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A regretful
communiqué:
24FPS to shut its doors
(August 1st, 2004)
I once gave a speech before a screening of Billy Wilder’s Avanti! –
touting it as the director’s best and one of my personal favorites –
only to find out, about 2 minutes later, that the print we had received
was no good – in fact, so brittle that the projector couldn’t handle a
few frames at a time before it would snap the film apart. MGM/UA had
booked us an old print; of course there was a new print somewhere, but
it wasn’t in our projection booth. The promise of showing a great and
underappreciated Wilder obviously made the night much, much worse – I
wished I had been introducing a lousier film.
The feeling of mortification is all too familiar as I write these words
– which is to say, 24FPS is something I care about, and announcing
that we (Zach and I) are leaving you with the promise of a great movie
magazine rather than producing exactly that, is just as devastating as
introducing a blank screen to a room full of moviegoers.
24FPS is something I began when I was 16 (under a different title that
quickly bit the dust by the second issue) and was published as a
raggedy 20-page Xeroxed digest in its first year. The third issue came
with a color cover, and the fourth (and most expensive to publish) was
in black and white newsprint.
Eventually a web version came about that existed as a combination of my
own personal musings and all of the back content from the printed
issues of 24FPS. By issue seven I had teamed up with Zach Campbell, who
had aspirations to start his own online mag. For the next two years we
worked as a team, exchanging ideas, and bringing in our friends to
write for us.
For this we would like to thank some of our most valued and prolific
contributors – Damien Bona, Victor Morton, Dan Sallitt, and Peter
Sobczynski – and others whom we had begun to engage but unfortunately
didn’t have the opportunity to work with again.
Returning to Avanti! momentarily, I did have the chance to
introduce
the film once again, this time with a great 35mm print behind me, and
less than a year later, albeit in a different venue and with a
different crowd.
The moral is that there’s hope after all – and the news that Zach and
I
are retiring 24FPS (at least indefinitely) doesn’t mean you won’t be
reading us again in a different venue with a slightly different
readership. Or that all of 24FPS’s content will become unavailable.
Quite the contrary: this letter is also to announce a forthcoming “web
archive” of all the article we’ve ever published, with heaps of new
materials never before available online.
In the meantime keep writing in with your comments and suggestions.
Gabe Klinger (gabe at 24fpsmagazine dot com)
with Zach Campbell (zach at 24fpsmagazine dot com).
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