Paul Tatara!
By Bob Cook

The beginning of the end was Black Hawk Down. Paul Tatara, film critic for CNN.com, in December 2001 sat in the Columbia Pictures screening room in New York, already having "had it up to my fucking neck" after four years of watching the rise of gross-out as a high concept in about every genre but wedding videos. But Black Hawk Down, in Tatara's eye, the gorefest disguised as patriotic hymnal, was too much. "Forty minutes in, I thought, 'I know what I'm going to write, I know how people would react to it,' " Tatara recalled. The crux of his assessment, which appeared Dec. 28, 2001, was: "This is a splatter film!"

From the review: "Undoubtedly, even viewers who walk out on Black Hawk Down will have been stirred by it, just as they've been stirred by a car accident or a bloody TV news report. But that's the easiest possible response to get from another human being." There are plenty of movie fans who absolutely adore Tatara for the often hilarious, but never pretentious or snobbish, way he sticks pins in Hollywood's balloon. It's hard to post a sentence of his reviews to get that effect — the humor tends to build up within the course of each review.

But there were also those — including, apparently, some within CNN.com — who loathed Tatara for his acerbic and conversational reviews in which the sacred and the profane of Hollywood each had equal chance of taking it on the chin. Black Hawk Down brought that to a new level. "I got death threats!" he said. "There was my picture on a site behind crosshairs and a rifle!"

Six months later, Tatara was no longer a movie critic. Unwilling to accept the latest freelance contract that CNN.com offered him (terms were not disclosed), he left. So for now, Tatara's back to his previous world of screenwriting, in which he has learned you can still make a some money — whether it's subsistence or a nice living depends on who's interested in your work — even if you never get a film produced. (The closest he came was having Woody Harrelson attach himself to a script on former Boston Red Sox pitcher and still-active flake Bill Lee, but the project shut down after Harrelson starred in a series of bombs after his 1996 success, The People vs. Larry Flynt.)

Tatara never hid his failure to get a screenplay made from his CNN.com audience — for him, it was neither a source of bitterness to be mind in his reviews, nor a cudgel to prove how inside Hollywood he was. "People would write in to me and say, 'What do you know? You're a screenwriter who's never gotten a movie made!' And I'd say, 'That's right!' "

When Tatara talks about the movies, he really does speak in exclamation points, although they're passionate more than angry, and he doesn't really raise the volume of his voice — they're more like exclamations of annoyance. At 39, Tatara is of a generation that remembers when movies like The Godfather and Chinatown could be critical and commercial successes at the same time, thrilling the senses and engaging the mind, concepts that — to Tatara, at least — appear to be lost in present-day Hollywood.

A critic who hates Hollywood schlock is hardly news, except that Tatara still holds out hope that those halcyon days can return, if only audiences would stop being so lazy ("I don't think they're stupid!") and willing to accept the feeling of being shot out of a cannon as the ultimate moviegoing experience. Unlike many newspaper movie reviewers, Tatara doesn't review movies, as some fans have asked them to, "on [the movies'] own terms," nor does he say that independent movies are, or should be, the only place to find films with a brain. "Nobody ever says: 'Wow, that was the loudest, most fast-moving book I've read in my life!' " Tatara says.

"I don't have problems with something making a lot of money! I gave a good review to Men in Black! But you don't want to walk in and let the lights and noises wash over you — to pretend that's all movies are capable of, that's all you can feel — if I want a rollercoaster ride, I'll go to Six Flags!" Tatara believes today's audiences would say about Chinatown, "Who cares, Jack Nicholson finding out who stole the water! Give me Vin Diesel jumping out of a helicopter!"

Tatara was born in Cleveland, but grew up in Arab, Ala., pronounced AY-rab. After college, Tatara had focused on screenplays, first in Gainesville, Fla., then in New York. He already had an agent and was experienced in dealing with Hollywood executives when he took the CNN.com gig.

That Tatara was hired as a critic at all was a bit of a fluke. A former classmate at Auburn University in Alabama who edited for CNN.com asked Tatara to do some reviews, even though he hadn't written any since college.

From 1997 to 2001, Tatara appeared frequently, as often as 16 times a month, along with the critic who actually appeared on TV, Paul Clinton. In 2002, his workload suddenly dropped to, at most, five reviews a month. There were times in the past that CNN.com editors had told Tatara that the higher-ups weren't loving his work, and more and more the site was relying on Entertainment Weekly, its sister AOL Time Warner publication.

"There were always periods, after nine months or so, when someone would raise a stink about the tone of writing being too conversational, too harsh, too, too, too," says Tatara, who is not speaking in exclamation points at this moment. He's just warming up.

"Especially with the conversational tone. They wanted me to be faceless!"

"It could be that [CNN's] blood pressure was higher, because the site wasn't making money! I had a real readership, but they couldn't care less! They weren't allowing people any real personality! At this point, [CNN] is like the Kmart of news services, and instead of a news flash, they should have a Blue Light Special!"

A spokesperson for CNN said it's official company policy not to comment on former employees.

"[Conversational] is the only way to listen to a critic! It's not up to me to say if you'll like it! If I tell you who I am and say I like it for consistent reasons, then you can make a decision based against that!"

In that way, Tatara took inspiration from his favorite critic, David Denby of the New Yorker. "He's more of a populist (than a movie theorist), and he writes with intelligence and a good sense of humor." Tatara also liked Denby's sense of independence. "He's not likely to buy something because it's getting good reviews," said Tatara, who knows that road — he panned critical favorite The Royal Tenenbaums, saying that director Wes Anderson's "coy wistfulness is so rigorously organized, you feel like he grew the heart in a test tube. The general impression is that of a New Yorker-informed nerd who's determined to get all the pretty girls to kiss him for being so sensitive."

Tatara is looking for work as a movie critic; he says that newspapers and others have told him they like his writing, but that they already have a critic. Plus, Tatara's act might not play well at newspapers where part of his job would be interviewing the subjects of his criticism — "I don't know who they might be, but I think some newspaper critics think they're better off not rocking the boat so they can get their interviews.

"My main feeling about ... critics is, I would like to know where in the hell Earl Dittman from Wireless Magazine comes from!" says Tatara, talking about an active plugger in movie ads. "I'm researched it, and I can't find [the magazine]! And Mark S. Allen of UPN? He's never met a piece of shit he didn't like! And I wish I was as positive as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone!"

Despite all the exclamation points, Tatara is not bitter about his CNN.com experience, or his screenwriting experiences, for that matter. He's just trying to shout above the din of a thousand machine-gun shots in Dolby Digital.

"Hollywood has people where they want them! You have complete idiocy, or something with a little bit of content! And you're not supposed to point that out — if you do, you're not playing the game! When I saw Black Hawk Down, I thought, 'You know what, the studios win!'"

E-mail Bob Cook at bob@flakmag.com