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Hi. I'm Wheeler Winston Dixon... James Ryan professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
and I'd like to speak for a moment about motion picture magazines.
There are basically 3 kinds of motion picture magazines.
There are fanzines, which cater to fans
There are genre magazines like Fangoria... magazines which cover certain kinds of films.
Then there are trade journals. And the most famous trade journal is Variety,
which has been the show business bible for years and years.
American Cinematographer, which caters, of course, to cinematographers.
There's The Hollywood Reporter, which is another trade journal.
And more recently, there are web journals, which have really taken over in Hollywood as the most important trade journals.
The most important of theses, without any doubt, is Deadline Hollywood, which is run by Nikki Fink.
Deadline Hollywood has become the absolute go-to source for news in the film industry...
Along with Box Office Mojo, which is the very best for numbers.
And there's also a site-source called Hollywood Wiretap.
And these are all trade journals. They don't deal in film criticism.
They deal in numbers and facts, and what's winning and what's losing...
and who's moving from one studio to another, and what director is hot, and what agent is not.
and there all business.
There are also scholarly film journals.
These are film journals that seriously examine films,
and take them apart in such a way they they're really informed, serious film criticism.
The most important of these is Sight & Sound, which is a British film journal.
Then we have the web journal, Screening the Past, which is free and anyone can log on to.
Frame Work, which is another serious film journal.
Senses of Cinema, which is perhaps the greatest online film journal published in Australia, which is also free.
And then there's Film Culture, Film Comment, Film Criticism, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video,
which is edited by myself and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster.
These are a host of film journals that seriously examine the art and history and theory of film.
All of these journals have a place.
The fan journals appeal to the public. The trade journals keep people in the industry up on what's happening so they know what's going on.
The theory and criticism journal, however, are increasingly important
because foreign films are not getting a major release in the United States anymore
They often wind up on DVD, streaming or video on demand, and they don't get the prominence they deserve.
Once is the 1960s, every film used to have to open in a theater.
So you would be able to see everything from Psycho to La Dolce Vita on a big screen, but that's not true anymore.
So, for example, I look forward to Sight & Sound and Film Comment every month so I can see all of the films out there that I might have missed,
and use the festival round-ups... the film festivals around the world... in order to become aware of these films.
So, these journals cater to different audiences, and they're all valuable.
The fan journals, the trade journals, and the theoretical journals...
they're all part of the literature of the film studies in the 21st century.
I'm Wheeler Winston Dixon, and this is Frame By Frame.