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People are saying the nicest things about Home Page. It's almost embarrassing.
Almost...
ROGER EBERT- I noticed America's best-known critic standing alone at baggage claim after the flight in to Sundance. Seizing the moment, I told him I had a film premiering there about the Web. He eventually came and emerged thumb way up. Sometimes (but, face it, hardly ever) it's that simple. In a column entirely devoted to the film in Yahoo! Internet Life, he writes that Home Page "bubbles with the heady excitement of the Web's early days."
AIN'T IT COOL NEWS - Harry Knowles, whose wildly popular site has Hollywood quaking in its boots, calls Home Page "fantastic." Cool news, indeedy.
MINDJACK - The best explanation of the interaction between the film and the website I’ve seen in print to date. Organic Theater. So that’s what I’ve been up to all this time!
NEW YORK POST - Cyber writer, Joseph Gallivan, declares that Home Page “squeezes more zeitgeist into 90 minutes than all the histories we'll see in the next six months.”
ZDTV - "Netizens, rejoice! Home Page brings the Web back to the people." ZDTV gets a wee bit gushy in a segment for their Internet Tonight show. If you have RealPlayer, you can watch the whole segment or outtakes from the interview with the stunningly handsome and articulate director.
SALT LAKE TRIBUNE - This little Dot.com blurb got the D-Word all dotty.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY - The "wiggily entertaining" D-Word is pleased to be considered one of the three best indie film web sites, especially in the fine company of Kevin Smith and the Blair Witch boys.
VILLAGE VOICE - Matt Goldberg wrote a slightly jaded, bizness-oriented take on Home Page for the Voice's Cyber column on the eve of Sundance.
SF WEEKLY - San Francisco Web culture hits the big screen with Home Page, they write. But will it play in Peoria?
TNT'S ROUGHCUT.COM - Mark Williams, who writes for Variety and other industry publications, kicks off Rough Cut's Sundance coverage with a perceptive, well-written feature about this new "Internet-savvy doc" called Home Page.
DER SPIEGEL: Author David Hudson ("Re-Wired") is based in Europe but happened to be at the Web'98 screening, the first public screening of the film. Almost everyone in the film was there. He wrote up an account of the high drama for Germany's most prestigious magazine.
STEVE SILBERMAN: The Managing Editor of HotWired, Steve appears briefly in the film and was also at the Web'98 screening. He e-mailed a typically thoughtful reaction.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: When Pamela O'Connell headed The Mining Company's Home Page site, I thought her to be the most knowledgable writer on the home page phenomenon I've yet come across. The fact that she was an early booster of The D-Word (see below) is, of course, pure coincidence. One day, she told me she'd successfully pitched an article about Yours Truly to the Local Rag of Record. And so, without lifting a finger, I get my 15 megabytes of fame.WIRED ONLINE: R.U. Sirius serves up some serious poster quotes in this brilliantly insightful, nothing-short-of-visionary article. I'm still recovering.
EASTGATE PICKS: Talk about sirius compliments! Abbe Don is one of the foremost multimedia artists around, and was the Executive Producer for Electric Minds (ie. Justin's boss). Eastgate publishes "serious hypertext, fiction and non-fiction," and asked Abbe to pick her fave sites.
THE MINING COMPANY: Pam O'Connell first found me while doing a Nexus search of home pages. She came across the following article in ...
THE WASHINGTON POST: Don Oldenberg called Steve Silberman (starting to see a trail of connections here?) for an article called "There's No Page Like Home." Steve said "Hey, you should talk to this guy who's here shooting a documentary about personal home pages." Justin and the film became the focus of the story. This was the first media hit I got, and the first hint that the press would find the project kind of inner arresting.
@NY: Tom Watson wrote a review of The D-Word in this e-mail newsletter that goes out weekly to thousands of New York Silicon Alley types. Apparently, Pamela raved to Tom...
THE INDEPENDENT: Roberto Quezada-Dardon had some sweet things to say in, "Home Sweet Home Page." The Independent is a monthly magazine published by AIVF, the foremost national organization for indie filmmakers.
JUSTIN HALL: You might be wondering by now whether the "star" of Home Page has sweet things to say about Yours Truly and his representation in the film.
Clearly you've got time on your hands so, what the heck, check out the following inner views and overviews:
THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE: Jon Lebkowsky interviewed me about the D-Word/ Home Page convergence on a filmmaking conference in The Well over the period of a few months. If you want a good overview of the whole shebang, this is the link. Succinct it's not, though. Maybe someday I'll learn to type in sound bites.
Over a year later, on the eve of the South-by-Southwest Film Festival in Austin, we did a follow-up.
THE SUNDANCE CHANNEL: asked me to keep a diary of my week at the Independent Feature Film Market in 1996, where I screened the sample of Home Page publicly for the first time. For the 1997 IFFM, they had me follow up with the highlights (and lowlights) of my year.
Copyright © 2000 D.B. Block.
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2000 D.B. Block. All Rights Reserved