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Media
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"I have to say that I deplore the fact that he's leaving books for movies," said New York magazine television critic John Leonard. "I'm just sorry to see someone that talented waste his time as I do." Leonard, who gave Scott his start writing book reviews for the Nation, is being facetious (I hope). A leading literary critic himself (and former editor of the New York Times Book Review), Leonard understands the joys -- and pitfalls -- of covering different media and has tried in his own criticism to make the culture clash cohere.

But Scott, whose savvy criticism for Newsday and such publications as the New York Review of Books bristles with references from all kinds of culture, doesn't see a discrepancy. "I never had much interest in the hierarchy of high and low culture," said the Brooklyn resident. "There's just good stuff and bad stuff." And though a piece he did on Martin Scorsese for Slate influenced Times cultural editor John Darnton to call him, it's his book reviews that he is known for.

"The minute he told me it was, 'Of course! How obvious! What a smart idea!'" said Laurie Muchnick, Scott's editor at Newsday. Though she sounded grief-stricken by her loss, she was one of several people I spoke to who said the appointment would be a gain for moviegoers (despite that little matter of him never having reviewed a movie before).

Darnton asked Scott to audition by reviewing a few films for him, and Scott chose "Flawless" and "The Limey" -- "more or less movies I hadn't read much about but seemed different enough that I could show some range," he said. ("I think I said it would have been better if Robert De Niro had been wearing the dress," he recalled of "Flawless." "That was the one to get a lot of mean lines in.") Whatever he said must have struck a chord, since national name-brand critics as diverse as Joe Morgenstern and David Denby had been short-listed for the job.

Not everyone agrees that the book critic was an obvious hire. "Scott doesn't at this point have the qualifications of a Dave Kehr [the former film reviewer of the New York Daily News, considered by many to be a likely pick for the job], but the Times editors apparently didn't want someone like that," Roger Ebert said. "Has he seen six films by Bresson? Ozu? That's not the sort of question they would think to ask. Would they hire a book critic to be their music critic? Architecture critic? No, but that goes without saying. They probably believe, like many other editors, that anyone can be the film critic. It is the only job on the newspaper that everyone, including the editors, believe they can do better than the person on the beat."

My own speculation (that the Times would hire internally, shifting a cultural critic from another beat) was way off the mark -- though executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, who reportedly took a keen interest in this hire, had entertained my theories with a straight face. "They put up a pretty good smoke screen," says Scott. "I didn't see my name mentioned anywhere." And the Times' propensity to shift writers to different beats was certainly one of the job's attractions. "I think it will take a while to get my bearings as a movie reviewer, but I do look forward to writing other things for them," Scott adds. That should make John Leonard happy, too.

Elvis Mitchell, on the other hand, is much more of a known quantity for followers of film criticism. Since 1997 he has reviewed films for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, as well as National Public Radio and CNN. (Mitchell will continue to do some reviewing for NPR but must lose his other commitments as a Times employee.)

In the early '90s, it wasn't hard to find an editor who had assigned Mitchell a piece -- and it wasn't hard to find an editor who wished he hadn't. Deadlines were often missed; Mitchell's very popularity seemed to threaten his livelihood.

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