Awards Chatter Podcast – Leonard Maltin (Movie Legend) – The Hollywood Reporter
Leonard Maltin is probably the most famous living film critic in the world. For many people, He was the Internet Movie Database before the advent of the Internet. As the author of more than a dozen important books on the subject of film, he is best known for the extensive “Film Guide”, which he updated dozens of times between 1969 and 2014, and whose cover featured his bearded and bespectacled face and his name above the title from 1986, and which ones The New York Times Described in 1996 as “the go-to choice for both film geeks and casual couch potatoes” and in 1997 as “the bible of American movie buffs.” He has also reviewed films and interviewed nearly every major filmmaker and star in front of huge television audiences as an on-air film critic for entertainment tonight from 1982 to 2012.
Maltin is someone even the most shallow movie buff has come to know – he had a cameo appearance gremlins 2; He was mentioned in an episode of The simpsons; Its leader was referenced in an episode of The Sopranos and in the movie Greenberg; and he continued reading clues Danger!.
But even with serious cinema lovers, he always retained his reputation. Perhaps the only film critic ever invited to serve as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he is also a longtime member and two-time past president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; a voting member of the National Film Registry; and member of the Board of Directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation.
As the Los Angeles Times once wrote, “Los Angeles has no shortage of film critics, but none is more respected and admired” than he is.
Need more evidence? Maltin received the 1993 Anthology Film Archives Preservation Award; the 1997 ICG Publicists Awards press award; the June Foray Award from the Annie Awards in 2002; the American Society of Cinematographers’ Bud Stone Award of Distinction in 2005; the Silver Medallion Award from the Telluride Film Festival in 2007; the William K. Everson Film History Award from the National Board of Review in 2010; Inkpot Award at Comic-Con in 2013; the George Eastman House Light & Motion Award for Advocacy in 2014; a special award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in celebration of its film leader in 2015; and Turner Classic Movies’ Robert Osborne Award, presented to him by Warren Beatty in 2022.
Additionally, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where he has moderated conversations with Modern Master Award recipients for decades, was renamed the Maltin Modern Master Award in 2015.
Not bad for a kid from Teaneck, New Jersey.
During a conversation at Maltin’s home in Sherman Oaks – which is filled to the brim with film books and memorabilia and which he shares with his wife Alice, to whom he was married for almost half a century, and daughter and podcasting partner Jessie, Jessie’s , shares husband and 21-month-old granddaughter – the 72-year-old reflected on the origins of his love affair with the films and how he started writing about it seriously while he was still in elementary school; how his film guide came about when he was just 17, and the ups and downs of his 45-year journey from then; what his life looks like today, a decade after he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s; how he sees the future of film and film criticism; and much more.
