“It’s hunger for whatever it is that the Times confers on people,” he says. “For me, writing for the Times was like being a really ugly person who’d inherited a lot of money.”
Indeed, his unexpected departure from the Times, seemingly one of the sweetest assignments in film journalism, generated a storm of media interest. Other hometown news sources, including The New York Post, The New York Daily News and The New York Observer swiftly attacked the story.
OF SCREED AND TWEED
Searching for some insight into Mitchell’s departure, I called and emailed A.O. Scott ’88 enough times to be sure I was becoming a nuisance. Unfortunately, the Times’ recently minted head film critic never responded.
The busiest speculation about Mitchell over the past year may have been about the circumstances of his departure from the Times. Conjectured causes have included his tendency to unexpectedly take on side projects (like, say, teaching a Harvard class) and friction caused by his many close friendships on the production side of the movie industry.
Despite his mellow demeanor around students, a particularly acidic feature on him last May in New York magazine blamed his Times departure on the fact that his “flamboyant persona has more in common with the movies he writes about than with the paper he works for,” painting him as an opportunistic dilettante with a tendency to abuse his expense account.
However, the direct cause for his departure was widely assumed to be interpersonal friction, which boiled over when his colleague A.O. Scott was promoted to the position of Times head critic. This one, however, turns out to be true, according to the Dredded One himself.
“They said they wanted to make A.O. Scott the lead critic, and that’s not what I signed on for, and I left,” Mitchell says.
Mitchell says that a few other factors contributed to that decision. He describes the Times itself as a powerful institution with some rigid rules, very much deserving of its “Grey Lady” nickname.
“I don’t think you can be [completely] individual at the Times,” Mitchell says. “Using honorifics makes the pieces formal. Times house style demands that you make your voice heard while adhering to this standard.”
Mitchell tells me he volunteered to review the animated Pokemon 2000 just to poke fun at the paper’s insistence on honorific titles.
“I was so excited to write about Mr. Squirtle and Mr. Pikachu, my hands were getting sweaty in the theater,” he says, chuckling, “But they wouldn’t let me…then what can you say about that movie? ‘I think they looked a lot more like the trading cards than I thought they would?’”
Yet another point of contention revolved around his Hollywood friendships and the impartiality demanded by the Times pulpit. Harvey Weinstein, the former Miramax head and one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, notoriously put his arm around Mitchell and said he was his “favorite film critic” after the premiere screening of the 2001 John Cusack romantic comedy Serendipity, according to The New York Observer.
Mitchell went on to pan the film in his review, a twist he says Weinstein found hilarious.
“I’m neither the first nor the last critic to have friends in the industry,” he says, but those friendships were “not enough to compromise my own integrity…I’ve lost friends over it.”
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