He has been a regular contributor to the Sunday Now! section of the New York Daily News. His writing has appeared in USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, New York Observer, Cigar Aficionado, Premiere, Cosmopolitan and Entertainment Weekly. He conducted the Playboy Interview with both Howard Stern and Tim Robbins.

He is the author of three biographies: Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah (1991); Harvey Keitel: The Art of Darkness (1998); and Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film (2006).

A native of suburban Minneapolis, he worked at newspapers around the country before arriving in New York and has the distinction of being fired as entertainment editor of the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger for panning a concert by Anita Bryant.

He programs, produces and hosts the Emelin Film Club at the Emelin Theater, a performing arts center in Mamaroneck, NY, and the Bow-Tie Criterion Cinema Film Club at the Criterion Cinema at Greenwich Plaza in Greenwich, CT. He regularly guest-hosts at other film series in the New York area and has programmed films at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Jacob Burns Film Center.

His short film, Flo Fox’s Dicthology, was shown at the Woodstock Film Festival and the International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam, in 2002. His feature-length documentary about film critic Rex Reed, Do You Sleep in the Nude?, screened at the 2007 Hamptons International Film Festival and the 2008 South By Southwest Festival. Someday, hopefully, it will actually be finished and will see the light of day.

OK, so that’s the official version. Meanwhile, I’ve unearthed the first movie review I ever wrote. It was for my junior-high-school newspaper in Richfield, MN, when I was in 7th grade. Click here to see it and to see the critic as a young nerd.