‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Leonard Maltin (Film Critic)

Scott Feinberg
·3 min read
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Leonard Maltin is probably the world’s most famous living film critic. For many people, he was the Internet Movie Database before the advent of the internet. The author of more than a dozen important books on film, he is best known for the exhaustive “movie guide” that he updated dozens of times between 1969 and 2014, on the cover of which appeared his bearded and bespectacled face and his name above the title from 1986 on, and which The New York Times described in 1996 as “the go-to choice for both film geeks and casual couch potatoes” and in 1997 as “the bible of American cinephiles.” And he also reviewed movies and interviewed just about every major filmmaker and star in front of a massive TV audience as the on-air film film critic for Entertainment Tonight from 1982 to 2012.

Maltin is someone even the most casual movie buff came to know — he made a cameo in Gremlins 2, he was mentioned on an episode of The Simpsons, his guide was referenced on an episode of The Sopranos and in the film Greenberg, and he read clues on Jeopardy!

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But he always maintained his cred with serious cinephiles, as well. Perhaps the only film critic who has ever been invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he is also a longtime member and two-time past president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, a voting member of the National Film Registry and a member of the board of directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

As the Los Angeles Times once wrote, “Los Angeles has no lack of film critics, but there isn’t one who is more respected and admired” than he is.

Need further proof? Maltin was feted with the Anthology Film Archives’ Preservation Award in 1993; the ICG Publicists Awards’ Press Award in 1997; the Annie Awards’ June Foray Award in 2002; the American Society of Cinematographers’ Bud Stone Award of Distinction in 2005; the Telluride Film Festival’s Silver Medallion Award in 2007; the National Board of Review’s William K. Everson Film History Award in 2010; Comic-Con’s Inkpot Award in 2013; the George Eastman House’s Light & Motion Award for Advocacy in 2014; a Los Angeles Film Critics Association special citation celebrating his movie guide in 2015; and the Turner Classic Movies’ Robert Osborne Award, presented to him by Warren Beatty, in 2022.

Plus, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, at which he has moderated conversations with the recipients of its Modern Master Award for decades, in 2015 renamed that honor the Maltin Modern Master Award.

Not bad for a kid from Teaneck, New Jersey.

Over the course of a conversation at Maltin’s home in Sherman Oaks — which is packed to the gills with movie books and memorabilia, and which he shares with his wife of nearly a half-century, Alice; his daughter and podcasting partner, Jessie; Jessie’s husband; and a 21-month-old granddaughter — the 72-year-old reflected on the origins of his love affair with the movies and how he began writing about them in a serious way while still in grade school; how, when he was just 17, his movie guide came to be, and the ups and downs of its 45-year journey since then; what his life is like today, a decade after he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; what his outlook is for the future of the movies and film criticism; plus much more.

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