‘USA Today’s’ Mike Clark Joins ‘Home Media Magazine’

10 Dec, 2009 By: Billy Gil

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Celebrated film critic Mike Clark has joined Home Media Magazine, the publication announced today. Clark, the former USA Today home viewing columnist and a 20-year veteran of film criticism, will start writing for Home Media Magazine in January.

Clark’s weekly column in USA Today began in the summer of 1985 when VHS public domain titles in EP mode still sold in drugstore racks.

“Our idea is to take this Friday institution and adapt it to the print and online incarnations of our magazine,” says Home Media Magazine publisher and editorial director Thomas K. Arnold. “In print, we envision bite-sized takes on Mike’s current favorites from the weekly flood of new releases in varied genres. For the online version, he’ll be writing a blog, through which we hope to give him more breathing room than he had at the paper to exploit a lifetime of viewing experience.”

Before joining USA Today, Clark programmed approximately 150 film series and 5,000 individual titles over eight years as program planner, and eventually director, of the American Film Institute Theater (then located in Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts). A lifelong entertainment enthusiast who won $16,000 at age 10 on The $64,000 Question (category: “The Movies”), he completed all M.A. course work at NYU’s Graduate School of Cinema. A contributing editor to Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide since 1973, Clark also is an elected member of the National Society of Film Critics.

“Movies are my background and thus my prejudice,” Clark says.  “But I’m also a junkie for non-fiction portrayals of sports, politics, pop-rock-jazz, classic TV and – more recently, documentaries about investment bankers who didn’t look both ways at the stop sign. As ever, I’ll be going for an eclectic mix, in hopes that the reader will always be going, ‘What’ll he up to this week?’”
 
 

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