|
|
|
|
 |
||
|
JoBlo spends 90 Minutes with Harry Knowles Pompous. Informed. Intelligent. Bloated sell-out. A pioneer. Several words that people have used to describe the man behind one of the biggest movie sites on the Net, Harry Knowles and the AICN.
--------------------------------------------------------- I personally like his site, don’t necessarily care for its design or setup, and certainly can do without some of its really, really long articles at times, but overall, enjoy it for what it provides. News, rumors and scoops on upcoming movies. After hearing Harry Knowles speak for 90 minutes, I have to say that I now have a newfound greater respect for the man. First of all, he’s genuine, funny (had the crowd "in the palm of his hands") and quite charismatic as a speaker. He’s also very relaxed and obviously very confident in himself. What did I learn from Harry Knowles?
Well, he’s put a LOT into his site. A lot of people think that all he He began in the newsgroups, posting movie scoops here and there, helping Matt Drudge spread the movie news. Decided to start his own movie site after an accident left him paralyzed in the hospital for more than six months. Without being able to move, the Net became his new obsession. Once released from the hospital and working 17-19 hour days purely on the site, Harry starting developing a fan base. At this point, he was still working conventions with his dad, making a little dough here and there, but nothing from his site. And just when he couldn’t afford to run the site anymore (server expenses of $1200/month), a man named "Steve" approached him with promises of free server space forever! Steve claimed to be a big fan who just wanted to help, but turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. With two years worth of writing on his servers, Steve suddenly asked Harry to begin charging folks for access to his site. After several back and forths, in which Harry explained to Steve that he just couldn’t do that, Harry woke up one morning to find everything and his site…gone! A big FUCK YOU from his supposed "fan" Steve. Disillusioned and distraught, Harry considered AICN down for the count. That is until he received close to 5000 emails within a two week period, from fans, asking him to start it up again. He was amazed at the amount of support that he had gained by this point (he never tracked the number of visitors to his site), and decided to ask people on the newsgroups if they had some of his old writings in archive. And surprise-surprise, many people did!
Pasting together a bunch of his old writings, taking care of all the .html and design himself, Harry started his site up again. At this point, another company approached him with hopes of helping, but this time, the company was a little more serious. Uhhhmm…they were the folks behind Disneyland.com and Nissan.com. The site took off from there, but it wasn’t really until January of the year 2000, that AICN really started making some dough and being able to hire people. It now seems that Harry has caught on to the "business end" of the internet biz, and has decidedly remained independent. In fact, he hopes to remain that way for the rest of his life. With approximate revenues of close to $150,000/month, you bet things are looking sweet! That is all the more amazing when you consider that Harry had several offers from other network sites, some offering as much as $20 million to purchase his site out right over the years. Sure, Harry says that an inheritance from his mom (who passed away) was always his fall back position, but he didn’t want to count on that money, and turned down the millions in order to remain independent and at free will. And after listening to Harry go on about his site, about movies and about his constant curiosity behind the process of filmmaking, I could see why his site has become so popular. Whether you like the guy or not, whether you like his site or not, one thing is definitely for sure with Harry and that is that he just LOVES MOVIES!
Couple of interesting side-notes include Harry describing director Guillermo Del Toro as one of his best friends. "A man who looks exactly like me…but Mexican!". And how he and director Robert Rodriguez love to paint models against one another. He also told of various stories regarding Rodriguez, his total geekiness (he loves to watch BLADE RUNNER in B/W and considers it one of the best film noirs ever made), and how he seems to be psychologically scarring his kids with various obsessions of his. Two other interesting stories that he told included one which had the head of Disney (either Roth or Eisner) call his home and ask him to take down something nasty that he said about BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN from his site. Knowles agreed, but only after Disney offered a printed apology to Knowles in various newspapers, for having literally lied about a quote from him about the movie. Another nite, he was watching X-Files (bien sur), when his little sister called him for a phone call which she had picked up. "Who is it?", says Harry. "Some guy named Steve Jobs" says his sister. Pretty weird. There was the head of Apple, a billionaire, calling Harry Knowles at his home in Austin, Texas, in order to talk about Harry having the script to TOY STORY 2 in his possession. What a life! One thing Harry did reassure the crowd is that he does not use any news that he talks about with some of his more famous friends, because he does believe that there is a line not to cross (some of the other movie rumor websites believe that Harry has crossed too many lines with them, but they are all still trying to work that out themselves). Overall, I have to say that I really enjoyed spending 90 minutes listening to Harry ramble on about his site, the dynamics of owning an Internet site in this day and age, movies, comic book films and how they were all affected positively by the recent success of the X-Men, and his life in general. An interesting guy…to say the least.
SAN DIEGO COMIC CON 2000 1) Day by day coverage by JoBlo and The Arrow 2) EXCLUSIVE new scenes from HOLLOW MAN 3) SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE / Director E. Elias Merhige / Behind the Scenes 4) X-MEN / Director Bryan Singer / Q& A Session 5) CROW 3 movie reviews / Panel with star Eric Mabius and producer Jeff Most 6) Harry Knowles: who is he, where did he come from and how did he get so popular? |
does is sit around and receive scoops from people, but boy-oh-boy, did
he ever have a rough start.
He
also knows a lot about movies, loves flowing off onto various tangents
about movie stuff (this might explain the length of some of his reviews)
and loves what he’s doing.
Home
- Reviews - Trailers -
Screensavers - Wallpapers
- DVD Clinic - Trivia
Quizzes - News
Arrow in the Head - Upcoming
Movies - Celebrity
Savers - Scripts - Discussion
Board
Shopping - Movie
Malls - Star Malls - Box-Office
- Interviews - Contact
Us
