The Nietzsche of the Niche Market

"Which brings us to this final joke on everyone: Movies are largely ceasing to be a mass medium and are becoming a collection of cults (of which the snob crowd is but one). The trend is an old one, beginning with the advent of television, which cost movies three-quarters of their audience in the 1950s. But now it is reaching a new crisis. You can see it in this year's best picture Oscar nominees, only one of which ('Munich') even aspired to reassemble the old audience. You can see it in the steady (and I think irreversible) decline in theatrical attendance. This means film snobs are really no different from, say, the 'opera queens,' once part of a vital mass audience and now a handful of devotees in frenzied pursuit of that bootleg recording of the Lisbon 'Traviata.' The same is true of all the formerly popular arts and media, even television in the cable age."

In the Los Angeles Times, movie critic Richard Schickel reviews The Film Snob's Dictionary by David Kamp with Lawrence Levi. One can read the Dictionary's introduction here.