Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (#SFWApro)

Yet another hard-copy product falls to the Internet: Leonard Maltin says he’ll stop producing his movie guide after this year’s (which just came out). He said in an interview that as more people look to the web for movie data, a movie guide written by a paid staff just doesn’t sell enough to cover its bills. He will, however, still be working on regular updates of his classic movie guide.
The original Movie Guide came out in 1969, providing capsule reviews and basic information (cast, director, running time, year of release) for more than 8,000 movies. I think my parents may actually have had the original edition, or it may have been the first update, out in 1974. Either way, I was hooked from the start.
To put this in perspective, this was an era way before the IMDB or Wikipedia, and before this kind of guide was common. Most movie reference books looked at films of a particular star or studio instead. Maltin’s was specifically focused on movies available on TV, which is why it only covered a few thousand. Back in those days, there were no all-movie cable channels and releasing new movies to TV was still a big deal. When a major studio film came to TV, it would usually appear in network prime time—ABC Movie of the Week or the like (this was also, of course, pre-VCR, pre-DVD, pre-streaming movies).
As someone who’d begun to love movies but didn’t know much about them, Maltin’s guide was fascinating. Occasionally frustrating too, as some older movies I wanted to learn about weren’t available for TV, so they weren’t in the guidebook.
As cable grew and TV and the movies no longer saw each other as adversaries, the number of movies in the guidebook swelled. Hence the decision to split it into two—regular movies and classics—rather than have a single huge book that would be harder to lift.
I’ve been a regular buyer every year for years. Even in the Internet age, I’m going to miss it, though I’ll sure as hell be hanging onto this year’s edition.