Cruising the Movies

As my copious citations of McDonald prove, he honed a kind of cultural criticism—personal but outward-looking, raunchy yet brainy, funny and furious—rare in his era and barely in evidence today, when we are overrun with professional (and paraprofessional) opinionators whose writing rarely rises above plot synopses with some adjectives and adverbs thrown in.

Cruising the Movies is film writing that delivers that magic with verve, wit, and self-deprecation. It is, against all odds, a piece of film criticism that is as entertaining as the movies that it looks at, and contemporary film writers would do well to take a page from Boyd’s book.

Boyd McDonald (1925-1993) was a writer for Time and IBM, a journalist, and founder and editor of Straight to Hell, a celebrated fanzine that bore a variety of subtitles, including “The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts” or “The New York Review of Cocksucking.“William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who teaches film history at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many video installations. His films and videos were the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. He has worked in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox.

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