Todd McCarthy shot down at Variety

Todd McCarthy, the Chief Film Critic of Variety (along with 7 other staffers, including chief theatre critic David Rooney) have all been laid off in what is described by the trade publisher Neil Stiles "as a cost-saving measure". My knee-jerk thought is that it's the beginning of the end. Strange timing also, coming the immediate day after the Oscar ceremony when The Hurt Locker, a movie that critics and bloggers truly made into a Best Picture winner (sure as hell wasn't the general public) - proved their importance is still significant. The L.A. Times reports;

The paper will now rely exclusively on freelancers and in-house staffers with other duties to review movies and shows. Stiles claimed that Variety will not cut back on the number of movie reviews it carries, which last year totaled about 1,200.

Are we all truly doomed then, our profession soon to join the dinosaur, the dodo and Eddie Murphy on the extinct shelf? Well, when I say "we", I mean the full time salary critics, and I actually don't actually mean "me" at all - I mean guys like McCarthy, David Denby (New Yorker), A.O. Scott (NY Times), Kirk Honeycutt (Hollywood Reporter) etc. It's becoming a depressing actuality that the only way to survive in this business is to start up your own blog, manage all the contacts yourself; earning revenue by cutting your own deals. Peter Sciretta,Emmnauel Levy, Richard Roeper, Jeff Wells, Harry Knowles, John Campea, Matt Holmes style - though this won't ever be a luxuriously paid job and I bet we all have to watch the pennies to get by, putting in way more hours out of our passion for writing about cinema than anything we make in financial returns. If we worked as hard in any other profession, we would probably be very well off indeed. But that's just the way it is. Anne Thompson, who left Variety in August last year blogged;

"Variety can't afford McCarthy and Rooney, as they couldn't afford me or editors Michael Speier and Kathy Lyford. But I was a relative newbie, a columnist/blogger. I was a luxury. Problem is, I was well-paid, as were McCarthy and Rooney. Nonetheless, they are necessities. Without them, Variety is doomed.... Variety is running out of cash. As one vet journalist tweeted me today: 'This feels like end of the world as we know it. I can't even comprehend.'

Anyway, I was shocked to read of McCarthy's dismissal as he is one of the only critics I read every review, and follow religiously. He was certainly one of the only reasons left to read Variety since Thompson's depature, and news guru Michael Fleming started writing for Deadline. Who needs Variety when they have no critics worth reading, and I can find all the news I need from Coming Soon - one easy to read place? It wasn't like the out-dated trade paper gave much opinion for fear of stepping on any studio toes and losing the big exclusivity deals they have. Roger Ebert has wrote an angry piece today on this topic, as has David Poland at The Hot Blog titled "RIP Variety", with more likely to come. Guys like McCarthy will be ok, and any media outlet would be lucky to have him and he has a future in the industry (either on his own, or writing for someone else) but Variety's future, and that of the full-time salary critic? Who can say?