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Catching Up with RogerEbert.com Editor-in-Chief Matt Zoller Seitz

Around these parts, we’re pretty partial to Matt Zoller Seitz.

One Month Later: Catching Up with RogerEbert.com Editor-in-Chief Matt Zoller Seitz

Around these parts, we’re pretty partial to Matt Zoller Seitz, the pop-culture-obsessed multihyphenate who founded The House Next Door, and either mentored or befriended a great number of House and Slant writers before moving on to develop sites like Press Play and become TV critic for New York magazine. But even for those without any Seitz biases, chances are it’s hard not to admire the guy’s pluck. On July 4, it will have been one month to the day since news officially broke that Seitz had been named editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com. Of course, despite the massive loss we all suffered when Ebert passed, this job quickly seemed among the most coveted in all of entertainment journalism. And yet, it presented quite an intimidating challenge too. Though both Seitz and Ebert’s widow, RogerEbert.com publisher Chaz Ebert, have stressed that, naturally, no one could ever replace Roger, Seitz has accepted a torch-pass from someone who was rather inarguably the most popular film critic ever, and whose revered position is one of the hardest acts to follow in the history of the profession. But despite the hubbub, hurdles, and pressure that could unnerve even the steeliest pro, Seitz appears to have seized his role with grace and, indeed, guts, which is to say nothing of his recent championing of what might be the most widely-reviled flick of the year.

Seitz’s glowing review of the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle After Earth, which largely tanked with critics and audiences alike, brought out the venom in a lot of RogerEbert.com’s commenters, some of them heatedly declaring that Seitz’s dissenting views reflected an inability to carry on the Movie Answer Man’s legacy. The article’s minefield of a thread, which Seitz characteristically tread through with curiosity and kill-’em-with-kindness professionalism, is just one of the things he and I discussed while chatting last week. Speaking at length, we also talked about the the tragic bomb-drop of James Gandolfini’s death, RogerEbert.com’s growth as a home to great writers of all types (and origins), how Seitz came to get the job in the first place, and how it allows him to employ his old-school journalistic skills. Like Ebert before him, Seitz has a background as a newspaperman, his more than two decades in the business including a stint at New Jersey’s Star Ledger. There are plenty more connections between the two men, like a near-uncanny prolificness, an intimate writing style filled with personal experience, a penchant for finding and fostering talent, and a humility that feels genuine. The more we talk, the clearer and clearer it becomes that, biases aside, Seitz was the right choice, not to fill Ebert’s shoes, but to walk in his footsteps.

So, how have things been going with the new gig? What’s it been like taking the reins of a legend’s home base?

Well, it’s been really quite exciting and overwhelming, I must say. I’ve been a journalist for over 22 years, and this poses a unique set of challenges in that I have every skill that I need to do this job, but I’m not Roger. And I think that’s something that everyone is having to get accustomed to. It’s interesting—the response has been mostly very, very pleasant among regulars on the site, and then there are some people who don’t like me, and don’t like what I do. Whether that’s a reaction to the work itself or simply to the fact that I’m not Roger is a question that I can’t answer, and I don’t really know who should even try to answer it. But, you know, this is the way of human experience. Roger was a beloved man, and if it hadn’t been me, it would have been somebody else, and it’s very likely they would have encountered exactly the same issues. Someone that a lot of people loved very much is gone. We’re never going to collectively get over that. And, in my opinion, the worst possible way to try and move on is to attempt to be Roger, or to replicate exactly who I think Roger was, [in part] because my version of Roger is different than your version, and different than somebody else’s version. We all have this sort of fantasy version of who Roger was, and nobody could ever really match up to it.

When this interview publishes, it will have been just about one month since everyone found out that you had been chosen to head up RogerEbert.com; however, I don’t believe too many announcements focused on exactly how your selection came about. Can you briefly describe that process?

Sure. Chaz [Ebert] asked me to do this at the last Ebertfest. She invited me to an apartment she has in Champaign [Illinois] for a meeting, and other members of Ebert Digital, their company, were present. And she basically said, “I like you, Roger liked you, and we think you’re the guy to run the site. Could you do it?” I thought they were going to ask me to do something but I didn’t think it was going to be that. Chaz had been in contact with me periodically in the weeks leading up to Roger’s death, to say things along the lines of, “Things are very, very busy right now, but very soon I want to talk to you about your site,” meaning Press Play. Press Play and RogerEbert.com had a lot of contributors in common, and still do, and both sites have promoted each other’s content. And what I figured was happening was that Roger was ill, he couldn’t really be the leader and make sure that content was getting on the site in the way that he wanted, and maybe they wanted Press Play to help somehow? I wasn’t quite sure what Chaz was on about. But I did not expect it was going to be asking me to be editor-in-chief. I was kind of blindsided actually.

How have the other aspects of your career, such as your job at New York Magazine, changed as a result of this? Have they changed?

Well, [my work at] New York Magazine and Vulture is kind of a job-and-a-half anyway. So there was some skepticism on the part of the publisher there about whether I was going to be able to do this. But when I explained to him that this is approximately the same amount of work I was investing in Press Play, while writing for New York Magazine and Vulture, they eventually decided that they were alright with it. They’re an incredibly supportive organization, and I think there was an understanding on their part that this was special, and that it wasn’t just like any other job. I think they kind of understood that this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and they wanted me to be able to say yes as much as I wanted to say yes. I think the big challenge now is just dealing with the 24-hours-a-day role. And I’m actually getting good at that. I’ve always been known for my ability to do a lot of things simultaneously, but, boy, this is really putting it to the test. But what I’m discovering is, when I think about Roger, and what Roger was able to accomplish in a day, I find that my time-management skills instantly improve. Even before Roger got cancer, he was doing three, four, five, six things at once, and quite well. And he was apparently still living a full and satisfying life—he wasn’t a slave to his computer and he wasn’t chained to his desk. He got out, he went to festivals, he traveled, and he took trips that sometimes didn’t have anything to do with movies. I’d like to do that someday, and Roger showed me that it’s possible.

Matt Zoller Seitz interviews Haskell Wexler at Ebertfest

That’s a good note on which to start talking about the connections between you and Roger, and what things you’ve carried over to RogerEbert.com that have proved a good fit. First of all, you started Links for the Day, which we use here, and now you have Thumbnails over at your MZS blog, which is very similar.

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Oh, it’s basically the exact same thing I used to do at the House. Let’s not kid anyone!

Well, like Roger, you have this voracious appetite for pop culture and a keen knack for social media, so much so, that when I do Links for the Day, your Twitter and/or Facebook feeds end up being resources.

[laughs] It’s funny you should say that because one of the lessons that I learned a couple years ago was if I had a really, really good idea, I wouldn’t share it on Twitter or Facebook. Because occasionally I would do that and then I would see a blog post with basically that idea. And occasionally, there’d be a link back to me, saying “Thanks, man, for talking about this on your Facebook page!” [laughs]

Do you find that doing Links for the Day, and now Thumbnails, is more a way for you to share the things you’re interested in with the world, or to better catch yourself up on what’s going on in the world?

It’s a little of both. It’s three things, really: It’s giving myself a way to cast a wider net in terms of what I read and watch; it’s a way to spread the Internet wealth around a little, and send some traffic somewhere else, which is something that Roger was very much into; and then I guess the third thing, which is sort of related to that, is it makes feel a little bit closer to Roger when I’m doing it. And there are often other editors and writers who are suggesting things that make their way in, but I’m the guy who’s writing the posts and laying them out. What I’m really aiming for, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, is the kind of curation that they practice at Harper’s. In my opinion, that’s the best magazine in the world. I love The New Yorker, I love New York Magazine—there are a lot of good magazines out there. But with Harper’s, there’s something uniquely arty, and weird, and special—a vitality with which it’s laid out. There are these intuitive connections with how things are arranged on a page. And I don’t think I’ve gotten there with Links, or rather, Thumbnails—ha-ha, a Freudian slip—but I hope to, someday.

You and some of the other writers at the site, like Sheila O’Malley and Odie Henderson, bring a lot of yourselves to your work, a lot of first-person narrative, much like Roger did. But there are other contributors, like Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, who don’t do so much of that. The overall diversity makes the site a kind of artists collective. Is that something you’re striving for? What sort of writers attract you?

I don’t know if I have a particular type of writer that I’m looking for, but I will say that I want the writers on the site to be as different as they can possibly be, while still being good writers and good journalists. I really enjoy stumbling upon writers, just kind of at random, when I’m surfing the net, as they used to say in the mid-nineties. I like reading something and saying, “Holy shit, she’s really good!” or “Wow, that guy can really edit,” and then writing them an email and saying, “Hey, why don’t you send me some pitches?” Because I feel like one of the biggest pains in the ass about being a writer is feeling like you’re doing it in a vacuum, and I’ve met writers on a much, much, much bigger scale than me who feel that way too sometimes—like, you’re getting feedback but you’re still not entirely sure if everyone’s connected. I mean, it’s great to get 100 comments on a story or whatever, but it’s even better to get that one comment, or that one email, from someone who seems to understand you on an almost freaky level. I like that. Keith [Uhlich] or Ed [Gonzalez] might have told you that I used to throw a lot of parties at my house, almost every single weekend, and it just got to be known that, if you weren’t doing anything on a Friday or Saturday, you could always stop by Matt’s place. And you knew there was gonna be food on the grill and beer in the fridge. Everywhere I go [professionally] I try to turn it into that a little bit, although hopefully we still get some work done. And RogerEbert.com is becoming that in its own strange way.

And what about assigning specific assignments to specific writers?

Well I love the feeling of thinking like a journalist. When Richard Matheson passed away, I thought, “Okay, we need an obituary, and we need it fast, otherwise it’s going to be irrelevant. We can’t do that sort of personal blog thing, where you sit on something for two days, then write something and hope that someone reads it. We gotta be on this—it’s big.” And I looked down at the roster of people who wrote for the site, and when I came to Peter Sobczynski, I thought, “Hmm, I bet he could do a really good job with this.” I called him at 6 p.m. and asked if he could get me something by midnight. He turned it in by 10 p.m., and it was perfect and we ran it. And I thought, “This is like the old days.” It was like when I was working at The Star-Ledger, only we’re not all in the same office.

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Like a major newspaper, though, the site has a pretty huge wealth of departments, from the “Far-Flung Correspondents” section, which Ebert himself started, to “Balder & Dash,” whose content seems to overlap with other sections. Is there a specific to department you’re most interested in augmenting right now?

We’re actively working on the whole site, in theory, at least. But right now, Balder & Dash has gotten the most of my attention, probably because it’s the most like what I’m used to, which is a kind of catch-all film and television blog where anything can happen. But we’ve had a few good pieces go up on “Demanders,” which has become more of our DVD and streaming column, or “channel,” as we call it. And we’re going to refine that further. My big project in the coming months is Far-Flung Correspondents, which is a very special part of the site, because it’s home to writers that Roger hand-picked because he liked them. And some of them were professional journalists, and some of them were [relative] newcomers, but what they had in common was that Roger thought they were all special. And I really want to develop that because I feel like that’s the greatest unexploited resource so far in my tenure—those wonderful people. You’ll be hearing a lot more from them very soon.

Let’s get to some of the bigger things that have received attention since you’ve stepped into this position. There was your against-consensus After Earth review, which got a lot of interesting responses…

Ahh, that’s one way of putting it. [laughs]

Well it presents a good opportunity to talk about relationships with commenters. We definitely get our fair share of impassioned commenters here at Slant and The House. What’s your general feeling about the dialogues that accompany certain articles, be they positive or negative?

I think comments are mostly great. I’ve always interacted with commenters to a much greater extent than a lot of critics do. And I started doing it back at The House Next Door. In fact, the comments section at the pre-Slant House Next Door, for a lot of people, was the main reason to visit the site. Which isn’t to say they didn’t occasionally derive pleasure from the writing of myself and of other staffers, but it was a place to hang out and have intelligent, impassioned conversation. Roger’s site has been the same way, but it presents a different set of issues because the audience is so much larger. There are millions of people who read this site every month. As a result, you get a very wide range of comments in terms of relevance and acuity, by which I mean you’ll get comments that relate directly to the substance of an article, or the substance of a comment left on the article, and then you’ll get ones that are kind of just people belligerently patrolling. They don’t actually visit the site regularly, but were referred by an angry link from somewhere else. I call that the “Fly, monkeys, fly!” commenting approach. [laughs] Keith Uhlich ran into a nasty case of that a few years ago when he wrote about The Dark Knight. For some reason it’s always more vitriolic when it’s comic book movies. It’s incredible. Horror film fans are much better behaved than superhero film fans. I don’t know why that is. We are developing a comments policy, and I’m hoping we’ll move toward one where there’s significant moderation. The substance of people’s arguments will not be touched, but I think we’ll post a notice that if your comment is filled with attacks, and you’re not engaging with the text, then there’s less of a chance it will get through. We don’t want this to turn into YouTube.

Matt Zoller Seitz discusses James Gandolfini’s death on CTV

The other big item that surfaced this past month was the death of James Gandolfini, which made me think of you because you’re a TV guy, you’d just taken over a film site in the wake of the death of someone you knew, and here comes the death of another giant, whom you also knew, and whose work straddles the worlds of TV and film. How did you approach covering Gandolfini at RogerEbert.com?

Well, I’m pretty familiar with the subject of James Gandolfini and The Sopranos in general, so I thought I could bring something unique to the site just given my professional history [in that area]. But there’s also a tremendous amount of overlap between fans of television and fans of movies. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t make any sense to separate those two things. And I knew there was a great chance that anyone who was reading Roger Ebert’s site was either a fan of The Sopranos or, at the very least, aware of it. So it made sense to cover that. It was a big deal. James Gandolfini’s death should be one that’s on par with the death of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix—it’s up there. This is the kind of death that makes people remember where they were when they heard the news. This guy touched people. I know he touched me. That [Sopranos] roundtable series that was posted on the site, “Cut to Black,” was, oddly, in the works for months. I kind of went rogue on that and made that shoot happen. It was just a fluke of timing that it happened to go up that week. We scheduled it for that Monday and Gandolfini died a few days later. I asked the editor, Dave Bunting Jr., to add a title card at the end, dedicating it to Jim. And I want to do more video items on this site. I want the site to be a destination where people can go to see cool stuff. I want it to be like one of those television shows that you watch with a sense of anticipation, because you don’t know what they’re going to do next. That’s job one.

I’m going to fumble this quote a little bit, and I’ve had a hard time finding exactly where I read it, but somewhere along the line, Roger wrote something about a note that he kept at his desk at the Chicago Sun-Times, and it said something to the effect of, “At the end of the day, I’m just a man in a theater watching a movie.” He did it to remain humble. Is that a philosophy you identify with and hope to uphold?

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Yeah, but I think every critic feels that way to some degree. Ultimately, I think the only thing that separates a professional critic from a regular moviegoer is that they’ve probably seen more movies, read more about movies, and have done a lot more writing. And that’s it. And I’ve had a number of conversations at parties with people I was meeting for the first time whose opinions on film and television were every bit as interesting as ones that I had recently heard from veteran critics. I feel the same way about criticism as I do about pretty much any other skill that I have, which is that it’s just a means to an end. And the means to an end is connecting with other people. The movies and the television shows are just a way to do that. Just like an actor wants to connect with people—the performance of the text is just a means to an end. And you can substitute your own examples. Why does anybody do anything? If it’s not just for a paycheck, then there’s gotta be some other reason. And I think it’s connection.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

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