I'm LYT. Who Remembers Me?

What brought me here, and what I'm doing.

“Who am I? Why am I here?”

I probably know the answer better than Admiral James Stockdale did when he said those words in the unusual, three-way vice-presidential debate of 1992, my first year at college. It occurs to me, however, that if somebody else sent you here, you might not know my answers. So this is my attempt to give them.

Unless you know me personally, anybody who has heard of me — Luke Y. Thompson — at all has probably done so as a result of my film criticism. (My acting, while fun, has been in movies for which I have no illusions about the audience size, though if anyone reading this loves Wicked Lake, Ding Dong Dead, The Human Race, or Mad Cowgirl, know that I appreciate you!) There was also that brief, glorious mid-aughts era when we had an L.A. blogosphere: just a whole bunch of us newspaper folk writing online journals, talking about one another, becoming minor Internet celebrities, until the best of us got picked up by larger publications, the rest moved on, and Cathy Seipp, who brought lefties and righties together in harmony with booze, died of lung cancer.

I've been film criticking professionally since 1999, and before that, on my college's pirate radio station, KSCR 104.7. It started strong – I was syndicated throughout a national chain of weekly newspapers. Nobody foresaw the utter collapse of the newspaper industry, and making a buck at this has been incredibly tough since around 2007. Last year, I thought I was in good shape having four different outlets, but then I lost three of them at once, for different reasons in each case but horrible synchronicity.

Keeping a following is harder than it may sound. Some critics have essentially maintained a version of their same gig at different places, but me – I've worked for lots of different outlets, and many of them required different voices and roles. One does not use the same voice for Forbes as one does for a site called Topless Robot (Forbes chastised me once for using profanity because I wrote the phrase “big swinging dick”). Other times, I wrote without a byline at all, in part because some of what I was writing was advertorial, and it spared me from making a personal endorsement I didn't believe in. Different voices and tones aside, every article bearing my byline holds my honest opinion*, except and unless an editor inserted theirs into the piece, which happens more often than you'd think, but is usually something you can fight back on.

(*Occasional joke pieces written “in character” do not count in this equation, as I hope you'd naturally gather.)

I've had many good editors, several adequate, and let's just say the bad ones all had one thing in common – they wanted to be, or thought they were, celebrities, seemed to find me some kind of threat or challenge to that spot, and were more focused on self-fame than the actual job of catching typos, errors, and helping writers express their best selves. Sure, some got book deals or were on TV, but to this day, nobody outside our field has likely heard of any of them. (The one once-famous “nerd”-comic you might know the name of was never my editor, thank Glob – just a figurehead boss that nobody liked besides the celebrities he sucked up to.)

When Twitter started, I thought it was idiotic, so when I joined, I deliberately made horrible dirty jokes to try and lose followers rather than gain them. When similarly juvenile humor briefly sank James Gunn, I deleted my Twitter and restarted, which probably cost me a lot of readership, but gave me back some online dignity.

Anyway, unlike, say, a critic who goes from one newspaper to another similar newspaper, I don't know that a lot of people followed me from, say, Forbes – where I frequently reviewed religious movies – to my coverage of Comic-Con for Deadline, or from Topless Robot to Documentary magazine. Further complicating matters, I don't always write about movies. I've written about fast food, politics, and toys quite a bit as well, and because I grew up with comic books and video games and action figures, I've frequently been at publications with that niche, though I actually love ALL cinema. I respect genre very highly, but I resent being pigeonholed as just a genre guy; something that still happens to me among supposed peers. It's especially frustrating to me when I see things that I feel like I at least partly pioneered – Comic-Con panel-by-panel coverage for the trades, understanding of pro-wrestling's influence on culture, fast food reviews, movie toy coverage, etc. – become part of major publications and mainstream discourse without my involvement at all.

A lot of the genre sites that have provided homes to writers like myself in the past no longer do – after training us all to write to a formula for search engine optimization, it turns out they can teach machines to follow that formula and save the (low) paychecks. The dirty not-so-secret thing about analytics is that most of your traffic comes from random searches and not loyal readership, and that encourages editors to only greenlight what has worked before rather than build a new base. If I could make every article somehow about Star Wars porn, I'd have had the highest-trafficked site on the web circa 2015. Nowadays it's probably something else, but not drastically different. [At one site, I was told that if I pitched any story, I had to show that five previous stories on the same topic did good numbers.] You've likely noticed that most entertainment news stories have a headline like “Star X REVEALS a thing!” then the first sentences reveal the thing, which is usually a quote from Deadline, Variety, or the Hollywood Reporter, and then you get 250 more words to hit the Google minimum that are often just repetition of the upcoming movie's plot, cast, and crew. It's the game, and I don't mind that it's the game, but I also don't mind not being in that.

So what am I doing here? Well, it seems like all the writers who were once big at newspapers are coming here, and I can write pretty much what I want without having to beg for a pitch to be approved by someone who doesn't get it at all. It's like indie cinema in that way. I don't expect to make a living at it, but it'd be great to supplement one. It'll take a while to get access to the same level of stuff I once did – the more subscribers I have, even at the free level, will help -- but there's plenty of up and coming art, as well as widely available stuff, that we can talk about. My cholesterol's too high to be about fast food as much as I once was, but toys, atheism, politics, and the general weirdness of popular culture are all on the table. I don't think you'll find this space to just be a carbon copy of that of every other former “nerd-blogger,” for want of a better term.

I say in the bio that everyone has opinions, but nobody else has had my life. That's somewhat true for everyone, but I was born in West Virginia, grew up in Ireland with an English psychotherapist for a mother and a Southern art historian for a father. I was valedictorian of Smoky Mountain High School in North Carolina. I was a published poet at the age of ten. My grandfather was a priest in the Church of England, and a POW in Germany in World War II. I live in the desert now. I was an only child raised in a country that was not my own, nurtured by my toy collection and limited access to media and movies, and that has all informed who I am and where I come at things from. I will expand upon all of this as we continue the journey here on Substack.

If you've liked things I've done before at other places, and they can't lay claim to them, maybe we can do some of them here. Fast food reviews are always requested, so you'll get them. Anybody want my mother-in-law to come back as an advice columnist? She's down if the demand is there. I plan to show off my photography a bit more here, for those who don't follow my Instagram. I'll read fan fiction aloud if you want. The field is wide open, so tell me in comments below what you'd like to see. I have nothing to lose, nobody to fire me, and no house style guide to conform to. I'm not the sort of guy to spill dirt, nor do I even know much, but I'll be as honest as I can be. I might get new ideas – hell, I never wrote about religion and atheism before except in the context of my movies, but I want to provide comfort to those like me who absolutely deny literalist fairy-tale notions of the cosmos. Those pieces will be paywalled, because I only want people reading them who really want to. The rest will mostly be free, save each individual review that each paid subscriber may request of me as a signing-bonus exclusive.

You'll get the truth as I see it. So many times – too many times – I've been at places that mandated “positivity” (usually with the most backstabbing office culture just underneath) and constructive criticism only (Heaven forbid you make fun of the all-holy sponsor Taco Bell). Equally bad is the current rage-click-o-sphere that preemptively hates anything that might feasibly be considered diverse. Love what you love, hate what you hate, but keep it real and BACK IT UP. That's what I've always lived by. If opinions are like assholes, corroborating evidence is the dildo that opens them to everyone.

Are you a publicist who thinks I might be simpatico with what you have? Let's talk. Scrappy underdogs are welcome, as I am one right now. I do have day jobs, so to speak, but we won't be talking about those.

And if a major publication offers me a job again? What happens here then? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but so long as I'm not prohibited from everything, I imagine I'll keep this up on any topics that are still allowed. If not, maybe we'll go to email chains. We'll see, but I have no desire for any reader to ever feel ripped off.

In the new year, I want to uplift people. It occurred to me that film criticism is like a lot of other professions now – it's controlled by people who don't care much about it and keep the opportunities limited so we fight amongst ourselves, when we need to fight the power. I have been guilty of seeing this as a cutthroat competition, when it need not be. All good voices should be heard.

You'll help decide whether mine remains one of them. And then I'll keep doing it anyway.

Any questions?

What do you think of what I've just set out? Let me know in comments beHAHAAHAHAA JUST KIDDING I NEVER WANT TO HAVE TO CONCLUDE AN ARTICLE WITH THAT CORPORATE-MANDATED FUCKING “ENGAGEMENT” SENTENCE AGAIN IN MY LIFE.

Whoops. Sorry. Venting. Out of my system now, I hope.

Carpe noctem.