Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
This anthology of writing by the influential film and TV critic Andrew Johnston is signed by the book's creator and editor, Martha Orton (Andrew's mother) and Matt Zoller Seitz (Andrew's friend and colleague, and the author of two appreciations printed in the book).
"What do I strive to contribute through my passion and visions?" wrote Andrew Johnston, the influential film and TV critic for Time Out New York, US Magazine and The House Next Door. "I want to help make the world make a little more sense. I want to do work as a critic and journalist that helps increase the audience of work that deserves exposure and explain why it deserves exposure. And eventually I want to create artistic work of my own - in the form of fiction or essays - that, in its own way, does the same thing - work that illustrates connections, puts things in context and, ultimately, makes people realize that for all the insane bullshit that's going on out there (and has been going on out there since time immemorial), the world is really a pretty cool place."
Andrew did all of that and more during his unfortunately too-brief time on earth. He died of cancer at 40 in New York City, but after two decades of being a prodigious and idiosyncratic writer on film, television and other subjects (including fiction and pop music) and one of the youngest members of the then-Baby Boomer dominated New York Film Critics' Circle, where he pushed to have Generation X favorites like Rushmore, Donnie Darko, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and the Lord of the Rings trilogies recognized for their artistry.
Andrew was also one of the earliest practitioners of what is now called the "TV recap," and many of the techniques that are now in common use by recappers (including writing about episode storylines non-chronologically, or by theme or motif, and putting bulleted lists of observations that didn't fit the main piece down at the bottom) were invented or perfected by Andrew, in his critical writing on episodes of Mad Men, The Wire, and Friday Night Lights for the blog The House Next Door (now a part of Slant Magazine).
This volume is assembled and edited by Andrew's mother, the poet and spiritualist Martha Orton. Martha provided poems for Matt Zoller Seitz's book Mad Men Carousel, which includes footnotes taken from Andrew's writing on the series. The book is a labor of love in the truest sense, providing a vast sample of Andrew's writing from college through his peak in the late nineties and early aughts, through his final weeks.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"I feel comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life... I object!" Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz in Legally Blonde, 2001
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He has launched a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater. On October 3-6, 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre!
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.