In 1909, Florence Lawrence died. A car crash. At the time, nobody really knew her name but audiences knew her face. She was The Biograph Girl, the actress who’d starred in dozens of films with Biograph Company. But at the time, it was not the norm to credit actors. There were no film stars. And then Lawrence died in a car crash. Except she didn’t. That was a lie. In 1909, the producer Carl Laemmle sought her out, after discovering…

“And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims,…

Among the most powerful names in comic books throughout the 1990s was Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Rosenberg had gotten his start as a distributor in the mid 80s through the company he founded, Sunrise Distributions. The company was successful enough that Rosenberg was able to finance a few independent publishers as well, and when Sunrise folded in 1987, he took control of a few of these companies, namely of course Malibu Comics. It was through Malibu Comics that Rosenberg really made…

When I first started working on my documentary about the summer camp I used to work at, I figured it would be a way to cope with the coming end of the camp. I didn’t realize how it would essentially consume my life for years afterwards. I started working on it in 2022. It’s nearing the end of 2024, and I’m still working on it. I thought I’d be done by now. I had no idea what it would take,…

I spoke about this in my review of Hard to be a God, but I hate cynicism and nihilism. Specifically, that brand of pretentious cynicism that acts like they’ve reached enlightenment and that they’ve seen the hard truths no one else can see is angering to me. There’s so much of our culture that propagates that idea too. In cinema, in literature, in politics, down to the language we use. We describe cruel and violent men as having power, and…