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The Big Rewind

A few years back, I wrote a manuscript about my experiences flying from Chicago to Los Angeles every weekend to tape AMC's "Movie Club With John Ridley", a poorly rated, mildly disreputable basic-cable movie review panel critics and audiences alike heralded as "short-lived" and "cancelled". It didn't get published but I learned a valuable lesson: people don't want to spend their hard-earned cash on books about television shows nobody has heard of. I quickly abandoned planned oral histories of "Hello Larry" and "Cleghorne!" and decided, on my agent's advice, to write a book proposal for a memoir that filtered my hilariously traumatic real-life tale of growing up in first a mental hospital, then a wealthy foster family whose patience and generosity knew only strict, unyielding boundaries and finally in a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents through the sturdy prism of pop culture. It was an opportunity to crassly exploit a lifetime worth of psychological pain for monetary gain. Despite a tradition of good taste and solid judgment, the good folks at Scribner inexplicably bought my book proposal. I wrote "The Big Rewind" while working on the inaugural season of "My Year of Flops", a popular online series on famous cinematic failures I do for the Onion A.V Club, where I have toiled as the Head Writer for something like a decade. I like to think of "The Big Rewind" and "My Year of Flops" as Siamese twins created in the same tainted womb, so I am delighted to be able to announce that Scribner be publishing a "My Year of Flops" book filled with what SCTV would call "Golden Classics" as well as plenty of awesome original, all-new material. In conclusion, buy my book.