From the summer of 2003 up until earlier yesterday evening I wrote for a rust belt paper called The BEAST (formerly known as The Buffalo Beast.) I started writing movie reviews for movies I rarely saw. My reviews were biased, scathing and sometimes humorous attacks of the latest crap that Tinseltown (has anyone even referred to Hollywood as "Tinseltown" after 1960?) had to offer. The reviews I wrote started with the best of journalistic intentions, but eventually and fairly quickly turned into something the wannabe bastard child of Hunter S. Thompson (the godfather of our humble rag) would've written. Gonzo film criticism.
More often than not I made up stories about the experience surrounding my ficticious viewing of any given movie as opposed to the film itself. These usually included fabricated versions of my friends and co-workers or anything having even the slightest possibility of being more interesting than 75% of what was coming down the cinematic pipeline. I always more interested in a more fun than informative read anyway.
And writing for the paper was fun for a while. It was sometimes a struggle to belt out something acceptable but that second wind would usually kick in just in time for any given deadline. Even if it involved using Belle and Sebastian liner notes instead of an actual review. And our short-lived WBNY Buff State show from which we got kicked off the air was an absolute fucking blast! (By the way, I don't recommend improvising on a radio show.) I wrote for the paper for free during the first 2 years in an unspoken/unwritten agreement in exchange for some legal work. Writing for the paper was fun and I didn't care about money. Then a rich Canadian Republican (if such a thing is even possible) started... financing us for what would later be unveiled as ulterior motives. The money left but I still got paid.
I started delivering the paper up and down Elmwood Ave and actually made more doing that than I did writing. It was fun and I kind of felt like I was part of something. Granted, I never went to the attempted staff meetings or had any kind of correspondence with either my editor or publisher outside of getting paid or finding out when the hell the next deadline was. Well, aside from a few parties at my publisher's house or the occasional failed BEAST bash.
Over the years the paper became less fun. Not so much working for the paper (which in itself became a drag) but I'm talking about the paper itself. Articles about trying to convince the mayor of Buffalo we were producers for The Sopranos to see how many appointments we could get him to blow off and goading Tom Cruise into suing us gave way to long, dull tirades about the most obscure leftist nonsense you've never heard of. The extent of my political awareness stops somewhere between SNL's Weekend Update and a Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert garden party so I may not be the most trusted voice on this matter, but I remember the paper had much more going on when I first started writing for it.
When 2007 came round The BEAST went from a free, bi-weekly toilet seat read to a $2, monthly toilet seat read. It went from a newspaper to a magazine format and at the last BEAST bash I attended, my editor and I decided I would start writing movie trailer reviews as opposed to actual alleged film reviews. It seemed easier to review a 2 1/2 minute trailer than it was to write up a 2-hour movie in theory but in practice it was a bitch much of the time.
Then we get to this year. Weeks of bugging my slovenly editor as to when the next deadline was only to get an e-mail maybe half a week before the deadline was kind of annoying. In the good old days, you'd get your shit in by Sunday night or Tuesday morning at the very latest, the new issue was ready to be picked up at the printer's on the following Thursday and you were paid by Friday at the latest. With this new... system, weeks went by before any checks were written or an issue hit the stands.
And that part I eventually got used to. The amount of time/work I put in didn't even amount to minimum wage but the checks I got had a way of showing up at incredibly opportune times. Getting a check that saves you from having to blow some dude down at the bus station men's room to pay a bill that was due 3 days ago has a way of keeping you coming back for more. That and I really like my publisher. Truth be told, I probably would've laid down in traffic for the guy.
Until the checks stop coming.
About a month ago, my lazy and unorganized editor shared his plan to make The BEAST a solely online publication (something he apparently never discussed with the publisher) and how I could send in as little as a single review at a time as he was going to do frequent updates. Sure, fine, whatever. Newspapers are dying out and it makes perfect sense that ours would go purely digital. The last online-only issue didn't have any of my reviews and since I didn't get the deadline and was under the impression the online thing would go off without a hitch weeks later. The last weekend of August I sent in my reviews for September which despite the voicemail from my editor, they have yet to make an appearance on the site.
I'd been calling my publisher for weeks and had yet to receive a reply. Whenever I'd call to get paid or find out when the next issue was coming out he'd at least pick up and give me a 15-second explanation or an ETA. Now, nothing. Apparently he and my editor had fallen into some twisted acrimonious professional relationship which involved sleeping in seperate bedrooms and watching the same television programs simultaneously in different rooms on opposite ends of the house.
And the kids are hungry.
If they can't take the time to put up the reviews I worked on over several hours or even call me back about them, then I'm not going to take the time to write them. And if there's a problem with them (I have to wonder if writing the review for the remake of Fame in Finnish was the final nail in the coffin) I wasn't told about it. I've been writing for that paper for almost 6 1/2 years. If I submitted something that really sucked I'd hope we were professionally at a point where I'd have been told about it.
And despite my leading anyone who reads this to believe that money was the only issue it wasn't. Granted, the money I made from this paper helped pay my bills and support my family, but I would've continued to write for free. Like I said before, I know that papers are taking a beating and I like my publisher so much that I would've gone back to writing for free if it would've helped him out. But because he can't communicate whatever the hell's going on and because my editor doesn't communicate with me about either the deadlines of the quality of my work, I must say goodbye to The BEAST.
P.S. Just so that last submission I made to The BEAST doesn't completely go to waste, I'll post it on this blog for anyone who A) knows about this blog, or B) cares. This one's on me, kids...
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