Harry Knowles is a big man with a bigger reputation and a bedroom smaller than the closets of those who fear what he writes.
– He’s located in the middle of what Hollywood types generally refer to as “fly-over country” — that is, anything between the coasts — and the non-descript single-story house where he lives with his father and compiles his on-line missives likely would not otherwise appear on anyone’s radar screens, in or out of Austin.
– Yet if buzz is the movie world’s second-most desired currency — after money, of course — then the 28-year-old Knowles is a tycoon who loves spreading the wealth. As founder of the Ain’t It Cool News Web site, he’s the Internet’s most famous — and infamous — movie E what do we call him?
– Not a journalist, he admits. Not a critic, he says, although he expends much energy criticizing.
– “I’m a film advocate,” he declares. “That’s what I always tell people because it’s different. I don’t react; I proact.”
In this case proacting–no, that’s not a word, but Harry’s world allows for rule-bending–means reviewing movies as soon as they’re shown anywhere, whether or not they’re finished. He has “spies” who infiltrate early test screenings–where audiences are recruited to help a studio gauge how well a movie is playing–and send reports to the site (aint-it-cool-news.com).
Often Knowles himself will sneak into such a screening, which you might think difficult for an increasingly well-known, 300-pound guy with flaming red hair and an Abe Lincoln beard. (He recently wrote of slipping into an Anaheim, Calif., screening of this summer’s Jim Carrey/Farrelly brothers comedy “Me, Myself & Irene” by enlisting film makeup artist extraordinaire Rick Baker to disguise him as a hideous female.)
His look is part of his brand; the guy wants to resemble a cartoon character and includes increasingly elaborate animations of himself on his site. When last fall’s season-opener of “The Simpsons” depicted a tubby, red-headed Internet critic getting booted from a test screening of a new Mel Gibson movie, the reference wasn’t exactly oblique.
When you’re being parodied on “The Simpsons,” you know you’ve arrived. But what an odd journey Knowles has taken: from Austin film fanatic to presumed Hollywood powerbroker. Just as “The Blair Witch Project” last summer trumpeted the Internet as a formidable force in marketing movies, Knowles has led an Internet-based transformation of the way film news is served up to a public with an apparently insatiable appetite.
Traditionally, the studios have controlled the flow of information, so until a movie opens, what the public knows about it is based primarily on marketing campaigns. That’s still the case with most people, but for the ever-growing number of plugged-in moviegoers, Ain’t It Cool News, which reports receiving about 2.5 million hits daily, and other ascendant Internet sites are spilling the beans early on the quality and contents of upcoming releases.
Hollywood, in general, doesn’t view this development happily.
“Everyone is so panic-stricken when there’s any negative spin out there,” said Mike De Luca, New Line Cinema’s president of production.
After Knowles revealed to the world that 1997’s most heavily promoted summer movie, “Batman & Robin,” was a stinkbomb, a Warner Brothers executive publicly blamed him for the movie’s bad buzz, which immediately raised his stature. Now several of the studios have adapted a dual strategy for dealing with Knowles: denying his importance while trying to stay on his good side.
” `You keep your friends close; you keep your enemies closer’ is the adage I would use,” said one L.A.-based studio publicist, who asked not to be named. “Everybody in town looks at his site.”
Aside from previewing movies, Knowles also reviews screenplays of films in the planning stages, reveals leaked casting deals and posts photos, costume pictures and designs from movie sets that have been surreptitiously forwarded to him by people involved in the productions, even though the artwork usually has not been cleared for release.
And in what was set to be a major coup for the site, Knowles posted a list of Academy Awards nominee finalists–eight in each category–on the eve of the nominations announcement in February. But Knowles had been fed bum information from someone who claimed to have access to the Academy’s computer system, and the list was bogus.
“I got screwed,” Knowles said, adding that the snafu taught him not to run information that he doesn’t have the technological means to confirm.
To his detractors, however, the Oscars debacle confirmed suspicions that Cool News, like much of the Internet, is not to be trusted.
“There are people who really play him for a fool, but there’s no way he can really check that either,” said one studio executive, who asked not to be named to avoid engaging Knowles in a public dust-up. The executive claimed knowing of two instances in which Hollywood insiders planted early negative reviews of rival studios’ films, giving themselves away by using character names that appeared in the initial script but not the screen version.
Knowles contends that he screens his contributors more carefully than other movie sites and usually posts reviews only from people who have written to him before. His critics also like to point to his chummy relationships with certain filmmakers and studios, whose works often receive gushing write-ups on the site. Yet he has earned the respect of other film industry officials.”He has good information,” said the studio publicist. “He does from his home base in Austin what a lot of journalists in Hollywood wish they could do.”
That home base is a modest three-bedroom house where Harry and his father, Jay, moved in 1986 following the parents’ divorce. (Harry’s mother died in a house fire in 1992.) A poster for the recent “Psycho” remake covers the outside front door, and the dark interior crams in a memorabilia convention’s worth of vintage movie posters (“Rebel Without a Cause,” “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,” “The Hound of the Baskervilles”), framed animation cels (“The Simpsons”), stacked reels of 16mm movie prints (“The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Superman II,” “Prince Valiant”) and piles and piles of videocassettes and DVDs.
The living room also is cluttered with dozens of movie scripts that arrive from various industry sources (“We’ve got like a storage shed that’s filled with them,” Knowles said) as well as ancient tribal masks and Chinese porcelain bowls–remnants of Jay Knowles’ background as an anthropology major-turned-memorabilia dealer. The father said he took Harry to memorabilia shows for the first 15 years of his life.
“He’d sleep under the tables sometimes because lots of times we’d be setting up in a situation where we might be selling stuff for 18 to 20 hours of the day,” recalled the father, who resembles a taller, grayer, somewhat leaner, more grizzled version of his son. “Part of the reason he’s got the film references in his head that he does is because of that. He heard thousands of conversations between film geeks about why some movie is their favorite, why it works for them, why [they like] some actor or actress or director.”
Harry was working at a local collectibles show in January 1996 when the pivotal event of his life occurred: While easing a flat cart loaded with 1,200 pounds of memorabilia down a slope, he tripped over a hose that had been stretched across the floor and the dolly slammed into the small of his back. He said he was able to drive himself home, but over the next few days he lost all feeling and movement in his legs.
He had wanted to be an actor, even landing small roles in Simon Callow’s “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” (as Fat Boy) and a Dolly Parton TV movie called “Wild Texas Wind” (as Concert Attendee). But without medical insurance, money or mobility, Knowles was looking at a future confined to his home.
“I just figured, well, this is it,” he said. “Whatever I’m going to do, I need to develop a trade that I can stay in this bedroom and do, because I’m probably going to be in this bedroom for the rest of my life. Or so I thought. I decided, well, I love movies, I’ll cover movies, just write about them.”
When he launched Ain’t It Cool News in February 1996, Knowles was not new to the Internet, having contributed frequent postings to Matt Drudge’s political-punditry Drudge Report site. He named his own site after John Travolta’s maniacal cry of “Ain’t it cool?” in the action film “Broken Arrow.”
He still works in the same underlit bedroom, which isn’t big enough to fit a chair between the computer desk and the two mattresses flopped sloppily atop one another. He sits on the corner of the bed.
Meanwhile, he said he researched his injury on the Internet and eventually regained sensation and movement without consulting a doctor, noting that the last of his numbness disappeared in January.
Knowles’ writing style isn’t what you’d call refined. He uses lots of exclamation points, CAPITAL LETTERS and ellipses, writing like a fan so caught up in the passion of his argument that he can’t be bothered to rein himself in. Given the Internet’s lack of space constraints, he doesn’t have to.
He and his father originally saw Cool News as a fan forum from which they could sell movie memorabilia. “But about six months in, I discovered the test-screening process,” Harry said.
Knowles recalled that three months before James Cameron’s “The Abyss” was released in 1989, he read a critic’s rave review of a test screening that described a climactic giant tidal wave. “I go see the movie: Where the hell is my giant tidal wave?” he said.
The studio, he learned, had trimmed the released version by 27 minutes, including the near-apocalyptic tidal wave. With that incident in mind, Knowles figured that by covering test screenings on his site, perhaps he could ward off such future butchery. He also could disrupt the Hollywood hype machine by offering early verdicts on high-profile movies.
After his “Batman and Robin” coup, he reversed months of negative publicity on the delayed and reportedly troubled “Titanic” by reporting that the movie, by none other than Cameron, was a flat-out triumph.Although he acknowledges in test-screening reviews whether a movie actually is finished, many in the movie industry liken the practice to tasting a half-baked cake.
“These screenings are part of a process,” the studio executive said. “It’s an opportunity for a filmmaker to see if an audience is reacting the way he intends for them to react. Clearly that’s an unfair way to judge a motion picture, especially because in the early stages an effects movie often will not have many effects. I’ve read that Harry claims to be a fan of movies, yet what he does is so destructive.”
“I think it’s immoral,” agreed David Poland, who writes a rival film industry column on TNT’s Roughcut.com Web site. “I think it’s bad for moviemakers. It’s essentially judging something before it’s ready to be judged.”
But De Luca voiced no objections. “It doesn’t really affect ticket buyers, so I don’t know what everybody’s so sensitive about,” he said. “The great thing about the site is it exposes b.s. Chances are if the movie [stinks] in the first test screening, it’s going to [stink] in the last test screening, and nothing’s going to change that . . . .There was a lot of negative stuff about `Batman and Robin’ on his site, and it still opened to $42 million.”
Knowles defended his approach on journalistic grounds.
“It’s always annoyed me that film journalism in general decides to ignore almost the entire process of filmmaking in a way,” he said. “To me if you’re studying a field, if you’re studying anything, you have to take a look at all parts of it. . . . And since it is something that’s being pushed out there on millions of people, it’s a public thing to take a look at.”
The studio executive scoffed at the journalistic credentials of someone who regularly posts proprietary materials on his site. “You can’t work above board and below board at the same time on an ongoing basis,” the executive said.
Knowles receives his share of perks not available to many entertainment journalists. Director Frank Darabont had Knowles flown to the set of “The Green Mile” and the movie’s Los Angeles premiere, despite Warner Brothers’ objections, and director Michael Bay arranged for Knowles, who had been hyping “Armageddon” for months, to attend that movie’s premiere in Orlando. Knowles subsequently wrote that he loved both movies and reported crying more than once during “Armageddon.”
DreamWorks, widely considered to be Knowles’ biggest suitor among the studios, supplied him with a print of the just-released “Gladiator” to show two months ago at an event he was hosting in San Francisco. (DreamWorks representatives ignored requests to discuss their relationship with Knowles.) The movie has receivedraves on the site.”He’s become very inside because they’ve co-opted him to a great extent, which he doesn’t seem to understand,” Poland said. “He’s enormously self-deluded based on enormous self-righteousness.”
Knowles, no surprise, rebuffs the “sell-out” charges.
“It’s always annoyed me that the idea that the studio is paying my trip out there is changing anything,” he said. “To compete with Entertainment Weekly and all this stuff as a guy who lives in this [cruddy] little house, I have to take it. Otherwise, I don’t get any access. Although now that’s beginning to change.”
He added that that he has been merciless on Warner Brothers even though he has a memoir contract with Warner Books.
The issue over receiving studio goodies is not unique to Knowles. Although larger publications such as the Tribune don’t allow their staffers to accept studio-funded trips, many smaller outlets do. Poland, for instance, complained on his site about not being invited to the Hawaii junket for “The Beach” until 20th Century Fox finally added him to the list.
From Knowles’ perspective, he’s just doing what he can to strike blows on behalf of the regular movie fan.
“There have been high-level studio development meetings on major motion pictures where top executives have come to the table with printouts from Harry’s site,” said Mark Ebner, a ghostwriter on Knowles’ memoir.No studio representatives contacted for this story said Knowles has affected film development. De Luca, who said he reads Ain’t It Cool News every day “just for fun,” said he “can’t imagine” anyone at New Line being influenced by Knowles.He added that Knowles’ importance “is overestimated because everyone in Hollywood tries to keep everything so secretive, and everyone’s so paranoid about stuff leaking, so they probably empower Harry more than is actually the case.”
Still, New Line supplied Knowles with an early print of “Magnolia” to screen at his 24-hour movie Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin, and De Luca said the studio encouraged director Peter Jackson to send reports and artwork from his “Lord of the Rings” set to the Web site.
Knowles said Ain’t It Cool News finally is receiving enough advertising to turn a profit while paying salaries for him, his father and two part-time employees, but he’s trying to seal a deal for investment capital because “right now in a lot of ways the site feels like a small UHF station outside of Atlanta, and I really need to build the network up.”
Also in the planning stages are a television show, a radio show and spin-off areas on his site for music, sports and perhaps other fields.
Meanwhile, he’s living the film fan’s dream of getting inside information and seeing movies before just about anyone else. At March’s South-By-Southwest Film Conference in Austin, he, his dad and 10 or so pals enjoyed a preview of “High Fidelity.” Yet the group’s immersion in Hollywood thinking was evident as the guy who writes on the site as Captain Blood pronounced, “It’ll be lucky to make 25”–that is, $25 million at the domestic box office. (He was just about right.)
Standing outside afterward in gaudy leopard-skin shoes, Knowles made some effort not to let the fan in him become overwhelmed by the industry pundit.
“When I see a movie like this, I don’t think about box office,” he said. “I think about where I want to go to get a lot of drinks and talk about the movie till dawn.”
