War Stories: Tales from the Film Trenches
The Ad Hoc Affair
by
Richard Armstrong
The road to self-sufficiency
as a film writer is full of ruts. In November, 1996 I was fired from ArtEast,
presumably because my column wasn't 'popular' enough, i.e. it didn't toe the
distributors' promotional line. Bad news, since it was the cinema's advertising
which was paying for the film writer's (unbiased) opinions. In November, 1997
I was taken on by the Cambridge 
Insider,
a now defunct cultural weekly. The money was crap, but it was exposure and in
the summer of 1998 they made me Film Editor. I promptly rounded up a posse of
good writers to contribute to the film pages. They didn't make a penny. Then
the Cambridge Insider stopped paying me, having lost their independence to some
cowboy printing outfit in Peterborough. Then it went down the pan.
In the summer of 1999 I was invited to be Film Editor of Ad Hoc, a pretentious style guide for Cantabrigians with too much money. Spending their investment capital on Jeeps emblazoned with the Ad Hoc logo and gradually blanding the magazine down to adverts and filler, they eventually forgot that they had to pay me and I sacked them. As pretentious as it was, I actually liked the quirky Ad Hoc in the early days. Now it's crap.
I suppose I should
have seen it coming. Needing someone who knew some experienced film writers
because he didn't know any, the then Editor, Toby Venables, got me to commission
people to cover what was new at the Warner and the Arts, as well as contributing
myself. I invited the best people I knew at the time - Nina Caplan of Metro,
Kevin Harley of Dazed and Confused, Kathryn D'Alessandro of Audience, Brad Stevens
of Video Watchdog - as well as a few I didn't - Charlotte O'Sullivan of the
Independent, Jonathan Romney of Sight and Sound. The first few issues were fine,
but by October, my efforts were being compromised by other hands. To tie in
with the release of the contentious French art film Romance, I planned to run
a short version of the interview Juliet O'Brien and I had conducted with the
director, Catherine Breillat, in 1996. This summer I 
had
interviewed Tim Roth off the back of his first film as director. For its dodgy
attitude towards child abuse, I felt The War Zone was a much more contentious
affair. It was also getting more exposure in the press generally, but Romance,
when it came, got relatively little. To me, Roth was more interested in hyping
his discovery of Lara Belmont - "another Ingrid Bergman, don't you think" -
than facing up to his responsibility as a film director. But as that controversial
new French film opened at the Arts, Toby stepped in and we ran the Roth piece
in the October issue, The War Zone having closed over a month ago. In March
I reviewed The Blair Witch Project, which had appeared on video. Toby didn't
feel that my review was satisfactory and wanted to run his own piece on the
film. And so my 250-word review ran on the website alongside Toby's leviathan
and I bowed before the superior length of Toby's piece.
Ad Hoc was also true
to its name in its payment policy. Being responsible for commissioning made
me responsible for taking the flak. If I had a fiver for every time my phone
rang that year with an empty-handed writer on the end of the line, I would be
a rich man now. Proudly advertising to each new writer their "30-day terms",
cheques took a month-and-a-half, two months, three… Finally, I had to wait five
months for settlement of an invoice. By the autumn, I was thoroughly pissed
off. When Vicky, their efficient, nay scrupulous, Associate Editor, left, Toby
brought in an inexperienced person with a funny name to take over, as if having
a funny name made her different. It just made her funny. As if programmed to
do so, she proceeded to lose invoices, commission work that was not required
or used, lose floppy disks. And all the time I wasn't being paid. On one occasion
when I complained about how long this was taking, I was told that my cheque
was held up by the "Christmas rush". It was the middle of October. On other
occasions, my cheque had been sent, was to be sent...the permutations were endless.
Around the end of November, Sarah Wood from the Arts Picturehouse (as it now
was), called to say that she had been told that Ad Hoc were no longer running
reviews of foreign-language films (death for the Arts Picturehouse). It was
news to Ad Hoc's Film Editor. Toby assured me that this was not the case and
that this person was clearly paranoid. (For the record, 
Sarah
has always seemed level-headed to me). Feeling that Ad Hoc and the cinema should
reiterate their mutual relationship, I set up a meeting between Becky Innes
of the Arts, myself, and another representative from Ad Hoc in a restaurant
in town. I informed Toby so that he could schedule the meeting into his diary.
He wasn't interested and suggested that I speak to the Cambridge City Editor.
(Toby was now our 'Creative Director'). As the day approached, Toby called me
over and asked what all this was about. I reminded him of our earlier conversation.
Blustering about needing to be there since it was obvious that Ms Innes was
coming down from London and therefore Toby must meet her because Toby was the
one who normally met people from London, I was told that the Film Editor was
not required to be there to discuss Ad Hoc's film coverage.
By this time I had been introduced to a number of writers whom Toby thought suitable to write for Ad Hoc. They were inexperienced wannabe writers, some of whom had talent. Most of whom knew Toby. One of them churned out reviews quicker than I could edit them. He was an in-house person who was happy to write reviews. In other words, he didn't require payment. When we were offered the opportunity of a press conference off the back of the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, my expert on martial arts cinema was otherwise engaged. The Associate Editor suggested I find anyone to do it. Ad Hoc has always been generous about inexperienced wannabe writers, some of whom had talent, all of whom knew Toby, none of whom required payment.
By December, the magazine
consisted of ads cemented together by filler. Meanwhile, I had still not been
paid. I resigned. In my letter of resignation, I threatened to take legal action.
Lo and behold, a few days later I was paid the bulk of what I was owed. 
In
January, I went after the rest. I was told by the Creative Director that he
was astonished, given our "friendship" of several years, that I could have left
him so in the lurch. By the end of February, he had run out of prevarications
and they paid up. Many times since I have wished that I had taken Ad Hoc to
court. Many more times I wished that I had fire bombed the building.
The Ad Hoc episode got quite nasty on both sides. But good did come out of it. Several of their best writers left when I did. And it reinforced my sense that writing about films can be an art form. What was at stake at Ad Hoc was least importantly the egos of individuals. What was at stake at Ad Hoc was the place of that art form on the contemporary cultural landscape. At Ad Hoc I was put in a position which prompted me to resign because I wanted to try for a film criticism which was not only good journalism, but made the reader think and imagine. Sadly, what too often appeared on the website was shallow, sloppy and opinonated, a series of surfaces in keeping with the superficial allure of the magazine. This is not a rant against one particular magazine. This is a rant against an entire culture within film journalism whose proponents feel the need to glister and perform as showily as many of the films that they take as their subject matter. Consonant with the glossy aesthetics of the Hollywood fare it prefers, such a culture examines its own aesthetics constantly, preening its usages by the light of the slick and predictable movies which it admires. At Empire, Total Film, Hotdog, Ad Hoc are practiced the aesthetics of the peacock in which the writer wants you to hear his voice even more than he wants you to see the film. Meanwhile, hopefully something remains ineffable about the film until next time.
At
Ad Hoc I was funded, briefly, imperfectly, to cultivate a style of film coverage
that was informed: I tried to get someone with particular expertise to write
about a particular film; heterogenous: I had men, women, older, younger, an
American, a person of mixed race, a Christian, writing for me, and passionate:
everyone had shown me that they cared about film before they came to Ad Hoc.
It still makes my blood boil when I think of the dereliction of film coverage
in that publication, a feeling that will only really be assuaged by a magazine
and a website of my own. But such dereliction is symptomatic of a problem that
is bigger than Ad Hoc, bigger even than Toby.
© Richard Armstrong
© Illustrations by Lou Netter
Richard Armstrong is now resident film writer with the video/DVD outlet MovieMail and a BFI Associate Tutor. His first book - Billy Wilder: American Film Realist - appeared in 2000 from McFarland Publishing. The Ad Hoc Affair is an extract from Richard's forthcoming book - Chocolate Biscuits and Italian Neo-Realism: Confessions of a Cinephile - for which he is seeking a suitable publishing deal.
Billy Wilder: American Film Realist