THB #66: Unpublished.

My infrequent publication this week has not been a matter of vacation.

I wrote up a 3000 word piece called “Just Keep Swimming” that was so brutal in passages that I sent it to a confidante and asked for an opinion. I got lots of them. But the one that stung most powerfully was, “Do you have to slaughter everyone?”

I’ve spent the last 36 hours or so chewing on what the column means to me and whether, as tough as the column was, was I actually that angry or was I just appearing to be angry?

Self-reflection is death, on some level. I’ve been at the business of having a standalone film industry column for 25 years now. And what was true from the conception of The Hot Button, in 1993, to its first publication in 1997 to it’s rebirth just a few months ago remains true… it’s not about me.

Yes, at times, it has been about me. And film criticism became part of the mix and that can be quite personal. But the idea has always been to take the news and to shove it into the factual atom splitter an…