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The Movie That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist
What does it really take to kill a finished movie? Not a flop… or a script that never got off the ground… or a project that burned through its funds. I mean a movie that’s done. And by done, I mean shot, edited, scored, shown to real audiences who liked it (like, genuinely liked it),…
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The Odyssey Comes Home
Here’s a question worth asking: why did a nearly three-hour, R-rated movie based on a poem older than reading itself just shake up the global cultural zeitgeist? Not “did it.” It did…the best debut of Christopher Nolan’s career and the third-biggest opening of the year, against films that had entire theme parks behind them. The…
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What We Learned Teaching Astoria About Movies
Here’s a number that should not be true for a beginner filmmaking class in a town of about ten thousand people: nearly two dozen. That’s how many showed up for the first session of our Film 1 class at Clatsop Community College. Some people put a lot of miles on their car to be there.…
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What Astoria Knows About the Movies (That Hollywood Forgot)
There’s a question worth asking: why here? Not in a self-deprecating way. We know why we love this town. But from a purely logistical standpoint, why would a studio in Los Angeles, with the entire continental United States at its disposal, keep sending film crews to a small fishing and cannery town at the rainy…
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The Town That Kept Everything
There’s a version of small-town history where the past gets cleared away to make room for whatever comes next. The Victorian houses come down for ranch-style sprawl. The working waterfront completely disappears, making way for all-new Anywhere USA structures. The old essentially becomes a memory instead of a neighbor. Astoria didn’t really do that. Drive…
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The Women in the Room Where It Happened
There’s a version of the New Hollywood story you’ve probably heard. Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Altman… the movie brats and mavericks who blew up the old studio system and replaced it with something rawer, stranger, more alive. It’s a great story. And for the most part it’s true… again, mostly. But it leaves out something…
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The New Blueprint: Why Hollywood’s Risk Aversion is the Indie Filmmaker’s Secret Weapon
Take a walk down the Astoria Riverwalk on a moody afternoon, and it’s easy to feel the ghosts of cinema past. We live in a town that practically served as the backlot for the golden age of the high-concept studio gamble. In the 1980s and 90s, Hollywood regularly poured millions into original, mid-budget ideas (think…
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The Grammar Nobody Taught You
Did you know that you speak a secret second language? You absorbed it in darkened living rooms and multiplexes and —if you’re lucky enough— maybe even drive-in back seats. No lessons or textbooks. Just years of watching, until it became instinct. Now you’re a fluent speaker. It’s called cinematic language. And the fact that nobody…
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Nobody Trusts Anybody: What The Thing Knows About Us That We’d Rather It Didn’t
There is a line in John Carpenter’s The Thing that has no business being as relevant as it is in 2025. MacReady, alone, recording into a tape deck like a man dictating his own obituary, says it flat and quiet: “Nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired.” He is describing twelve men in Antarctica. He is…
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Hold It: Why Physical Media Is Having Its Moment (Again)
On January 6th, Video Horizons on Duane Street quietly reopened under new ownership. There was no giant inflatable tube man or ribbon-cutting ceremony. Just that familiar, comforting scent of plastic cases and carpet; the kind of smell that promises you’re about to find something weird to watch on a Tuesday night. James Strecker and Coral…
Get ready for The MEGA CUT, premiering at our inaugural celebration 10/2/2026!
