HISTORY OF GREG'S PREVIEWS OF UPCOMING MOVIES

In August of 1997, I had been online for nearly four years. In the fall semester of 1993, as a new graduate student of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida, one of the first things we were told to do was to sign up for an "e-mail account." I had heard of bulletin boards that some people used to communicate via their computers, but it had never really seemed like something I'd be into (or that I'd get to work on my aging Commodore 64, which I had bought because it had more interesting games than my Atari 2600). Soon, I was discovering that the Internet (by pre-WWW standards) was not really that difficult to learn, and besides that, there were thousands of neat things online that would appeal to me. I took to the Internet so quickly that I soon found myself "in the right place at the right time" as a library student, because the libraries of the world were being looked at to be on the vanguard of spreading the Internet gospel. After getting my B.A. in Philosophy, I had chosen Library Science as a graduate program because I heard there were lots of jobs, and the job seemed to potentially give me unlimited access to books, movies, music, and information... a cultural (pop or otherwise) junkie's dream. Now, with the exploding growth of the Internet matching my graduating date (May, 1995), I had inadvertently been thrown into a level of demand that was such that I was the first person in my entire class to land a job.

The summer of 1997 was a tumultous one for me. In a one-month period, I was in a life-threatening car accident, moved back to Wisconsin, and started a little site that would end up being the coolest thing I'd ever done. Hoping to get back to my home state after six years away, I started a job search. The week before my big trip to the Midwest on a series of job interviews, however, I was broadsided by a streak of red in the form of a brand new Ford Mustang, running a red light and slamming into my driver-side door. An inch separated me from death and what I was left with: a painful knee injury for which I was still having surgery a year later. Leaving my crutches in the car a week later, I put on a brave face through a job interview, and landed a job at an excellent public library, in Oshkosh, close to both where I grew up, and my parents' hometown.

One of the problems I often found as a frequent visitor of chat rooms and message boards was that people were often asking about movies that hadn't been released yet, and I would serve up instant commentary on what the movie was about, what I thought of it, etc. And then, as those more ethereal regions of the Internet do, the content disappeared. So, at the same time that I was getting adjusted in Oshkosh, as I got my new Internet connection started, I started a page for myself and my friends called "Bookhouse's Previews of Upcoming Movies" where I could just post that stuff, on the web, and then forward people there rather than having to regurgitate the text every time. "Bookhouse" was my "nom du net" at that point, a name that references both my former occupation as a librarian, and as a fan of the TV series, "Twin Peaks", which featured characters called "The Bookhouse Boys." At that point, it wasn't my goal to aspire to a wide audience.

And yet, with time, people came. What started as a completely amateur hobby I did on nights and weekends led to me leaving Geocities, and being taken on by an advertising company, and in October, 1999, quitting that librarian job that had brought me back to Wisconsin. Upcomingmovies.com continued to grow for the next three years, to the point that in March of 2002, it served 8 million hits to nearly a million unique visitors, making it one of the most visited sites in the world run by just one person.

And then, in May, 2002, I began the process of taking the concept to the next level, as the site that used to be Upcomingmovies.com moved here to be integrated into Yahoo! Movies, and I moved too, from the woods near Madison, Wisconsin to the city of Los Angeles, as your host of all Movies that are Upcoming. The goal has been to keep the spirit of Upcomingmovies.com alive through the new design, with new features and means of navigating that will enhance the experience even more, and this redesign will be just the beginning. It's an exciting time to be a moviegoer, and I'm looking forward to continuing to be your source, and commentator, on the movies that Hollywood and the indies produce.