Ray of Light: EW Edition

Yesterday we eulogized Entertainment Weekly as a print publication by taking a walk through its Fall Movie Preview covers during the aughts and the twenty-tens. But let’s add a postscript to that eulogy with my all time Top 5 Favorite EW Covers, as best as I can remember them anyway, tracking from a resplendent pun to an incredible for all the wrong (right) reasons promotional still to an indelible homage to Movie Star elegance at the graphite 10 million mile level to her eminence. Long live EW.

 

Another Walk Down Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview Lane

Last week the truly grim-sounding entity IAC Dotdash announced that the six magazine titles it had acquired from Meredith Corp would cease print publication. That included Entertainment Weekly, the pop culture periodical that bloomed in the 90s and became essential reading for so many of us wannabe cinephiles, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman becoming the fourth and fifth movie critics I read semi-regularly after Roger Ebert and the Richards, Corliss and Schickel. EW’s discontinuing print is for all the usual reasons too disheartening to discuss (even as I post, these malevolent bastards continue bleeding out my hometown newspaper The Des Moines Register), which is why I would prefer to look reality straight in the eye and deny it, retreating into cozy, pitiful nostalgia. After all, reminiscing what’s lost and will never be again is at the top of my Skills on the resume, especially where Entertainment Weekly is concerned. 

Last year we took a trip down memory lane involving EW Fall Movie Preview covers of the past and I thought, why not pour one out for Entertainment Weekly by picking back up where we left off, at the turn of century. It turned out to be a wild ride. 

2000

I seem to remember Tom Hanks showing up at the 2000 Oscars with the initial scraggly outlines of that beard and making everyone wonder what was up with his new look. But no, it was just the beginning of his “Cast Away” beard, back in those halcyon days when a movie about Tom Hanks being alone could land the cover of the foremost pop culture magazine rather than get buried on one of the 119 streaming services. 

2001

Talk about a time capsule. Do the kids remember this celebrity relationship? Do people my age remember this celebrity relationship? Now, thank goodness, Pe and Tom are with their true soulmates: respectively, Javier Bardem and “Mission: Impossible” stunts, the way the universe always intended.

2002

Marty gets the EW Fall Movie Preview hammer over LOTR, inconceivable today. Plus, take note of Reese Witherspoon is up there in the window on the right-hand side for “Sweet Home Alabama” which will become important in a moment. 

2003

In retrospect it seems odd that Russell Crowe’s “Master and Commander” never got a sequel, but in retrospect doesn’t that also seem just glorious? This impeccably crafted, joyously watchable action-adventure as a one-off? 

2004

Pour one out for the Oscar campaigns no one remembers. 

2005

Three years after Reese was in the small window at the top for “Sweet Home Alabama” she was upgraded to the cover. This was her “Walk the Line” year, after all, winning the Oscar and coming on the heels of pulling down a cool $15 million for the second “Legally Blonde 2”, on top of the world, looking down on creation. 

2006

Uh oh. Signs of Intellectual Property. But then, Daniel Craig as James Bond was as big a reason for the cover here as just James Bond.

2007

Sometimes you don’t recognize the tipping point until you’re past it. Because it’s not just Reese here, getting the Fall Preview cover for the second time in three years. It’s how they pitch this issue with no movie names and just names of the starring actors. Angie and Will and Jodie and Brad and Nicole and Patrick Dempsey (wait, what, how’d he sneak in there?) and Julia and Denzel and Keira. Little did we know, the sun was setting on the stars. 

2008

Because here comes that Wizard, what’s his name. I mean, really. Kate & Leo couldn’t get the cover? KATE & F***ING LEO??? This is the end. My only friend, the end. 

2009

True story: every time I see “Twilight” showing on some tv channel I didn’t even realize I had I think to myself, “Oh, the one with Paul Newman and Gene Hackman (and Reese Witherspoon)?” It is never that “Twilight.”

2010

Now as we enter the twenty-tens, the wheels truly fall off, following “Twilight” with “Harry Potter” again while Reese is shunted back to the little window and the era of endlessly trying to sell us Ryan Reynolds as something approximating a Movie Star has begun. 

2011

And now we go back to “Twilight”, just trading covers with “Harry Potter” at this point, and Rooney Mara can’t even get the little window as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” 

2012

The “Twilight” saga again??? Are you kidding me??? Take one autumn off!!! His majesty, Daniel Day-Lewis, was The Great Emancipator!!! That didn’t warrant a cover???!!!

2013

Phew. We really needed a reset. This’ll get the job done, like a parody of an EW Fall Movie Preview over as the real EW Fall Movie Preview cover. 

2014

This isn’t just a parody of EW Fall Movie Preview covers, this is a parody of wedding photos. Savage.

2015

Well, obviously. I mean, this feels more like a Summer Movie Preview issue but they released it when they released it and the golden goose was back. And though they return to just the names of the movie stars down there in the bottom right-hand corner, rendering those names in the same colors as the snow and the lightsaber just seems to make them fade into the background.

2016

Right here, right now, in February of 2022, I have no idea what this movie even is. 

2017

Hardly.

2018

Gaga & Bradley became the hit of the awards circuit in 2019 when they kept cosplaying as Bruce & Patti in the “Tougher Than the Rest” video, but man...this cover goes to show that chemistry was already in full effect. 

2019

Don’t Try and Make Me Grow Up (Before My Time) by New Order. 

A Trip Down Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview Lane

The first day of Fall, astronomically speaking, is today, September 22nd, the Autumnal Equinox, and slated to end on Tuesday December 21st, the Winter Solstice. The first day of Fall meteorologically speaking, however, began back on September 1st and will conclude November 30th, dividing the seasons into three four-month blocks rather than relying exclusively on the position of the Earth. Less well-known yet nevertheless accepted by some weather experts, especially those with a cinephilia bent, is Fall Movie Fall. 

When does Fall Movie Fall begin? Well, that’s where it gets tricky. Some meteorologists tend to cite the Toronto International Film Festival as the beginning of Fall Movie Fall; other meteorologists view the start of Fall Movie Fall like its own kind of ever-shifting equinox, dependent upon when the first Fall-feeling movie is released. That means Fall Movie Fall began Friday September 10 when the new Paul Schrader movie, “The Card Counter” (👍👍), hit theaters. A more outmoded model of Fall Movie Fall,  meanwhile, pinpoints the publishing of the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview as the first day of Fall Movie Fall. Outmoded, of course, because Entertainment Weekly, now a digital-first entity that oxymoronically only publishes monthly, has lost most of its luster, meaning the Fall Movie Preview has lost its luster too.

For a long time this blog was among those who viewed the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview as the official start of Fall. That’s all gone now. And if autumn is a time of nostalgia, the beautiful death of all those leaves signaling the end of something even as something else begins, let’s take a brief moment here, to remember a time (the 1990s) when the EW Fall Movie Preview took us into a new season with glossy style...

As it turns out, Entertainment Weekly, which first published in February of 1990, did not even have a Fall Movie preview for its first two years of existence. It had a Holiday Movie Preview, as seen above, with Michelle Pfeiffer shilling for “The Russia House”, taking us back to the waning days of the Cold War and reminding me that I still need to see “French Exit.” 

Remember when transforming an old TV show into a movie felt unique?

Wait, what? The very first EW Fall Movie preview cover was MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME? 

What’s also interesting to note here is that while each subsequent EW Fall Movie Preview cover has a star or stars from the chosen movie posing in a kind of publicity shot, this cover is just a shot culled from the movie. I like imagining EW trying to schedule DDL for a photo shot and the mercurial acting titan simply saying “Nah, I’m not gonna do that.”

Yes, kids, once upon a time Marty Scorsese, bane of the Marvel Universe, could land magazine covers too. And though EW could have gone DDL two years in a row, or played to the Gen X crowd with Winona, it chose Michelle. Because that’s how big she was. Man, I really need to see “French Exit.”

Gump got the Oscar, but Pulp got the EW Fall Movie Preview cover.

Oops! John Woo’s “Broken Arrow” was supposed to be released over the Christmas Holiday of 1995 only to get bumped back when the special effects needed some ironing out. Who would have gotten the cover instead? Brosnan? Pitt? Cindy Crawford in “Fair Game”? Whatever, I’m happy to have this cover in my life, this image of Travolta and Slater palling around, and imagining it as a “Stripes”-ish buddy comedy instead, “Broken Bottles.” 

I’ll always have fond memories of “Ransom” simply because my faux-legendary run working for Carmike Cinemas, gradually working my way up from concessionist to manager, ending just before the turn of the century, kicked off the fall of 1996 with a “Ransom” standee staring me in the face every shift from across the lobby. Also, is “Ransom” the best Ron Howard movie? Is he better at workmanlike, genre-ish stuff than the prestige-ish stuff? A quick Ron Howard Top 5:

1. Ransom

2. Apollo 13

3. The Paper

4. Splash

5. Willow (if only because Howard, of all people, along with John Dahl and “Kill Me Again”, ensured we would always have cinematic evidence that Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley were just so hot) 

This cover will always stir strange feelings in me. After all, the Fall of 1997 was my star-cross’d first semester at the University of Iowa, star-cross’d because I probably was more focused on memorizing all the release dates within this issue than with all that crap in class and spent as much time at the Englert and the Campus III as I did in the library. Did I learn more from a 155-minute movie than I ever learned in school? The floor is open for discussion. 

When I went to the corner bar a couple years ago around Halloween, I noticed “Hocus Pocus” playing on every TV hanging from the wall. “It’s ‘Hocus Pocus’ night!” the server cheerily explained. “’Hocus Pocus?’” I asked incredulously. “I’m a ‘Practical Magic’ man.’” (I did not say that. But I thought it.) Speaking of which, when can we get another Kidman/Bullock vehicle? And don’t tell me because “Practical Magic” was poorly received. I live in world where Hollywood keeps trying to make Ryan Reynolds a thing; you can give me another Kidman/Bullock vehicle. 

What a way to wrap up the century. You just know they were trying to get a cover with crackling sexual chemistry between Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, couldn’t make it work, and finally, fed up and desperate, just took them down to the pool of the Four Seasons and shot this.

Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Cover: Outtake

When I googled for “EW summer movie preview 1996”, the first correlating image I found was an Entertainment Weekly cover advertising “Twister”, this cover...

I must have looked at it for 30 seconds straight, maybe 60 seconds straight. I couldn’t get enough of it. I tapped My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife on the shoulder and told her to look at it too. It’s incredible! It was only looking at it for so long that allowed me to realize the words Summer Movie Preview were conspicuously missing. Alas, it wasn’t the Summer Preview at all. Still, that wasn’t going to stop me from posting about it. And while I considered including it in yesterday’s walk down EW Summer Preview lane as a kind of momentary fake out, I decided it deserved a post all on its own. Because rather than opting for a literal twister, like your less merry marketers undoubtedly would, they go for the pun. And if Chubby Checker’s “Twist” is a summer song, then this double meaning is perfect for a movie that set the 1996 summer movie season in motion, a pun putting into perspective how the summer movie season should just be, like, you know, fun. Hunt, meanwhile, is a little self-conscious in that smile but also totally game while Paxton, bless his heart, is just going for it as best he can, which isn’t all that much, though not all that much is just right in this context.

Who knows makes for an iconic magazine cover. It probably depends on your taste. Maybe you go for John & Yoko or Janet on the cover of Rolling Stone; maybe you opt for one of those covers as historical documents preferred by Life Magazine; maybe you want to call up some Rockwell for The Saturday Evening Post. I’ve always leaned toward the Seinfeld floating heads for EW, or Bruce unexpectedly showing off his ice skating skills for Rolling Stone, or Nicole screaming for the NYTM. But now I see it’s none of those. It’s this one. It’s the twist; IT’S THE TWIST!!!

A Walk Down Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Preview Lane

Back in the day, I looked forward to the Entertainment Weekly summer movie preview issue almost as much as I looked forward to the summer movie season itself. If Santa gave you a Christmas list rather than vice-versa, like if he dropped off a Sears and Roebuck catalog at the doorstep of every good little girl and boy sometime after Thanksgiving, so you could go through it and check off what you wanted, that would have been like EW’s summer movie preview issue, this cornucopia of cinematic treats from which to choose. I remember getting that issue, from the Borders or the Barnes & Noble, the B. Dalton or the Waldenbooks, and telling myself the whole way home that I was allowed to only peruse one month a day – May’s movies tonight, June’s movies tomorrow, etc. I would never stick to that, of course. By the end of that first night, I already knew the major releases by heart and then I’d go through them again, and then I’d go through the smaller Other Movies section where all sorts of under-the-radar releases were given a one-sentence synopsis, taking notes on the ones that looked most intriguing, because those movies would never show up in a central Iowa movie theater, just at the video store eight or nine months later.

That’s all gone, of course. There is no need to wait for a special magazine issue because movie news is instantaneous now. I’m not saying it was better then. I remember watching movies and hoping – hoping – certain trailers would be shown because if I didn’t see them then, I would have to wait until the next movie I attended. In 2013 I could watch that first “Bling Ring” trailer 132 times the first day it dropped. At the same, though, there is nothing today that matches the all-at-once feeling of an EW Summer Movie Preview, myriad movie titles just suddenly dropped in your lap. And maybe because I’m looking forward to this summer movie season more than any in recent memory, simply because of what we went through last year when I couldn’t go to the movies at all, I find myself yearning for that EW issue more than ever. The best I can do these days is revisit the ones from the past. My past. Meaning, of course, the 1990s, when my love for movies bloomed. 

Take a walk with me...   

1990

You couldn’t put Nicole on the cover too? Nitwits.

1991

Woah. Now there’s a time capsule. What was it Willie Stokes said? “They can’t all be winners, can they?” 

1992

Sort of a microcosm of most of these EW covers, where despite Michelle Pfeiffer in the Catwoman suit, they’re essentially selling the movies based on the stars. 

1993

A little disappointed here, EW going back to the same well as 1992, though you can detect the shifting marketing dynamics. The velociraptor gets the spot that the top of the page, there, with Meg directly below. Meg would get completely shunted these days. (Whoopi’s on this cover too for “Made in America”, which I remember specifically because it’s what I was forced to buy a ticket for after I tried and failed, at the age of 15, to buy a ticket for Mario Van Peebles’ R-rated “Posse.” It was one of the first times I remember thinking: “Oh, all the funny stuff was in the commercials.”) 

1994

If they had Who Should Have Been on the Cover? lists like they have Who Should Have Won the Heisman Trophy? lists, EW probably would have penciled in Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves for “Speed” over Billy Crystal’s “City Slickers” sequel, “The Legend of Curly’s Gold.” Indeed, “City Slickers II” finished third at the box office the weekend it opened, behind “Speed” and “The Flintstones.” Still, I like imagining Billy Crystal doing an expensive photo shoot somewhere in the American West and then the EW finally just settling on this shot of him in a studio in Burbank holding a rope. 

1995

“Bridges of Madison County”, filmed due south of the county where I grew up, gets the cover over “Batman Forever?” It was a different time.

1996

What the hell is even going on here? “A Time to Kill”, which Sandra Bullock is shilling for, was set in Mississippi, not west Texas. And her character was from Boston! This appears to be an attempt to sell the movie more through sex appeal and I guess whoever was in charge of defining sex appeal on behalf of EW in 1996 had a cowboy fetish.

1997

Working as a concessionist at the Cobblestone 9 (vive la Cobblestone!), the summer of 1997 was the greatest summer of my life. And I will always consider it the summer of “Men in Black”, listening to Will Smith’s hip-hop theme song, like, eight times a night as I shimmied to it while sweeping up popcorn. And this walk down EW summer movie preview lane is a reminder that these covers merely took the temperature of the room before the season truly started, that quality was not grandfathered in before the movies actually screened, that we, the audience, not just The Critics™, could stand up and call crap crap. This also marks the three-year trend of two stars out of character on the EW summer movie preview cover. 

1998

Indeed, here is next year’s cover with Ben and Liv, shilling for “Armageddon.” And man, Ben. Dude’s been through a lot in the years since, including this year’s rekindling of the early-aughts Bennifer phenomenon with Jennifer Lopez, which was three or four years after this, if you can believe it. It’s nice to see Gen-X Ben again. His facial hair, in fact, does not look altogether different from the facial hair I was trying and failing, miserably, to pull off during the summer of 1998. In fact, let’s just move on.

1999

This is a pitch right over the plate, I know, Julia Roberts getting the cover, along with Hugh Grant, even though 1999 was the summer of “The Phantom Menace.” But in the space of that cheeky “And, Oh Yeah, Star Wars” subhead, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a lesson, the glimmer of what could be, a détente between IP-driven franchises and The Star Machine. If only. The whole point of this list, after all, was to feel a little wistful.