Film critic Judith Crist: “We all have our stories”

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:34:00 +0000

In August, the most hated woman in Hollywood passed away. At least that’s what she was called in her obituary in the L.A. Times. When she died at age 90, Judith Crist rolled the credits on a career as one of the most influential film critics in the U.S., regularly sending down often-crushing opinions via the New York Herald Tribune, New York magazine, TV Guide and the "Today Show." Crist was not in anyone’s binder in the mid-1900s. In an era where prominent female journalists couldn’t even fill a manila envelope, she was the whole damn file cabinet.

But I knew her as a powerful professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and she was one of my favorite teachers, even though she once delivered me a zing I’ve never forgotten — not on my writing, but on being too precious about sexual harassment.

This was the early '90s, and in her seminar, we read columnists like Russell Baker, William Safire, Calvin Trillin and Anna Quindlen. Each week, there was an assignment on a given topic: current events, a controversial issue in the news, an opinion about a new piece of architecture or an exhibit or restaurant. Her inflexible edict: You cannot write in the first person until the final class.

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Film critic Judith Crist: “We all have our stories”