Re: or better yet, start your own Morrissey site
> Moderating is the worst. I posted on an AOL board "that damn
> groundhog saw his shadow" and I received a TOS for it. The only good
> thing about AOL is if you complain and threaten to cancel it, you get a
> free month.
> Really? The fact that Roger Ebert also participated in it probably made it
> great as well. People didn't get personal if they fought about movies?
There was a lot of fighting, but the fighting was all over opinions on whatever the topic was, not so much personal (although this brilliant aspiring screenwriter was always flaming this successful screenwriter who wrote a lot of crap, and that was always amusing). It was mostly people trying to show off and look like the smartest one there. I was almost afraid to post there sometimes because people were so smart. There was an interesting mix of people, from bigtime industry insiders, to aspiring screenwriters, to regular joes and teenagers. And...a couple film reviewers, a columnist for a Macintosh magazine....a decorated vet who, like, testified before Congress over the Viet Nam war and was in some way involved with carrying the nuclear football at some point (and was related to Oscar winning DP John Toll). You'd just look like a retard if you posted like one, so not many people did act retarded.
That vet's name was Barry Toll, and it was pretty humbling when he stumbled upon me talking out of my ass on Viet Nam and he gave me quite a schooling. hahaha. On the other hand, I was arguing in defense of Killing Zoe to someone who was calling it unoriginal crap and pornographically violent, and f*** me...the director, Roger Avary, came to my defense! So you kinda had to watch about talking out of your ass. And everyone was under their real names on Compuserve, so that made people a little more sane.
Ebert was the nicest guy in the world. He'd reply to every single message as just a regular guy, and seemed to know a lot about every subject under the sun. I don't know if he still has a forum somewhere out there. At the time, he said he liked being able to get online feedback from his readers and interact with and debate them. It gave everyone an opportunity to sit in Siskel's shoes and have a go at him. Sometimes he'd email you and ask if he could use your post in his next Movie Answer Man column, and those would up in a book eventually! (I have a couple questions in the first edition of his Answer Man book, but I'm not telling which.) So yeah, he's a real accessible, normal, nice dude. Email him a good question about movies and they're highly likely to appear in his next Answer Man column, and perhaps a future edition of his Answer Man book.