F2K Ep. 37 - Film Journalist Travis Crawford

Fun 2 Know Podcast

In the 90s I began seeing Travis Crawford's byline pop up in assorted magazines, and over the years he has written for publications including Film Comment, Filmmaker, Fangoria and increasingly in the liner notes of archival DVDs. Currently he writes regularly for the U.K. Publication, the Calvert Journal. Crawford's always intelligent and passionate writing, often about films that mix genre conventions with exploratory filmmaking, has made his a byline worth seeking out. Personally, his biggest impact was made in his years as a film programmer at the Philadelphia Film Festival, whose highlight was always the sidebar “Danger After Dark,” a series of films curated by Crawford that brought some of wildest and most thrilling films to the festival and promoted the work of major directors who had been otherwise under-represented. Film is a major passion of mine but we haven't had a guest to discuss film with on the show since we had Reelblack Cinema's guru Mike Dennis on twenty episodes ago. Travis and I have chatted across Facebook a lot but I'd only met him fleetingly before the Fun 2 Know mobile studio trekked down to quaint Wilmington, Delaware, still basking in its Revolutionary-era charm. I usually try to pry out the guest's origin story but listening to Bill Ackerman's excellent Supporting Characters podcast, it seemed that Bill had already completed that job. Instead, we engage in a more freewheeling, loose conversation, one hardly influenced at all by the slowly emptying bottle of Lillet Blanc that mysteriously evaporated over the two-plus hours of talk. We discuss our theater going experiences across Delaware, Philadelphia and San Francisco, the work of Dario Argento and Brian De Palma, the current state of the great directors of the 70s, Lindsey Lohan, film distribution today, the limitation of the TV medium, Asian cinema, clawing out a living, bad jobs, film snobbery, Michael Shannon, the new Twin Peaks and much more, So let's head over now, you can imagine the late afternoon sun slowly dropping in the sky while we sit in the dining room of a bed and breakfast with every detail in the room rich in Colonial detail, as we mull over nearly a hundred years between us of film-viewing thoughts and memories.