I have to be really smarmy and start off with the obvious for #1 - "Make Good Movies". You might be amazed what happens when you actually try to make or release a movie with quality writing, direction, a great cast of trained actors who know how to make your characters seem real. There's a lot of subjective opinion involved in what makes a good movie--can't remember if I ever wrote the Battle Cry about what I considered good/bad--but I think most studios and publicists know when they have a dog on their hands, which is what leads to movies not being screened for critics. Then there are the movies that would appeal to a target audience or mass market audience like "Wild Hogs" which really don't matter what critics think, but still, if you want good reviews, making good movies would help. If that doesn't matter to you, then you might as well continue not screening them.

#2 seems to be less obvious to the studios these days... "Treat Critics Better." You know, I'm not one of these guys who needs to see every movie months in advance in my own private screening room (though it's kind of nice when it happens ), but studios tend to forget that most critics are doing it for a living. It's a job just like theirs, and we have to fulfill expectations from readers and editors that require seeing a lot of movies and writing about as many as possible, which usually cuts into other aspects of our lives. We also have deadlines. Showing movies opening week is fine, but when you're waiting until Wednesday and Thursday night, you make the life of the critic harder since they're not able to put as much time and care into the review, which just makes them ornery and more likely to go on the attack.

It's also nice if once in a while, we're allowed to bring friends, family and loved ones to see these movies considering that we rarely get to see them even when we live with them (we're writing after all). Studios seem to feel that guests are a bad thing these days, mostly because they're worried that early bad reviews will start showing up on various web sites that will post anything sent to them in order to get around the studio's review embargoes.

I wanted to bring a friend to see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer last week--and I won't even get into the fact that online critics were forced to wait until Thursday evening at 7pm while most of the daily NY papers had already run their reviews that morning--but when I was told I couldn't, I figured that i could at least hang with my friends, a few who had suffered a great loss this past week (see below). My good friend and fellow critic Devin Faraci at CHUD was really looking forward to it because oddly, he was one of the few people who gave the first movie a good review, something like an 8/10. His sanity aside, I went in to see the movie and saw him walking out, and when he didn't show up to take the seat I held, I went out to look for him but he was gone. Without further comment, here's what happened. It's neither here nor there whose fault it was or whether he'll ever be allowed to see another one of that studio's movies, but with a simple oversight that could have been easily resolved, the studio unwittingly pissed off a prominent journalist/critic who now has a bone to pick and will remember that the next time he has to review one of their movies.

The problem is that when anyone who has to sit through two or three movies a day, often four days a week, are put into these situations where we're uncomfortable or being inconvenienced, we're not going to be in the type of receptive mood to enjoy your movies, let alone open to giving it a "thumbs up" or the like.

#2b is to "Create a Comfortable Environment" which relates to the above but it also means allowing critics to see the movie in an optimal setting to appreciate the camerawork, the sound, the music, etc. When you're in a theatre with a noisy crowd of people who are talking or kicking your chair or interrupting your viewing, it's really hard to be partial or receptive to what's on screen. It is nice to have an audience of real people and fans because it adds to the atmosphere of the moviegoing experience, but my recent experience of seeing Ratatouille in a regular theatre on Saturday night was so bad that I don't think I'll be doing that again soon. That's why having a special section for critics is important because most of us are respectful of each other while watching movies (maybe since we know that we'll be seeing each other again the next day) and allowing us to sit in a section of our peers helps those going to see the movie for work concentrated on that job.

#3 is also pretty simple and that's to "Understand Why Reviews and Criticism Are Necessary" and it's not just to know what some 30-year-old manchild thinks of how you've treated his favorite comic book characters, but to know what works or doesn't work and what could be improved upon. Critics and audiences will rarely agree on these things, but critics have been beneficial in driving the Oscar race early in the game, and most studios will agree that they are necessary to get advance buzz going. I'm sure most studios will agree that being nominated or winning awards is a great to get a movie more attention or the all important $$$, so yeah, critics and reviews really are good for something. (One only needs to look at last year's "Little MIss Sunshine" to see a movie that was mostly successful due to rave reviews.)

And if you don't care about reviews, then you probably don't care about the audiences paying to see your movies and you probably should go the way of United Artists or MGM or any of the other studios who spent too much money on crap that no one wanted to see and eventually ran out of money and good karma. From my observations, I can see at least two major corporate films studios that are dangerously close to that outcome if they don't being more mindful of what they spend their money on.