The End is Never the End
April 2019. Four years ago. I was sitting in the back office of the movie theater that I had called my day job for a very long time. (Even though I worked more nights than days) My colleague and friend, Mike Butler, had been talking about doing a podcast for a bit and finally said to me, "We should do a podcast!"
So we did. We started talking about what would eventually become Forgotten Cinema. We bought some equipment. We did one practice episode covering the movie "Sphere", which turned out to be rife with issues. The episode, not the movie. Although, the movie is far from perfect.
During the four years of Forgotten Cinema, I started and ended another podcast with my good friend, Pat Whalen called Yet Another MCU Podcast. You guessed it, we covered the Infinity Saga phases of the MCU — from Iron Man to Avengers: Endgame. We wrapped that up just time to avoid the mess that became Phase 4 — not in terms of the quality of content, but how the phase spanned from theatrical releases and episodic streamers. It was confusing and I wouldn't have enjoyed trying to cover it for a podcast season.
Forgotten Cinema grew into us making commercials. Little short films that varied in themes from being related to the movie we would cover that week, a commentary on our job at the movie theater and this creation of characters based on ourselves where I played an over-exaggerated, egotistical, too-cool-for-school version of myself and Mike the naive, do-gooder who was not yet made cynical by life. We even had a series of us being in quarantine during the very-low times of the pandemic. When the world stopped, we did not.
Now, that podcast is over. We recorded our last episode in December 2022. But the final episode went live the final week of April, making it a full four years of podcasting. We are done. No more. But yet, are we? I imagine a future where we might come back from blocks of episodes. The weekly, day-to-day of the podcast was too much to handle with my other job and writing projects.
But, if there was an opportunity to revive Forgotten Cinema into an entity that provided compensation for myself and Mike, then I would sign up for that in a second. Forgotten Cinema as it was known to me may have ended, but the idea of it will never end.
I'm happy we accomplished something that brought a lot of good times and new friends into my life. I was able to celebrate the art of storytelling every week and we built something that will always be out there for new audiences to discover. I'm proud of the last four years.
If you love movies and are curious, check out Forgotten Cinema.