Rex Reed
Rex Taylor Reed (born October 2, 1938) is an American film critic, journalist, and media personality.
Rex Reed
Raised throughout the Southern United States and educated at Louisiana State University, Reed moved to New York City in the early 1960s to begin his career, writing about popular culture, art, and celebrities for a number of newspapers and magazines. He became a public figure in his own right, making regular appearances on television and occasionally acting in films throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Reed has been a longtime writer for The New York Observer, where he authors the "Talk of the Town" column. He is known for his blunt style and contrarian tastes, and some of his writing has garnered criticism for containing factual errors or disparaging remarks about actors.[1]
Early life[edit]
Reed was born on October 2, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Jewell (née Smith) and James M. Reed, an oil company supervisor.[2][3] In an interview with The New York Times, Reed stated: "My mother came from a family of 10 in Oklahoma, her second cousins were the Dalton Gang. And when my grandfather was a little boy, he was rocked by Jesse James on his knee."[1] Due to his father's profession, the family moved throughout the American South during Reed's childhood.[1]
He earned his journalism degree from Louisiana State University in 1960.[4] There, he began writing film and play reviews, not only for the university's newspaper, The Daily Reveille, but also for the Baton Rouge newspaper, The Morning Advocate. He moved to New York City after graduating from LSU, hoping to find success as an actor. Instead, he was hired to work at the publicity department of 20th Century Fox. In 1969, he said his job there was to "write those puffy things about Elvis Presley and—you know—Fabian, and tell everybody how great they were when I wouldn't be caught dead seeing their movies myself. [...] Cleopatra came along and rocked the company financially. We were saving on rubber bands and paying Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to float down the Nile while everybody back at Fox was taking salary cuts, and I was the first one to go—the little guy at the $75 salary, the most dispensable item in the company. I was fired." Later in the decade, he provided many interviews for The New York Times and New York, which at the time was the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1966, the year in which the Herald Tribune folded, he was hired as one of the music critics for HiFi/Stereo Review (now Sound & Vision), a position at which he remained until early 1973.[5]
Career[edit]
Film and TV appearances[edit]
Reed has acted occasionally, such as in the movie version of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1970). Reed also appeared in the films Superman (1978, as himself), Inchon (1981) and Irreconcilable Differences (1984). He appeared frequently as a judge on the TV game show The Gong Show in the late 1970s. Reed additionally served on the jury at the 21st Berlin International Film Festival in 1971,[6] and guest-voiced as himself on the animated series The Critic.
Rex Reed appears in the 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism explaining how important film critics were in the 1970s, and complaining about the proliferation of unqualified critical voices on the internet.[7]
Critic[edit]
Before becoming a film critic for The New York Observer, Reed was a film critic for Vogue, GQ, The New York Times, and Women's Wear Daily. For thirteen years, he was an arts critic for the New York Daily News, and for five years was the film critic for the New York Post. Reed was not given a ticket to the world premiere of Last Tango in Paris at the 1972 New York Film Festival as the festival considered him a columnist for the New York Daily News, rather than a regular film critic, as well as describing him as "[not] a friend of the festival".[8] He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and, because his reviews appear on the Internet, a member of New York Film Critics Online. He is the author of eight books, including Do You Sleep in the Nude?, Conversations in the Raw, People Are Crazy Here, and Valentines & Vitriol.
On October 24, 1974, reviewing Frank Sinatra's performance at Madison Square Garden, Reed called him "a Woolworth rhinestone" and wrote that "his public image is uglier than a first-degree burn, his appearance is sloppier than Porky Pig; his manners are more appalling than a subway sandhog's and his ego bigger than the Sahara (the desert, not the hotel in Las Vegas, although either comparison applies). All of which might be tolerable if he could still sing. But the saddest part of all is the hardest part to face about this once-great idol now living on former glory: the grim truth is that Frank Sinatra has had it. His voice has been manhandled beyond recognition, bringing with its parched croak only a painful memory of burned-out yesterdays."[9] Years later, Reed recalled that Sinatra "was sloppy" and "looked like he'd slept in his clothes. Sinatra was mad at me, but what did he do? He lost 25 pounds!"[10]
In 1986, after Marlee Matlin won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Children of a Lesser God, Reed wrote that Matlin had won because of a "pity vote", and that a deaf person playing a deaf character was not really acting.[11]