And... Action: Welcome to The Reveal

A new home for a continuing conversation.

Keith Phipps and I first met in the fall of 1997, when we happened to sit next to each other at a junket screening of Good Will Hunting in New York City. Keith was part of a three-man skeleton crew at The A.V. Club, then a largely unknown arts and entertainment section that filled out the back half of The Onion, a Madison-based satirical outlet that was starting to gain some national attention. I was logging time as a film critic for the student newspaper while finishing up a graduate degree in Cinema Studies at the University of Miami in Florida. We bonded over being seemingly the only people not to care for Good Will Hunting, and started a conversation that wound through topics like which critics we loved to read and why Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary was such a disappointing follow-up to Trainspotting. 

That conversation never ended. I started writing for Keith, first as a freelancer and later as a full-time staffer in 1999 (first screening: Eyes Wide Shut), and The A.V. Club evolved from the vestigial limb of a comedy paper to an idiosyncratic entity of its own—an identity forged largely under Keith’s leadership as editor-in-chief. We worked together at The A.V. Club for 14 years before leading  a dream team of collaborators to launch The Dissolve, a film-only site for Pitchfork Media. And when that site went dark, we teamed up with our top editors, Tasha Robinson and Genevieve Koski, to start The Next Picture Show, our ongoing podcast about the connections between classic films and new releases. The media world keeps changing, but we’re committed to stick together.  

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The Reveal is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to bringing you great essays, reviews and conversation about movies (and a little TV). While both free and paid subscriptions are available, please consider a paid subscription to support our long-term sustainability.

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The most important value we took from those early days at The A.V. Club is to give our writers—and ourselves—the freedom to explore the cultural territories they most cared about. Keep in mind, this was a time when circulation mattered more than pageviews, before tools like Chartbeat could tell us how many people were reading each article at every waking moment—a change that, of course, disincentivized editorial balance and incentivized keeping that needle pointed to the right. Back then I could explore my love for cult movies in the column The New Cult Canon, and Keith, at The Dissolve, could plumb the depths of screen science-fiction in his Laser Age column. This was the type of writing we were most excited to do—and, for some readers, the type of writing they were most excited to read. 

We hope that spirit will inform The Reveal, a newsletter that offers us more freedom than ever to write to our passions—and a rare chance to appeal directly to readers (and potential subscribers) who share them. Through reviews, essays, lists, dialogues and other features, Keith and I intend to comment on the current films (and occasional TV) that draw our attention, as well as the issues and arguments circulating in the industry and culture. We’re also free to write about the past, so readers can expect regular diversions into classics and obscurities far afield from the day’s trending tops. (For one, I can’t wait to get back into the latest cult phenomena.) 

Keith and I have newsletters in the works about the definitive film about the war in Afghanistan, the Walking Tall movies, the summer blockbusters of 2001, and the slippery question of just what movies are worth in the year 2021. We’re also looking forward to digging into a fall movie season that promises to be the most robust since the pandemic started, with big-ticket titles like Dune and No Time to Die premiering alongside new films by Julia Ducounau, Wes Anderson, Jane Campion, Edgar Wright, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the bumper crop out of Cannes 2021, which many of those critics we still love to read have touted as one of the strongest festivals in years. As much as we enjoy our freelance work for publications like The New York Times, Vulture, The Ringer, GQ and other outlets—work that, incidentally, we will continue—we’re thrilled to call our own shots on here. 

And we’re thrilled, too, to engage with longtime readers as well as new readers here on Substack. We’ve been proud of the communities of fellow obsessives that we’ve cultivated at The A.V. Club and The Dissolve. We love to interact with readers and see how the things we write can lead to fun, deep, respectful conversations (and occasional friendships and marriages). I always think about my formative moments as a college-age cinephile, casually arguing about movies over burritos with my friends, who might surprise me with some revelatory insight or an impassioned soliloquy about a movie I absolutely had to see. Or how two guys grousing over Danny Boyle’s disastrous third film could lead to a lifelong friendship and the newsletter we’re launching today. 

As The Reveal rolls out in the coming weeks and months, we hope to engage our subscribers in the types of lively, ongoing discussions that got us into this business in the first place. And with no one looking over our shoulders, we will remain, stubbornly, ourselves.