Welcome to Cinematter! This is the part of the site where I explain a bit about its purpose, and ramble on and on about myself.
The Origin of the Site
If you want a full history of the site, click here. I started the site in July 1995 under the title Shreck’s Cinema. It started as just a test project. I was seeing lots and lots of movies, and was interested in learning HTML, so I decided to merge the two interests.
I had been keeping track of all the movies I had ever seen in a database as a part time hobby, with ratings of 1-10. I decided to post the most recent results on the site, so (in one day) I quickly whipped up 60 or so short summary reviews for the movies I had seen so far in 1995, and I posted them all on one rather long page which became the first Shreck’s Cinema. No graphics, just one HTML page.
Why Shreck’s Cinema? Well, in honor of Max Shreck? Who is Max Shreck you ask? Why, he was the actor (under a pseudonym) who portrayed the original Nosferatu. Suffice it to say I chose the name as a homage, but it didn’t describe the site very well, and hence the name changed…
The first page worked well, so I decided to branch out. Another project I worked on in my spare time was to collect information on upcoming movies. I always enjoy getting the Summer or Fall Preview issues of Entertainment Weekly or Premiere, and my intent was to provide my own personal Movie Preview page year round. The Coming Attractions page started small, with only about fifty upcoming movies…but quickly began to swell.
Four years and over 700 reviews later, the site changed considerably. It gained graphics, frames, a search engine, a new name (‘Cinematter’) and a database backend.
In 2000, I took what was hoped to be a short hiatus with the site. It happened to take quite a bit longer than I originally planned! Still an avid movie watcher, my reviews had taken a back seat. After three uncompleted relaunches of the site in 2004, 2006 and 2009, 2011 proved that the fourth time’s the charm. The outdated release date information was truncated from the site, which was moved to the WordPress platform.
About Your Friendly Reviewer
If you must know information about me, I was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, educated in Berkeley, CA, and currently living in and about Dallas, Texas. In addition to Cinematter, my reviews were published monthly in Current Diversions, a newspaper catering to Beaufort and Hilton Head, South Carolina. When I was actively reviewing, I was a member, and the webmaster of The Online Film Critics Society. From 1999-2000, I was also a member of that group’s Governing Committee. I see on average 200 films per year, and frequent the Toronto International Film Festival, the Dallas Film Festival, and South by Southwest. Recently, I’m taking a whirlwind tour through film history, watching all the films in the National Film Registry in chronological order (with a handful of assorted other high profile films of each year tossed in as well). Midway through this three-year project, I hope to be complete by the end of 2012.