that movie, period. I don’t want that to happen at Sundance.”
Sensitivity notice: Film sites such as AintItCool and its forums may use language and terms readers find offensive.
Other movie fan sites include: www.chud.com, www.cinematical.com, www.darkhorizons.com, www.filmthreat.com, www.joblow.com, www.latinoreview.com, www.moviepoopshoot.com
(c) 2007 Deseret News (Salt Lake City). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.