And Now for Something Completely Different

My Other Job is a Dream

I had a dream that I got to work with the director David Fincher. Turns out, it wasn’t a dream. 

How did this good fortune ever shine upon me, you might wonder? Well, my other job is writing about movies for a website I started in 1999. First called Oscarwatch.com, it was renamed AwardsDaily.com when the Academy threatened to sue. Fair enough, it was their name I hijacked. Nevertheless, the Oscars couldn't stop me from watching them and my site took off. In fact it pretty much birthed an entire online industry of “Oscar Watching." But beneath what I was to become was the film geek I had always been. I had dropped out of film school in 1993, landed online in 1994, and spent the next five years thinking and writing about movies in a Usenet group intensely devoted to cinema. That was where I first got into David Fincher’s films. 

Of course I had not yet met David Fincher when I first started writing about his movies, as his work collided with mine. And he would have had no way of knowing that I’d made much of my own reputation online by writing about him, specifically The Social Network. We finally met after he read my review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  When I told him I’d seen the Social Network 30 times and declared it a perfect film, he told me I was insane.

Since then, we've seen each other a few times a year to talk about the past, present and future of movies. The one thing we never or rarely talked about was his movies, which is surprising unless you know him. The last thing he ever wants to talk about is his own work. One of the movies we talked about most was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, a movie we both agreed was one of the top five greatest films of all time. In all that time, since 2011, a lot has changed about movies and the way they are covered. There's been an ongoing lament that film criticism, such as it is, had supplanted the pure love of film. The Oscar business, my business, seemed to directly impact that trajectory. Does the Oscar industry do more harm than good? If everyone is aiming for those nominations, and to get them the movies must deliver what's assumed the Oscar voters want, does that create a kind of chokehold that empties out LOVE of movies?

We both grew up IN movie theaters. We grew up being shaped by the movies themselves, not by film criticism. Reviews existed, but back then only a handful of opinions would drop the Thursday before the movie opened. Now we have a whole industry revolving around films, picking them apart, positioning them for failure and success and forgetting about what their ultimate purpose in our lives should be.

That is at least part of what led to the new Netflix series VOIR. It was a desire to bring back the LOVE for a fast-disappearing art form and to find our way back to talking about them as a way to see them more deeply, with the goal of appreciating what filmmakers are trying to convey. At times there seems to be a whole industry devoted to making fun of movies, tearing them apart, mocking them for laughs. I suppose there’s a place for that, but there should also be a place to do the opposite. That is what we hope VOIR can be.

When I was first approached, David Fincher asked me to write about the movies I loved. I gave him a list of pitches. Of course, five of those were about his movies. He crossed them off immediately. We settled on Jaws because not only was it the defining movie of my childhood (and you’ll see why when the episode airs) but it was his too. I sent him something like 90 drafts and rewrites of just the essay. Yes, it’s David Fincher after all. 

He then brought on his collaborator, filmmaker David Prior who began straightaway by correcting a detail I had wrong in my pitch. I thought Brody said “fast fish” and he reminded me that those words were spoken by Hooper. Now we were cooking. Three people who loved Jaws almost more than life itself and whose entire lives had been shaped by the summer of the shark.

The other significant participant is my sister Lisa, who is featured in the little doc. She and I and most of our friends were all Jaws fanatics, as anyone who lived through that time would have been. It was when everyone went to the movies and no one felt excluded from them. The market decided what got made and so it was in Hollywood’s interest to appeal as broadly as possible.

And that is the story of Voir, the Davids and the Summer of the Shark. It was truly a collaboration in the best sense. We were trying to find a way to best express our love of this movie and to show, to anyone watching, how we were shaped by it. Our childhoods were shaped by Jaws, and--as it turns out--our futures would be too in one way or another.

We had no idea when we started that moviegoing as we knew it might be headed out of the future and into the past. That this series will be shown on Netflix may be seen, by some, as an invitation to dunk on Netflix for helping to “ruin” movie theaters. But I’ve been here all this time and I know that isn’t true. The damage was done long before, when the industry dependence on superhero movies began alienating adults, and that audience opted out of going to the movies when they found adult options streaming at home. Either way, movies will survive. Movie theaters are a more questionable prospect. Although, the decline of movie theaters has been predicted for decades, and here they still stand. 

To answer the question, how did I ever get this lucky? It’s unanswerable. Every step of the way I thought, if it stops here — just here — it will still be the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. Somehow it kept going and somehow it is going to show on Netflix on December 6th.

I hope you watch it, I hope you love it and I hope you tell me about the movies that you love.

Here is the trailer for Voir. It will show on Netflix in early December.