At This Recording, Tyler Coates reviews Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Young Literary Men, a book that I’m admittedly curious about, but absolutely refuse to read in hardcover unless someone gives me a copy. It is one of those new fangled novels that wants to tell people in their late 20s and early 30s who live in New York and have creative aspirations and complicated desires what it feels like to be a person in their late 20s and early 30s who lives in New York and has creative aspirations and complicated desires. It is sort of related to movies, by several degrees: Keith Gessen co-founded the literary journal N+1, the latest issue of which I read on the way back from Cannes; the co-founder of N+1, Benjamin Kunkel, wrote the novel Indecision, which Andrew Bujalski is allegedly adapting for Scott Rudin, to some chagrin from those of us who like Bujalski but hate that novel.

Anyway. Towards the end of his (largely negative) review, Coates brings up a blog post written by Gessen’s former girlfriend, Emily Gould. If you live in the world New York on the internet, you’ll know that Emily Gould used to write for Gawker and was recently eviscerated by that site for writing an extremely long cover story for the New York Times Magazine about dating another person who used to write for that site. Less press was given over to an earlier evisceration of Emily by Gawker, in which publisher Nick Denton basically accused his former employee of sleeping her way to the top (of what? The Gawker hate list?) by sleeping with Gessen. I thought that Denton’s post was really, really gross. I thought the NYT Mag piece was just unnecessary––although I applaud anyone who can make five figures off of blogging.

Okay, but seriously: this is a blog post about movies. Here it comes: …Read more

• Earlier this week, Jonathan Marlow published a rant on GreenCine Daily, titled They didn’t build their sales model for you. Much of the piece is given over to a description of the dire state of distribution affairs for truly independent filmmakers. Marlow, who acquires films for GreenCine’s DVD-by-mail main site, essentially argues that filmmakers should put less weight on dreams of theatrical distribution and concentrate on the many new media options. I didn’t comment on this story earlier because, well, my reaction was pretty much the same as Agnes Varnum’s: “It reads to me as a good summary of where things have been for last couple of years in film sales, so my question is what’s the news? Do people really not know this information?”
• Tom Hall also weighs in on the Marlow piece, from a festival programmer’s perspective: “Let me begin by taking exception to Marlow’s straw man, one that I have seen being built over and over again on panels and in discussions among filmmakers and programmers over the past few years; Film festivals are not, in fact, an ersatz distribution system for films.”
• If you live in New York and/or read the blogs of people who do, chances are you’re aware of The Emily Gould Fiasco. Funnily enough, Juan and Victor Piñeiro, brothers as well as director and producer of Second Skin, have bared witness to several smaller-scale Emily Gould fiascos over the past decade and a half.
• Finally, Paul Scheer explains why, although no one will admit to wanting it, Beverly Hills Cop 4 will make back twice its budget in its first weekend: “I’m like an abused sequel wife, I keep going back to theaters time and time again to get mercilessly kicked in the cinematic balls for having faith that a sequel can actually be good as it’s predecessors.”

Agnes Varnum has an interesting post at Re:Sources about blogs and bias. There’s this old chestnut about bloggers, that because our voices are distinct and our biases are supposedly transparent, our audiences can trust us more than a mainstream outlet. But Agnes notes that internet outlets are susceptible to some of the same bias issues as corporate media. Specifically, the editorial at larger sites is often beholden to the interests of their advertisers, and the all-attention-is-good-attention competitive business model can lead to a tabloid mindset, wherein “some days, they might have to just bend the truth to make it juicier.”

Implying that the impartiality of the Gawker blogs should be taken as less than a given, Agnes drops a reference to a review of Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs by Emily Gould (who, coincidentally, abruptly announced her resignation from Gawker last Friday).

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