Flutterby™! : Unless we find an angel 2011-11-07 18:50:59.996949+00

Unless we find an angel

2011-11-07 18:50:59.996949+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Jay is trying to get some visibility for Roger Ebert's plea to find a sponsor for Ebert Presents At The Movies.

I guess I have two problems. The first is simple donor fatigue. There are a whole lot of worthy causes that impact my life more immediately that want attention and resources. If you're a corporate entity wanting to convince me that you're making my community and my life richer, how about bring me more of COTS or help Friends of the Petaluma River turn the Ghirardelli barn into a center that pulls together the community, or, heck, support Mary Anne Mohanraj's push to fund her new book, or give Columbine a regular gig writing short stories, or...

The second is related: Public television? Yeah, two elections ago I spent an election day evening helping wrangle data to keep KRCB coverage accurate, but talking about returns on election night are exactly the sort of horse-race politics that I think cheapens the process. And I've never actually watched KRCB. I understand that various Children's Television Workshop programs may change the culture for the good in low-income households. However, television is largely irrelevant to my life. Heck, even for the few movies we see (watched Ides of March last night) I look to written prose, recommendations from other webloggers and friends online long before I'd watch a half hour show on whatever movies are released right now.

Ebert's done some powerful writing. I'm sure the critics he has lined up on this show are providing insightful commentary to people for whom movies are a central part of their lives, but it's not mine. Movies, television, mass media, these are all things that I partake of when I'm too braindead to participate in my community. I don't aspire to that state. "Let's go see a movie" is an acknowledgement of defeat.

So, sorry, Roger. I'll link to your post, hope you can find your demographic to support you, but it's not my cause. There are a lot of people out there looking for angels, a lot of people with projects that they believe will make the world better, and the impact of movies and talking about them on television to my life is just about nil.

Eh. It's an important cause to somebody; it's just not an important cause to you (or me for that matter). There's no need to justify picking one's causes.

I do wonder at how they got into this situation in the first place. Ebert can be naive about business but his wife is not. I'm surprised she signed on to a situation where they'd have to make the show AND provide their own funding. This deal sounds like there was no way it could ever have been anything but a loss for them.

[EDIT: I notice that a significant proportion of the comments at the Ebert link are, "Roger, why the hell aren't you doing this online where the audience is and avoiding dealing with all those idiotic, expensive TV folk?" - adjusted for varying levels of vehemence.]

I also wonder if we haven't gone past the point where a televised film review show has a purpose/niche - the world has changed, and film criticism is basically crowdsourced now whether we like it or not. But that's a different conversation.