In the year 1999, I ventured to a local branch of Toys ‘R’ Us and bought my very first PC. After getting it back home that evening after spending what must have been the best part of £500 on it, I discovered a rather long cable that went into the telephone socket on the wall. With the cable came a Yahoo! CD that would allow the computer to make a very funny, high-pitched squeal. That cable and that CD allowed me to connect to something called the Internet.
That night, my life changed forever.
I had always wanted to be a film writer or director, and even went to film school for a very short period of time — well, the course was called ‘Media Technology,’ but it encompassed film theory and very basic filmmaking and editing. After leaving in 1995 I had made a few videos, all not really coming to much, but that cheap computer was a tool that meant I could open up a world that was brand new to me, and I could explore and develop a new talent that I didn’t even know that I had. I could reach someone in America at the touch of a button; I could read what other people thought of films that hadn’t even come our way in the UK yet; I could look at boobies all day long. I could surf the Internet! I could read about movies. I could geek out with other like minded people. I could look at boobies. Hang on, I could build a website! Which is exactly what I did.
It wasn’t a huge success, in those early days. The website looked awful. It was called Just Panic Movies and was launched in the year 2000, but I was proud of it. I even got a threat from a certain studio to be sued for posting pictures of a certain magical family adventure film. That was scary.
A year or so later, I ‘merged’ my primitive looking website with another, slightly bigger site and developed my skills in film writing for that site for the next two years. During this time I visited Los Angeles for the first time. I went to Cannes. I met a guy who is now one of my best friends on Earth, and my skills in writing continued to grow and grow. Loved it.
In late 2003, I registered thehollywoodnews.com, the very website which you are viewing right now. I decided to go at it alone; try to make my way with my own site, but I was going to do a better job this time. The years passed and we enjoyed relative success, but I lived 100 miles from London, a place where it all happened. In 2008, I moved to the smoke and concentrated on making the site a success again. We even became a bit of a gossip site for a little while, but writing about Katie Price’s latest book signing didn’t really inspire me.
So, in 2010 it was all back to basics. We reset the site as a film blog, changed the site’s design to what you are looking at today, and in the Autumn of last year, Tom Fordy, Laura Stackhouse, Katie McCabe, Adam Spinks and Paul Koren came on board. In the past months, we have seen our traffic, relationships with the UK film industry, size and scope grow, and today, we were nominated for Total Film’s Best Overall Blog of the Year award.
Now, I am happy with that. I sit here with a beer in my hand so excited as to how far we’ve come in the last few weeks, months, years, and there are some other great nominees in the category in which we are placed. In fact, I enjoy reading most of them, most days.
I am so thankful to everyone that visits/ has visited The Hollywood News since its conception. I would just ask you to do one more thing…. vote. You make all this worth while, but we all would love an award on our mantle…
Thank you once again.
Paul Heath, Editor and Founder, The Hollywood News
VOTE FOR THE HOLLYWOOD NEWS for Total Film Best Overall Blog Of The Year 2011
