There were my hardworking professors, of course, who variously taught me the inner white collar workings of the film industry as it stood in the late 1990s (I hasten to add that most of their lessons remain relevant today). There were David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, who authored one of the most helpful film textbooks I was assigned (Film Art: An Introduction is currently in its eleventh edition; I read the fifth). There were the gloriously snotty cult cineastes at my local video store whose uppity and elitist conversations about the deep cuts of Ray Dennis Steckler were heard to my naïve ear as holy writ. There were the flip and casual pop obsessives writing for “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” whose blasé references to long-forgotten '70s TV oddities inflamed my imagination, and spurred me to learn more about the whole embarrassing map of pop culture in its entirety.
And there was Roger Ebert.
