🎧 Tales From the ’90s: Ain’t It Cool News’ ‘Titanic’ Impact on Hollywood

Drew McWeeny recalls his adventures with the upstart website that confounded studios, enraged execs and changed the fortunes of blockbusters

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This is the fourth in Richard Rushfield’s Hollywood Stories series about the ’90s. Earlier podcasts include often hilarious, smart and very candid conversations with CAA founder and longtime Universal exec Ron Meyer, Last Action Hero writers Adam Leff and Zak Penn and Winnie Holzman, the creator of My-So Called Life, the seminal TV show that preceded her work on Wicked.

At the dawn of the internet as we know it today, long before social media exploded the Hollywood hierarchy, there was Ain’t It Cool News, an in-your-face site, launched in 1996, that covered the movie business — passionately, disruptively and absolutely without fear or favor. Drew McWeeny, who joined Harry Knowles’ Austin startup in its earliest days, writing from L.A. under the pseudonym Moriarty, tells Richard Rushfield how Ain’t It Cool News remade entertainment journalism, confounded the studios and enraged execs from Tom Rothman to Rupert Murdoch. Among other breaks with industry-coverage norms, McWeeny and his colleagues were first to publish reports and reviews from test screenings, changing the fortunes of films including Batman & Robin and, most famously, Titanic. “I was addicted to Premiere, Movieline, all those magazines,” recalls McWeeny, who cohosts the film history podcast The Hip Pocket. “But it was all very carefully stage managed with the studios, and it had to be. We were the response to that, which was the most punk rock version of: No, not only do we not deal with the studios, but fuck the studios.”

COOL CAT Drew McWeeny at Comic Con in the 1990s. (Photo courtesy of McWeeny)

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