Page 1

Matt Zoller Seitz

Tell us about your blog.

The House is a cooperative blog with a roster of three dozen writers who contribute anywhere from one piece a week to one piece a year. Some contributors are professional journalists with a lot of experience. Others are non-journalists who love movies and can write well. There are also a fair number of current or recent college students and contributors such as Jeremiah Kipp and Steven Boone who are both critics and professional filmmakers. The mix makes for an informed but freewheeling comments section, and sometimes for multiple, divergent assessments of the same movie.

How would you describe your readers? Do you have much contact with the people who read you?

Our readers tend to fall into two groups: first-time readers who don't normally read a lot of in-depth film or TV coverage and who were directed to a particular House piece by another web site, and obsessive viewers with eclectic taste who see a lot more stuff than their peers and tend to read everything we put up — basically the kind of person you'd go up to at a party and ask, "What should I see?"

Tell us how — and why — you started your blog?

I founded The House Next Door in January, 2006, as a solo blog — basically an outlet for pieces that didn't fit the mold at my then-employers, The Star-Ledger (where I was a TV critic) and New York Press (where I was a film critic). I soon began publishing other writers' work — some of it sent to me by them, some solicited by me.

Describe your blog day — do you work at home? Go to a café? Sit in an office?

"Blog day" doesn't compute for me because I'm an insomniac. I don't really get cooking on the blog until about 10 p.m. During the day I see movies — some to review for The New York Times, where I'm the backup film critic; some to review for The House, and some that I just want to watch for pleasure, or to be able to join in discussions on other people's pieces. At night I email my contributors suggesting story ideas, offering notes and advice on pieces that are still in draft form, and visiting film, TV and breaking news blogs, compiling URLs of possible Links of the Day for my co-editor and chief collaborator, Keith Uhlich, a professional critic and editor who started out as a contributor and now handles most of the day-to-day logistics of running the site.

How do you find things to blog about and how do you decide that an entry is worth being in your blog?

That's a sort of mysterious question and I'm not sure how to answer it. We're not a news-driven blog, unless you count Links for the Day, so we don't feel obligated to cover the entire film universe. I just write about whatever the spirit moves me to write about. I suspect the other contributors go about it in more or less the same way.

Page 2

What is your favorite blog entry?

Of my own stuff, I'm probably most proud of my review of the second theatrical cut of The New World, my review of the finale of The Sopranos (recaps of which are collected in the sidebar on the site's main page); the piece I wrote last year on the filmography of the Coen brothers, and the essay I wrote about Owen Wilson after his suicide attempt, "A Sunbeam in the abyss." I can't single out any one blog entry by my staff because they're all such different writers and we're working our way toward our 2000th original post. It's like taking me out to a meadow and asking me to name my favorite flower.

What was your most popular/controversial blog entry?

My most controversial piece probably the screed I wrote the week before the 2006 Oscars about Crash, which I loathed. The most popular stuff was my writing on The Sopranos.

Is blogging the new path to fame and fortune?

I doubt it.

What separates journalism from blogging?

Nothing. As far as I'm concerned, anybody who writes regular blog entries that are as smart, polished and readable as the stuff you'd see in a major daily newspaper is a journalist. The business of print vs. Internet and professional vs. amateur is a distinction that means increasingly little, and will likely be irrelevant soon.

Who are the bloggers that you read religiously?

The gang at Reverse Shot and indieWire, which are joined at the hip, are indispensable. Ditto our colleagues at Slant. And GreenCine Daily, of course, film writing's equivalent of a news ticker. Of the solo bloggers, I'd say the two who are most likely to make me think, "Damn, I wish I'd written that" are Jim Emerson of the Chicago Sun-Times blog Scanners, and the website of film teachers David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, who regularly write pieces on film history and theory that add new phrases to the lexicon (like "network narrative" and "intensified continuity") and set the agenda for everybody else. And there's Girish Shambu, who's a phenomenon unto himself — a combination critic, theorist, teacher, student, poet, philosopher and party host.

How has your life changed because of your blog? Has it gone in any new directions because of your newfound prominence?

Throughout my career, I always took my work seriously, but I also had a skeptical or even cynical attitude about it — that it was just something people read at breakfast or on the bus to kill time. But since I started the blog I've been contacted by a lot of people who have been reading me closely for years and can quote lines or passages from pieces that I'd forgotten I even wrote. That kind of feedback means more to me than any professional honor I've ever received. It's the Christmas party scene at the end of It's a Wonderful Life where George Bailey learns that his existence meant something.