Hi! I'm Gilbert Hays. I'm 25, call Arizona my home, and I write movie reviews for the internet under the name GargusSCP. To now, I have exclusively published my work on letterboxd, producing hundreds of reviews over the last two years, to... fairly alright results. 87 follows is respectable when you're not producing content that fits a site's popular trends and not playing the follow-back game. However, I'm currently looking to push my reviews to a wider audience, hopefully through an actual publisher so I can supplement my current income, and I am finding the process of getting my foot in the door difficult. There's nowhere online a potential employer can click and see my work in full view that actually has my name on it, see. Not exactly the best situation when you've never been published before and have no strong contacts with anyone in the industry.
Fortunately, we live in modern times, and the magic of the internet lets us prod at folks we've never met who are in the industry for advise. Someone who publishes their work in a professional capacity advised me that I might do better if I had someplace to wholly call my own, a blog where I can publish my work in a way more strongly associated with me and mine, rather than the cramped hubbub of a film social media site. So... we're here now! On my awfully gradiented Blogger blog - because I came here briefly twice before to publish on two equally-quickly burnt-out ventures, and I can't think of anywhere better.
Even if this doesn't lead to any employment, I at least hope it'll lead to an audience of folks I can get to know!
So, housekeeping business. At present, I pick and choose films to watch and write about through several year-long challenges on letterboxd - the host sets up the weekly themes, me and some friends pick the films, we watch, I write. As of this writing, I have five active challenges up and running: the Cult Movie Challenge, the Queer Cinema Challenge, the Classic Hollywood Challenge, the Comedy Challenge, and the Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020. There are also a few challenges waiting in the wings, which I slapped together on a whim to help cope with depressive episodes, those being the Sci-Fi Odyssey Challenge and the Everybody's Into Weirdness Challenge. These I am saving for when the shorter Queer and Classic challenges are properly wrapped up in a few weeks. There's also the matter of a few holiday-themed marathons I run with friends, and the wholly odd notion of just watching movies on my own time, of my own volition, without the need for any big overarching structure.
All of these are published as full-length reviews on letterboxd. Naturally, despite my small audience on the site, I don't want to suddenly convert absolutely everything to blog-exclusive content all at once. Anyone who's currently following there might not like a big, out've-the-blue shift like that. To this end, I've determined that for the time being, only certain reviews will appear on this blog, for the sake of a smooth transition and a clean cut. To writ:
- All four challenges I began at the start of this year will come to their conclusions on letterboxd. When 2020 roles around and new editions of the Cult and Queer challenges begin, those reviews will appear on this space. Wrap-up posts for these challenges WILL appear here, however, as I don't really have anywhere else to put them, and have wanted to do something like that for a while.
- The Season challenge will appear here regularly. At present, it is on a "whenever we have time" schedule, as we are watching three films for each theme, and do not have the time, coordination, or energy to push a full seven films through each week. Expect to see them whenever they're up. Reviews for the first six films, already watched and written about, will appear in this space over the next few days, as fodder to make it look busy. Letterboxd followers will get a single paragraph blurb with a link to the full review.
- When they begin, the Weirdness and Sci-Fi challenges will appear here, also on a "whenever we have time" schedule. Same principle for letterboxd followers as above.
- Any holiday-themed marathons I run with friends (such as this Made For Halloween list we're gonna start in a few days) will have their reviews run here. Same principle as the previous two bullet points for letterboxd followers.
- Films I watch on my own time will appear on here and on letterboxd in the same form.
That should cover everything. Hopefully this venture goes well, and something comes from all've this work on top of a full-time county job!
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