I write about classic movies.
My Inspiration
1. The contents of my film library.
2. The challenge to say something new about a famous film or person, to see them from a different perspective. (That’s really tough.)
3. Old newspapers about films or filmmakers in Google News Archives (I link to the article so my readers can take a gander for themselves)
4. Once, seeing an old movie star on a new ad at a store sparked my own fake celebrity-endorsed ads, which became one of my most popular blog posts.
5. Reading other blogs, books, articles on different topics. Sometimes other people have a writing style that I like to emulate.
6. My clothing sometimes reminds me of a costume in a film and I’ll use that as a springboard to discuss the story or the costume designer.
7. Perusing old photos from the Library of Congress and other media contemporary with the film to get a sense of the audience of the day.
8. New films sometimes remind me of something from a classic film and I’ll compare the two.
9. A stray sound, a word in a conversation, a song may trigger a memory of a movie, then I spend all day researching the backstory of a film to write about it.
10. Emotions. If I’m feeling a certain way, I use self-deprecating humor and ask, how would a musical from the 1950s express this?
11. Plays. Sometimes old movies are adaptations of plays and you reverse engineer why the filmmakers left out this or maintained that. It’s fun to discuss.
– Java’s Journey Through Classic Movies
