A Quick Note About Our Process

Because shit got weird this week

Well, color me embarrassed.

I am having a particularly Sisyphean week, and I think it’s probably better to be open about the process than frustrated and quiet. I’ve just had a big research breakthrough on this project, and as a result, I realize just how wrong I was when I confidently claimed recently to have finally finished gathering all of the films released in theaters in the 1980s in the United States. Not just wrong, but comically wrong. Wrong by a magnitude of several hundred movies.

I would be embarrassed but I’m too busy incorporating all of this new research into my already existing research so I can get back to the business of writing the actual newsletter. There’s no point in pushing forward with October 1981 until I have this new final list all put together, and that’s taking me a major chunk of every single day right now to do. There are already three more films this month than I thought there were. Once all of this is done, I can get back to just writing the reviews, which will be nice. I am also now confident that there can’t be any more ugly surprises waiting for me. More than ever, I am also confident that there is no single authoritative complete record of the movies of the 1980s that you can easily refer to.

Part of the problem is the rise of the direct-to-video market. There are a number of films that never saw the inside of a theater in the United States aside from a few festival screenings, and in some cases, we’ll discuss movies that are outside the strict guidelines of the project, movies that opened internationally or that played a festival during the ‘80s but that were not commercially released here until later, if ever. I’ll mark those as special conversations, though. The rules for inclusion here are basically that a film had to play theaters in Los Angeles and New York to qualify. Some of the films here never played more than three or four major markets before they went to video, and that almost feels like a scam, like they were “technically” theatrical but for most people, they only ever existed as video titles. Still, if a film went through the trouble of getting a real theatrical run, then it qualifies, and that means we’re looking at something like 3500 films total. My original list didn’t even break the 3000 mark, and it’s wild to me how long I’ve been researching this and how truly difficult it is to find some of these records at this point. The 1980s do not seem like they were that long ago to me, and technology does not seem to be radically different, but it has become increasingly clear to me while working on this project that even pop culture from that recently can become obscured, confused, and completely lost.

A friend reached out recently to tell me that they were working in theatrical booking during the era of 1981 that I was writing about and that they had never heard of one of the films I covered, and that delighted me. When someone who was actually there at the time finds themselves surprised or learning something, then I know I’m doing my job properly. I believe I can eventually write every one of those reviews. I believe I can eventually track down every single one of those films. But I’m not at the finish line I thought I was at, even on the research front, and as a result, I’ve had to take a step back and dig in a little harder. I’ve got about a week’s worth of organization and research to do before I can confidently push forward, and in the meantime, I’m still writing my October 1981 reviews and I’ll have each week’s ‘80s Roulette for you. I hope you’ll bear with me as I make this final push to ensure I get this project as right as humanly possible.

God help me, I’ve even finally learned to build a spreadsheet so I can coordinate all of the various research sources into one comprehensive database. So you know I’m serious.

Thanks, as always, for the support and for your continued attention.