My Life As A Film Critic Pt 1

By Dan Skip Allen

My life as a film critic has been an up-and-down road, but I can’t start at the end. I have to start where I got the drive to be a film critic. When I was a little kid, I used to watch Siskel and Ebert. I had a local PBS station that played their film review show Siskel & Ebert: At the Movies, later At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper I religiously watched this show every week, before NFL football every Sunday. As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go to movies that often in the theater, but I saw a few films like The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Raiders of the Lost Ark in 81, ET the Extraterrestrial in 82, and so on, and so on. I also got to see the Academy Awards, in 81, as well that year. I grew to love the ceremony and everything about awards season.

I said to myself that at a young age, this is what I always wanted to do. One of the things that helped me be a huge film fan besides Siskel and Ebert is TV38 in Boston. A local affiliate station that played classic movies, westerns, monster movies, film noir, holiday films, and so many more. I got a chance to watch Martin Scorsese films like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, gangster films like the Godfather trilogy, Speilberg movies like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and other Coppola films like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. Rocky and The Dear Hunter were a couple of others that showed me about the real world at this time. I found I loved watching actors like Robert Deniro, AL Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, and Gene Hackman. The 70s turned out to be my favorite decade of film. It made me who I am today as a film aficionado.

I’m from Lowell, Massachusetts, but before my love of movies came into existence when I was just a fetus inside my mother’s belly, I struggled for life. My mother’s sister Aunt Linda and my mother, Pat, fought while my twin brother David  and I weren’t  born yet. My aunt kicked my mother in the stomach. When I was born, my head was caved in. In an emergency surgery, I had to have a plastic plate put in my skull to cover the part of my brain that was showing. I had to wear a hockey helmet to protect my skull until I was eleven years old. I didn’t get out of the hospital until I was almost 3 years old, closer to 2. My brother had some hearing loss as well.

Most of my early years before I can remember and not remembering will be a theme of my story; we’re a blur. I vaguely remember my childhood to this very day. I do have a couple of memories of my father, Eugene Allen, being abusive to me and my brothers. He would come home, and home at that time was Whores Fish Market, a roach-infested apartment above a fish market.  He was an alcoholic and he would take whatever pay he got from whichever job he had that week and come home with not much, which caused him and my mother Patricia to argue and fight. Eventually, we would get involved and beat up ourselves.  Later on, after reading a book about Whitey Bulger, I put it together. he may have been a bagman for the Irish mob out of L Street in Boston. He traveled there quite a bit when my brother’s and I were children on the T, the Boston Transit Sytem. The Purple line came right into Lowell.

My mother had a hard time raising four kids. She had all of us by the time she was 18 years old. She married my father at a young age. That’s what they did in the seventies. She would pack us kids up and take us to various places like the Salvation Army, The Knights of Columbus, and other places like St Patrick’s Church where she could get food for us. We ate what we could get at that time. It’s very similar today for me. Government cheese, pasteurized milk, canned goods, bologna, hot dogs, and beans and bread were as good as we could get. That’s why today I try not to eat that stuff if I can help it. I’m so sick of it from when I was forced to eat it as a child. I couldn’t get up from the table until I was finished eating those beans and franks. By that time, they were cold, but eventually, I finally ate them. We didn’t have much of birthdays or Christmases either, but back then  my mom would get us some presents from the Marines who had a toy drive.

I sometimes got myself into trouble when I was a little kid. Once I got stuck between a freezer truck and the building. For some reason, I went out the window, got on the truck, and fell between the truck and the building. My brother ended up eating a lightbulb once, and that wasn’t a good experience for him either. We both ended up on disability though because of his hearing loss and my head. We were diagnosed as disabled and had a bunch of tests run on us that showed we had learning disabilities.  I had many problems in school. We went to St Patrick’s Catholic School early on in our lives, but because of my learning disability, the curriculum was too hard for me. I was put into a public school, but I was a year behind all the other kids. As a young boy, my brother spoke for me quite often. I was a very shy kid. To this day, I’m a bit shy with most people unless I’m talking about movies, television shows, or sports. Than I can talk for hours.

The entire time all of this was going on, we still struggled to eat and find food or pay our bills. We moved a lot from what I remember.  I think we moved 9 times in 18 years of my life. One place around the corner from Whore’s Fish Market we lived in was a tenement. Which is a multilevel house with two or three floors. We ended up eating paint off the walls and got lead poisoning from the paint, which was lead-based. We won some money in a court case but not much. This inadvertently helped us get on disability and we were able to move to Salem, New Hampshire.  This was a new start for all of us, my brothers, sister, and parents. My father stopped drinking and kept a job as a security guard. My twin brother and I started collecting comics from the money my parents received for us. We loved watching GI Joe, Thundercats, Transformers, and He-Man as a kid, and they helped us get into reading comic books. Reading comic books got me interested in reading in general. I loved reading books and comic books as a kid. I read all the Classics like 1984, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird Old Man and the Sea and many others. English and social studies were my two favorite subjects in school. I was able to learn about history and writing in these classes. Learning about the world was fascinating for me. It helped drive my curiosity in years to come.

This is because my brain was able to start processing the things I started to love like sports. I’m a massive sports fan, and all the Boston teams were and still are today my favorite teams. I grew up as a huge fan of the Boston Celtics. Larry Bird was one of my idols growing up. I always wanted to be him. Even though I’m 5’8” and he’s 6’10” I was never going to be him, but I did play my share of basketball as a young man and adult, and I was pretty good at it for a short white kid. The Red Sox though have proved to be my favorite over the years along with the New England Patriots. When i was twelve they made me cry more than any other time in my life. The 1986 World Series was rough for a twelve-year-old me. I sat on the couch watching the games with my father, and game six seemed like we had it before my father decided to go to sleep. The rest was history though as Calvin Shiraldi and Bob Stanley combined to blow the game for the Sox. It wasn’t Bill Buckner’s fault that the ball went between his legs. It was those two relief pitchers who were at fault from my perspective. My two favorite players, Wade Boggs, and Roger Clemons, would later go on to play for the hated evil empire, the New York Yankees, and win a World Series instead of with the Red Sox. They had their greatest accomplishment with us, though. Boggs won 7 batting championships and Clemons broke the strike out record for a single game, with 20. One thing my father and I had in common though is we’d watch the Notre Dame Fighting Irish games together on Saturday afternoons. I missed those fond memories amongst all the bad ones.

This entire time, I still watched movies though,with my brother mostly at my side. In 1983-85, we got to see Return of the Jedi,  Rocky IV, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, The Terminator, and Back to the Future. These movies are still to this day some of my all-time favorites. The 80s weren’t like the 70s, but I have a fond memories of a lot of movies from this time in my life. There were a lot of seminal films at that time. 1986/87 were a  couple of big years for me because, like sports, the movies were great. Films like Top Gun, Rain Man, Robocop, and Predator all came out, and I loved them all. Tom Cruise, who was one of my new favorite actors, was coming into his own at this time in his career.  Movies were becoming more and more a part of my life. The 87 Oscars was a big one as I recall as well.

The mid to late 80s were a good time, though for me growing up. I enjoyed my brother’s company, and we seemed to be doing okay, relatively speaking. We moved a couple more times to Derry and Bennington, New Hampshire. My brother found work at a fish and chips restaurant, and we hung out on the weekends at a local Flea Market. There was a comic book guy there, so we were at home. During that period, my brother and I were oblivious to the struggles of our parents. My parents always wore out their welcome no matter where we lived. They wouldnt pay their bills for one reason or another. We all piled in a car and eventually moved to Florida in the middle of the night like when the Colts left Baltimore, where I currently reside today. After moving from New Smyrna Beach to DeLand in 1992, we lived in a double-wide mobile home. One by one, my parents and brothers left, and I’m still here all by myself.

My Life as a Film Critic Pt 2

Florida was quite different from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, though. There weren’t the cold winters with nor’easter and shoveling snow every day. It gave my family and myself a whole new outlook on life. Warm weather and a school where I could be my own man. I ended up going to three different high schools the three years before landing at DeLand High during my senior year of high school. My love of sports took over as I got on as the manager of the boy’s basketball team. With my problems with my father as a young man, I gravitated toward the head basketball coach, John Zeoli. He was like a father figure to me. He treated me like a son. He gave me rides home, took me to McDonald’s to get dinner after practice, and eventually got me a job as a custodian and the clockkeeperper for the games. I worked for him and his program for twenty-five years. They were some great years for me to some extent. 

The late 80s and early 90s were some interesting years as far as films, filmmakers, and actors went. Tim Burton brought out his films Beetlejuice and Batman, and Kevin Costner came into his own in Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and Dances With Wolves, I still think Goodfellas should have won it all that year, that’s a story for another time though. Clint Eastwood, one of my heroes from the Westerns I grew up watching, would put out Unforgiven my senior year in high school, and It would become a transcending moment for me. I would start to realize the difference between good and great films. Popcorn movies were one thing I loved, but I started to see filmmaking as an art form. These men were truly craftsmen at the top of their game. Throw in Steven Spielberg once again and James Cameron as well who were doing great work at this time in their careers.

Back to my life as a young adult. I was also getting involved in coaching football at this time. Well going back just a little bit I decided I wanted to become independent and chose to get off of disability to try to make it on my own in the world. Be my own man if you will. This would end up being a big mistake because I’ve constantly struggled from this point in my life and career. Nobody cared that I had a learning disability and emotional problems as a young adult. Getting into coaching proved to be a huge mistake as well. The football coaches would go out drinking after practice and games on Friday nights. That’s when high school football was usually played. Hence the film title and book its based on Friday Night Lights. I eventually became my own worst nightmare as all the drinking and partying as a twenty-something led to me becoming an alcoholic like my father before me and his before him. I lost track of what I loved to do and that was watching movies. Yes, I still watched movies but I wasn’t as much as I am today.

The ’90s and early 2000s were the birth of the independent scene. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater,  Wes Anderson, Steven Soderberg, Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, and David Fincher all came into their own as prolific filmmakers. They created filmmaking styles I hadn’t seen before. Pulp Fiction, Fargo. Memento, Bottle Rocket, Dazed and Confused, Se7en Magnolia, Sex, Lies, and Videotape were all seminal films for the time. The budgets were small and the movies were great. Indie filmmaking was the way of the future. These men would just be the first batch. The industry changed for the better more or less.  These filmmakers would spawn a whole new batch a couple of decades later.

I had a full-time job by this point in my life. The late ’90s and early 2000s were years I mostly enjoyed my time coaching and hanging out with friends but those years turned into the mid to late 2000s were my constant drinking and driving and partying turned into legal problems for me. It was partially the fault of another but I made the decision to go on the trip that got me in trouble with the law. It took me many years to get out of that trouble but eventually, I did. The constant hard partying caused me issues at my job and with my friends and family. I started alienating everyone around me at this point in my life. My life started going downhill once again but I always found solace in a dark movie theater or one with hundreds of strangers.  That’s all I had left in my life.

The late 2000s would find me falling deeper and deeper into the bottle causing me more and more problems with my bosses and job. I had a few friends but they were enabling me as a drunk. Sure I worked two jobs, but once I wasn’t working or sleeping off a drunk I was drinking at ball games, concerts, or watching sports at various bars and restaurants in and around the area I lived in. One thing led to another and the company I worked for outsourced my job to another company that replaced me and the others I worked with for almost twenty years for people who would accept less pay to do my old job. I was out of work and this ended up being the worst thing that happened to me. I ended up not being able to keep a job more than two and a half years after this, or since then.

One good thing came out of the job I worked for for almost twenty years. I had a high school student help me build a blog with what is now my website called From the Fourth Row!. At the time I didn’t realize how important having the blog was for my film criticism career. I also made a critical decision in my life for my health and safety. I stopped drinking. I decided one day I would stop cold turkey. I sat on my front steps on a Sunday morning and let the rain wash away my sins of the past and help me to start a new one. I haven’t drunk in going on eleven years now. I’ve been clean and sober the whole time. Not having to go out and drink all the time allowed me to spend more time watching movies and start my burgeoning film criticism career.

I followed a few film pundits on YouTube which had become a place for men and women to do their own reviews. Around the mid-2000s I saw Richard Roeper who replaced Gene Siskel as the co-host to Roger Ebert on At the Movies.  He said you didn’t have to have a degree in journalism to become a film critic. All you needed was a YouTube page and a Facebook account. So I took these words to heart and started doing reviews online. At first, my career had some starts and stops but I eventually would take off in the late 2010s and 2020s. My personal life would start going downhill as I started spending more time by myself. I didn’t have the bottle though to drown my sorrows in. Without the alcohol, my anxiety and depression took over my life.  I couldn’t keep a job and I had a hard time paying my bills. During the late 2010s, I found movie screenings though. I also found a whole new group of friends I could sound off to. They were a much-needed solace for me.

While things were looking up in the film criticism department things weren’t looking up anywhere else in my life. One thing I always had though was the movies. Films like Slumdog Millionaire,  The Dark Knight, Inglorious Basterds,  No Country For Old Men, Brothers, 12 Years a Slave, Boyhood, and The Grand Budapest Hotel showed me that there were still great filmmakers that would come out of the woodwork. Along with perennial favorites like Scorsese and Speilberg the film industry would thrive. There were still a lot of great films from my favorite duo like The Aviator, The Departed, The Wolf of Wallstreet, Hugo, Catch Me If You Can, Munich, and Lincoln. Even the most hard to watch films were right up my alley. The more dramatic the better.  Anything to get my mind off of my financial, car and housing difficulties.  

The world of promo screenings would open up a whole new world for me. I would get off of work and head right to Altamonte Springs, Winter Park or Waterford Lakes to get in line for the latest screening. I made some good friends during this time standing in line for hours on end. I never stopped thinking about being a film critic though. I always had in the back of my mind how I could get into this world. The youtube personalities made me jealous. I wanted to go to California to be on youtube with so many others. Instead I would take over for friend who had youtube shows and do my own show called The Top 5 Weekly which was a copy of my friends Scott Mantz and Alicia Malones show Ptofiles. It was hosted by me with my two friends strangers at the beginning, but good friends today Steven Billings and Andrew Cabral. We had a blast for a year and a half every week discussing film topics and our rankings of them. Also during this time I started to follow websites that focused on film and television articles and this is where I found cinesportstalk com. This is how my career finally found some traction.