Book Trends

The first great thing about this interview with David Thomson is David Thomson. The man is brilliant.

The second great thing about the interview is that even though David Thomson is a film guy and even though they’re talking about movies, you’ll find that in most cases you can replace "movie/film" with "book" and end up with a pretty insightful/prescient commentary on the publishing industry.

For instance:

I think [the decline of blockbuster movies] has certainly helped independent film. And I hope that sooner or later it will produce a revival of interest in foreign language films. Because there was a time in this country when there was a much bigger and more enthusiastic audience for subtitled films. So yeah–there are certainly compensating factors. But the thing that upsets me is that I retain a belief in and a hope for the films that are made for everybody: the big films that are also good films. And I do think that we are showing a lot of signs of losing the knack of how to make them.

Or:

Critics are as vain as anyone: They like to be read and they like to matter. I think critics these days feel that their say-so is pretty trivial. Because when films are opening in the way they open now, with this extraordinary surge of promotion, the reviews are pretty peripheral. I don’t think many American films, apart from the real independent films, get a lift or [a slump] from reviews. And critics know that, they feel that. And they don’t like to feel unimportant. Most of them can remember that age in the ’60s and the ’70s when people like Kael and [Andrew] Sarris and a few others really made the film critic quite an important figure in the culture. And I think that improved the writing. Because if you feel you’re being read with interest by a lot of people, then it sharpens you.

Try it.

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