Saturday Night at the Movies #1 - Reclaiming an Idea

It was recently brought to my attention that HitFix no longer exists.

In a general sense, this is not news. Uproxx purchased HitFix for a giant tax write-off in 2016 and then quickly fired everyone who actually made HitFix a site that people read. In practical terms, HitFix has been dead for quite a while. But recently, Uproxx deleted their full archives before a certain year, and that means they wiped away all the video we created, all the articles we published, and any real record that we existed. This is largely because Uproxx and their parent companies are a bunch of cancerous pig-dicked cretins and venture capital ghouls, and I genuinely hate each and every one of them. Buying something to destroy it is one of those late-stage-capitalist things that you are entirely within your rights to do as a carnivorous company designed only to destroy the things you touch, but it’s grotesque and cruel and I am entirely within my rights to hope a safe falls on everyone involved.

There is an upside, though. While this hasn’t really been tested in court, my presumption moving forward is that HitFix surrenders all rights to anything I wrote or published to them by virtue of abandoning our archives to these predatory dickheads, who then promptly deleted those archives. Clearly, no one wants to retain ownership of anything that we created there. I carved out the individual rights to the Film Nerd 2.0 columns when I was fired, and now I’m going to assume that, since you've made no effort to archive or maintain any of it, every single thing I created there has also reverted to me now, and if you’d like to prove different, Uproxx, suck my ass and sue me.

In particular, there’s one thing I wanted back and I was worried until now that I might have fucked myself by publishing those articles on HitFix. Now I can treat them like a dry run for an ongoing idea I’m going to pursue here, and since I don’t give a shit about the algorithm or how many ad clicks something gets, I’m going to write as many of these columns as I want, whenever I want, because this is a topic that has interested me my entire life as a film fan.

How long have I been trying to write about this particular idea? Well, the idea predates Ain’t It Cool or, for that matter, the Internet. This is something I started making notes for back in the late ‘80s, when I thought I might write a book about it. Now keep in mind, in the late ‘80s, Saturday Night Live was just over a decade old. Even at that point, it seemed mind-boggling to me how big of an influence this late-night comedy show had on the movies. There were brand new superstars that were created by the show and it felt like there were more of them every year. As the ‘90s kicked off, I became even more convinced there was a book’s worth of material here, and I kept making notes all the time.