Devin Faraci at Starbucks

There was once a time, long ago, when small, independently owned and operated movie news websites flourished. Hollywood PR folks begrudgingly allowed genre movie dweebs beyond the velvet ropes that had once separated them from the print and broadcast folks. This was the rise of what I call Geek Crit.

The rise of Geek Crit was a time when people (white men, really) could write full time for an independent movie news site. They’d get paid to go to conventions, festivals, set visits, junkets, and premieres. Folks from more traditional outlets would still thumb their noses at them and call them "movie bloggers". But they were film journalists and media critics.

They didn't make much money. But they could write the kinda stuff you can’t publish at the Hollywood Reporter. The kind of writing that won them a loyal following, because they spoke the language of youth. They knew their shit about comics or Star Wars or gore flicks or all of the above (and often more). And they hated reading Rex Reed’s garbage just as much as you did.

One of my favorite Geek Crit sites was CHUD.com. It was a scrappy place. The front page was never pretty, and the site’s voice was snarky and full of in-jokes. Owner Nick Nunziata put CHUD on the map, legitimizing it as a central hub of geek crit and entertainment news. Other such hubs were places like Ain’t it Cool News, Dark Horizons, and Bloody Disgusting. Each one gained reliable sources for scoops and leaks. They had strong editorial columns, and ambitious writers with charismatic voices and forceful opinions.

CHUD as it appeared on July 20, 2003.

One of the most prominent voices in Geek Crit was Devin Faraci. Frequently combative and self-aggrandizing, Faraci wrote with great conviction. He lashed out at people in his comment sections, on forums, and on Twitter. Too many delighted in watching him be a cruel asshole. Plenty of folks disliked him, too. But during his tenure at CHUD, Faraci’s bad behavior only made him more popular.

Over time, his voice became the site’s most dominant. CHUD turned into the Devin Faraci show. Readers were showing up for him, which became apparent in 2010. That’s when Faraci had a public falling-out with Nick Nunziata and left CHUD. And when Faraci left, his audience followed.

Before long, Devin was the editor-in-chief of Badass Digest, a new Geek Crit outlet owned by theater chain Alamo Drafthouse. A few years later, Badass Digest was renamed Birth.Movies.Death. It was a bright and spiffy site. The design was uncluttered. It boasted a cool kids’ table, where a more diverse array of sharp writers and editors sat.

Birth.Movies.Death was, for folks like me, the center of a new galaxy. I often imagined what it would be like to write for them. But Birth.Movies.Death only further legitimized Faraci, even when he was telling his readers that “some people need to be bullied”, or viciously harassing people on Twitter.

In 2011, Faraci wrote “some people need to be bullied” in the comment section of an article titled “Tumblr of the Day: Nerds Ruin Everything”.

I started writing for CHUD.com in September of 2012. And it was, without a trace of irony, kind of a dream come true. I was writing DVD and Blu-ray reviews. I received no payment other than a handful of DVDs and Blu-rays to review every month. Many of them were garbage; the kind of shit no one wants to read about. And that’s fine, really. I wasn’t a writer yet, and home video reviews were a fine way to cut my teeth.

But in the two years since Faraci’s departure, CHUD had waned in popularity. The place had no strong editorial voice. Nunziata had other things on his plate and wasn't able to be around much. I received very little guidance or feedback, though I certainly appreciated the little I got. CHUD was rife with technical problems. The site sputtered and creaked, having aged into a relic from an earlier internet. It seemed like the site could collapse at any moment.

By early 2014, CHUD was a ghost town. No one was writing news stories. Hardly anyone wanted to write theatrical reviews or TV coverage. But I stuck to my unpaid beat, and expanded my purview to include soundtracks for film, TV and video games. I had become the head of the home video review team, which had dwindled down to a handful of passionate and tenacious folks. By that point, we had become CHUD's skeleton crew.

CHUD as it appeared on July 19, 2014.

It was then that I saw an opportunity in CHUD’s vacancy. If there was an open space, perhaps I and the home video team could fill it. I worked with several writers to develop fun columns for the main page. I started writing news stories. I didn't really know how. When I had the time, I just did it. I did it poorly, but I also knew you had to be willing to suck at something to eventually do it well. Audiences, however, are less forgiving.

An audience is always divided: you’ve got your silent ones and your talkers. CHUD's most loyal talkers stuck to the site's message boards, and had been there a long time. It was a tight-knit community, and I was not a member. I ventured there on occasion, and found they didn't like the way I wrote news stories. It didn’t hurt my feelings, it was a fair criticism! I wasn't any good at writing news. I was open to fair criticism, so I spoke to them. Their criticism was founded in the idea that I was being paid to write like shit. But they had no idea I was just volunteering.

And as I got better at the unpaid work, I forged some strong friendships. Together, my friends and I kept fresh stories on CHUD's main page. We did it for love and we did it for ambition. We could write whatever we wanted, and we relished the meager attention we got from it. But it wasn’t without its frustrations. In May of 2015, I felt like quitting. I even told folks I would quit, but I didn’t. Not yet.

Just a few weeks after I announced my desire to quit, Nick Nunziata e-mailed us. He expressed his appreciation for our efforts to keep CHUD alive, but also announced that CHUD was in a state of turmoil. A few years prior, a tech company called Huddler had purchased a controlling interest in CHUD. As a result, Nick didn’t have full control of the site. But he told us he was attempting to regain it. He stated a plan to shut down the editorial and blog aspect of CHUD, and preserve the message boards. This never quite happened, but my friends and I took Nick’s announcement as a sign to enjoy our playground while we could, and preserve our work where possible. Still, we kept publishing. In September, Nick told us he appreciated our efforts and expressed a desire to start a new site.

Two months later, Nick told us he was working on a new venture with a Silicon Valley company. He announced it would be a bigger, nicer site with a budget to hire a team. He saw our passion and invited us to follow him to his new gig, and told us there was potential for an actual job.

That Silicon Valley company turned out to be Wikia, which had acquired Huddler in 2014. Wikia was founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, and it hosted wikis for every nerd property imaginable. Nick announced that Wikia had hired him as the managing editor of a new main page outlet. Still following the dangling carrot of a job, my CHUD pals and I became unpaid "Fan Contributors". We communicated more frequently, learned the journalistic ropes, and worked with editors. Eventually, Wikia would rebrand itself as Fandom.

The frontpage of Fandom, shortly after the rebranding in January 2016.

There were, in hindsight, more red flags than just the whole “unpaid” thing. It was a fucking weird platform. My friends and I soon discovered that almost no one at Wikia/Fandom seemed to understand editorial or opinion. After all, wikis are about the gathering of facts by unpaid laborers. Wikis do not traffic in opinion, speculation or criticism. The higher-ups were hesitant about calling a review a review, because they believed criticism didn't match their vision of boundless enthusiasm. After all, Fandom was built on monetizing the boundless enthusiasm fans have for their favorite things.

Despite the red flags, our team improved. It was nice to have our articles get traffic, and the site looked good. I did some fun (albeit clumsy) phone interviews. Fandom did stuff like take a few of my pals to cover San Diego and New York Comic-Cons. My friends weren’t paid for this work, but Fandom covered their expenses. It seemed to me like my friends were living a dream.

In August of 2016, they paid for me and a few CHUD friends to fly out to their San Francisco offices for a three-day event. They gifted us $300 (cash!) and some logo merch for our participation (read: three days’ work) at the event. It was a decent gesture. The hoodie was nice, and the $300 almost made up for the work I was missing at my actual job.

The event itself was little more than a corporate circle jerk, an excuse to throw buzzwords at us. They used “leverage” as a verb, when they actually meant to say “use”. We sat through PowerPoint presentations, which they called “decks”. I was used to this kind of goofy Silicon Valley dialect from my time spent working at an Apple Store. My CHUD friends and I had a difficult time not laughing at it all. For the first time in years, I felt like we were sitting at the cool kids’ table.

Me, center, attending Wikia Community Connect 2016.

A few months later, Fandom hired one of my close friends in a full-time editorial position. They moved him out to LA, where he would work in Fandom’s LA-based editorial department. They paid him a good salary, with benefits. Soon, he was interviewing celebrities, going to press screenings on the studio lots, and seeing double features at Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema. I was deeply jealous.

Nick Nunziata knew I was gunning for a job at Fandom. He told me he was trying to help me get that job, too. He told me he wanted me to fill his position. I believed him. To be clear, he never promised me anything. But to me, Fandom sure seemed promising. It really seemed like my (unpaid) work and devotion would pay off. It seemed like it was All Happening, that it was only a matter of time until I had a career in entertainment journalism.

That feeling of assurance meant a lot. I had no degree and was working for my dad's small manufacturing company while he was dying of cancer. Donald fucking Trump was months away from winning the 2016 presidential election. I needed something, anything to keep me afloat.

Then, in October of 2016, a lot happened very quickly.

Trump's odious "grab 'em by the pussy" remark exploded across the airwaves. Never shy about his distaste for right-wing politicians, Devin Faraci tweeted some disgust about Trump's remarks. Shortly after Faraci posted that tweet, a woman publicly accused Faraci of sexual assault. She accused him of sticking his hands down her pants, grabbing her genitals, and other crass acts. Faraci did not deny the accusations.

Faraci’s boss Tim League swiftly broomed him from his EIC position, and secretly gave Faraci a behind-the-scenes copywriting position at Alamo Drafthouse. It was shocking and sobering to see Faraci, at the height of his career, seemingly implode overnight. The #MeToo movement was coming to life.

Around that time, Nick Nunziata's growing displeasure with Fandom seemed apparent, at least to me. And you could chalk that up to him being a cynical Gen-Xer who didn’t mesh well with Fandom's clueless, jargon-heavy corporate culture. But outside of Fandom, I knew Nick was experiencing painful and relatable issues. It’s not my place to speak on what those issues were. Nick and I didn’t always see eye to eye, but I felt sympathy for him. And I had a sinking feeling that he wouldn’t last much longer at Fandom.

Fandom fired Nunziata right after the Super Bowl in 2017. I don't know exactly why. I think Nick may have tweeted something that got him in hot water with Dorth Raphaely, the newly hired SVP of Content. I’ll never know now, partly because the tweet is gone.

I stopped writing for Fandom shortly after they fired Nick. The world was a screaming mess. I was a mess. My dad died that April. Nunziata invited me to write at his new personal site, Trouble City. I published exactly one article there, and it was about my dad’s death. It was the only subject I could think to write about.

In September of 2017 folks discovered that Drafthouse hadn’t truly rid themselves of Devin Faraci. So his boss Tim League gave him another sweep of the broom. This time, the great broom of crisis management swept Faraci out of Drafthouse completely.

Weeks later, five women accused Harry Knowles, the head of Ain't It Cool News, of sexual assault and harassment. He, much like Faraci, retreated from the public eye.

In October 2017, the Harvey Weinstein accusations broke loose. While that was going on, a guy named Andy Signore, co-creator of a bustling geek culture content factory called Screen Junkies, was accused of sexual harassment and misconduct by several women. I’d never heard of Signore before this, but I had heard of Screen Junkies and their Honest Trailers series on YouTube. Signore’s admittedly “appalling behavior” cost him his job. (Today, oddly enough, he’s the Creative Director of a PR and marketing firm that offers help with “crisis communications” and “reputation management.”)

Faraci and Knowles were pillars of geek crit and they fell. They fell because they did bad things, and people who do bad things should suffer consequences. I hoped Geek Crit would heal in their absence. The good, hard-working folks remaining at Birth.Movies.Death really tried to yank the site out from under Faraci’s shadow. Despite their valiant efforts, they never succeeded. In May of 2020, Birth.Movies.Death was acquired by Cinestate, which had recently revived Fangoria magazine, to much acclaim.

The relaunched Fangoria magazine, published by Cinestate.

Just over a month later, Cinestate’s integrity crumbled when one of their producers was accused of sexually assaulting a woman on a film set. The staff of Fangoria and Birth.Movies.Death published an open letter, stating that they would no longer work under Cinestate ownership, and that buyers would be sought for both brands. Fangoria eventually found a new owner. Birth.Movies.Death did not.

By then, Faraci had retreated to more private corners of the internet, writing about Buddhism and recovery. Geek Crit was, again, delegitimized. Harry Knowles, Devin Faraci, Andy Signore, and men like them made it so.

In the summer of 2018, my one remaining friend at Fandom was not happy with the direction of the company. Their editorial vision was inconsistent and insipid. They were attempting the ever-popular “pivot to video”, and the pivot was clumsy at best. Most of the video content they produced in-house was, frankly, embarrassing.

By June of 2018, Fandom had quietly solidified a plan to address their floundering attempts at video. They needed a video department that understood the art of making popular content. They needed a pre-existing subscriber base. So they purchased Screen Junkies (sans Andy Signore). It was an ill omen. Seeing just how unhappy my friend was at Fandom, I again had the sinking feeling he wouldn’t be there much longer. Sure enough, they fired him from his full-time editorial position in June of 2018.

Just a few weeks later, Fandom publicly announced their acquisition of Screen Junkies. In the announcement, Dorth Raphaely (by then promoted to Chief Content Officer) said “We don’t want to break anything that’s working really well. The Fandom video team wants to learn from Screen Junkies.” In the months to follow, Fandom went on to fire more original editorial and video staffers.

I then reckoned with the idea that the career I was fighting for was likely dead. Geek Crit was likely dead, eaten by Bad Men and Content. I and some millennials like me grew up thinking you could have a legitimate career in entertainment journalism by doing it the CHUD.com way. By having your name in the masthead of a publication with punk geek cred, being a Real Fucking Nerd on the internet, and accruing a following of people who validated you and your behavior.

But now, indie sites built on passion and know-how can hardly compete with large-scale factories that pump out corporate sponsored content. And you can’t have a substantive blend of the two, because you can’t publish “The Walking Dead Must Reckon with its Political Messaging” alongside “Our Favorite Zombie Moments, Sponsored by AMC’s The Walking Dead!” I never aspired (perhaps to my detriment) to write ad copy.

The more democratic internet of the ‘90s and early aughts has been mostly replaced by a handful of apps that fight to keep readers out of their web browsers. There was a time when one could work full-time writing criticism and journalism at a boutique-y nerd site. That time feels long gone. 

These days, I do my best to stay away from entertainment journalism and Twitter. But about a year ago I came across a photo of Devin Faraci working at Starbucks.

The original poster tweeted it in May 2019, and I’d missed it. Seeing the photo felt like someone squeezing my lungs. There he was, standing in front of the bar, by a wall of drinks and pastries waiting to be picked up. I had once envied this man. But in the photo he looks miserable. I wonder if he knew, in that very moment, that someone was taking his picture. I wonder if he knew someone recognized him.

There is no shame in working at Starbucks. It’s not beneath me to sling lattés. You do what you must to make ends meet. It would be very easy to say that Devin Faraci got what he deserved, and that making Frappuccinos was his frozen Ninth Circle of Hell. But to say so would be shitting on hardworking people who are just trying to earn an honest paycheck, and are currently fighting to unionize. There, but for the grace of God, go I. There is no shame in making Frappuccinos to pay your rent. But there is shame in what Devin did to women. There is shame in the misconduct that cost Faraci his career. There is shame in what he did to Geek Crit.

It makes me feel sad and stupid to have placed my hopes in a system that was held up by people like Devin Faraci, Harry Knowles, Andy Signore, and others. It makes me feel sick to think their behavior helped create that system, and helped sustain it. In 2022, something about the death of Geek Crit feels right, because it was wrong to have existed the way it did.

It all seemed within reach. God, how I wanted it. God, how I thought it would lift me out of a lonely life. I thought it would save me from Starbucks. These thoughts seem stupid in hindsight. It hurt then. It still hurts.

What must it have felt like for Devin Faraci to hand expensive coffees to millennials and zoomers, coming into Starbucks with their laptops and their aspirations to write? I imagine it hurt. I imagine it still hurts.