LA Weekly @ 30.

The 30th anniversary of LA Weekly finds film editor Scott Foundas and staff writer (and former film editor) Ella Taylor in such dour moods that, at first glance, you fear each are issuing his and her farewells. Not so (I think), but both are indeed bidding farewell to an editorial environment that once allowed a mightily impressive roster of writers - Weekly co-founder Michael Ventura, John Powers, novelist Steve Erickson, Tom Carson, Manohla Dargis, among many others - space and time to write about movies. "When," Scott Foundas's subtitle reads, "writing about them really mattered."

Well. To step back, start with Ella Taylor's piece, a brief but essential history of the film section at one of the US's great alternative weeklies. Then prepare to sort through and wrestle and/or agree with Scott Foundas's mixed feelings. Myself, having read his sampling of Ventura's essays, I'll eagerly pass along his call and urge you to do the same: "Here is a career that begs anthologizing!" As for the rest, particularly his take on "a cultural phenomenon - go ahead, call it a decline - in which the supremacy of the Internet is more a symptom than a cause," I'll say this for now: I wouldn't mind at all reading a friendly debate between this young pessimist and the retired yet still impressively prolific and lucid Jonathan Rosenbaum. Don't get me wrong; pessimism is a healthy survival strategy and this is a debate I'd listen in on with an open mind.

When the day comes that the Weekly completes its migration from print to the electronic word, when we're all reading from Kindles, laptops and iPhones, someone is going to have to straighten out the website. The location of this page may seem obvious once you find it, but it took me a while. At any rate, there you'll find more anniversary-related features, including John Powers's appreciation of Ventura, two samples of Ventura's work from the archive (1984 and 1992) and more on the history of LA Weekly. Each section, too, has its looks back, but you'll have to poke around a bit to find them.

Posted by dwhudson at December 4, 2008 6:49 AM