Nick,
I always wanted to get LOTTERY-RICH so that I could fund the films of people that this site brought me into the orbit of (Yourself, DJEvil, HotAnimalMachine, others...), and, of course, in the way of lotteries everywhere, that did not happen. I was a contributor (a fucking very minor and unreliable one) to CHUD.com in the early days, and a decent contributor to GUY.com, and hey, that GUY stuff that I had in the pipeline (beer articles...I do beer for a living. If it paid better, you would all envy me) will just ship here, of course. On the message board at CHUD, however, it was a totally different deal: I had arguments and discussions and collaborations and warfare with fucking GENIUSES!!!! People like coyote (who may no longer exist: he was from Texas and had Amnesia, and no, I am not making that up), Blofeld, Will (R.I.P.), DJEvil, HotAnimalMachine, DevinFarachi, MicahRobinson, Ryan Calvert, Paul Hermann, Smilin Jack Ruby, Philip Dando (from England...ironically, he won a PS2 [American version] from CHUD, that we [this is me using the royal CHUD *WE*] could not figure out how to get to him without the very-new post-9-11 guidelines demanding that it be destroyed...I never did hear how that ended. Poorly, probably. As that is how most human endeavors end), and many, many more. Across 10,000+ posts, of course there were many, many more.
And hey, I aged. Life took over. Caring for my kids took over. And I posted less. I slept as much as I could, read as quickly as possible, replied as little as possible, and eventually I (grendel, the poster) faded into dim web-memory, and that only for the older posters on CHUD: I mean, I am CHUD Member #99. That, sir, is old school.
Not unlike yourself. In fact, not even coming CLOSE to resembling yourself: You are Nick Nunziata. You outlasted Patrick at Coming Attractions, the web*s FIRST AICN, before there was even a hint of that site. Patrick OWNED film-web (back before we knew what web was, or what it could be), and Chris Gore OWNED indie-film-print, which (as we are all friends I can say this:) we didn*t know what the death of which would look like!
Anyhow, enough reminiscing on my part: I was an early member of not only the CHUD message board, but the CHUD family. Not because of any great writing ability of my own, but more because my wife (ex, now, but who*s telling the story?!) had some Hollywood ties and I was able to get some sweet stories for early-CHUD ahead of the other web outlets: Stuff about Singer*s first X-Men film, a quote from McKellan about playing Gandalf and Magneto both...small stuff, on the scale and speed that info trafficks on now, but still, at the time? Made me look fucking MAGICAL!!!
...and CHUD made me feel magical, too...And if that sounds gay-fanboyish, then I invite you to visit Nick Nunziata*s spread in suburban Georgia, where he will summarily feed your soul to Steve Alten*s MEG. Or, by all means, visit me: I will be gracious, warm and inviting, and have a lively discussion with you. If, at the end, you determine that I am still a gay fanboy of CHUD and that it is somehow undeserving of my devotion, we shall agree to disagree, and you shall be sent warm and happy on your way.
(Heh. Do not trust him. That is a total lie: He will send you to Nick, who will feed you to Steve Alten*s MEG)
Regardless of the circumstance around CHUD*S peril, it certainly, just from the consumer-news-reader end of things sucks balls: If CHUD is seriously in trouble (never mind the blood, sweat, tears, mis-fired jizm, impotence, and incontinence that I have personally seen occur in the continuing of this effort!) then who suffers most is a guy like me. Like me. And, ladies and gentlemen of CHUD, as much as I have not been around in recent years posting on the boards, it will not take a long time, nor a whole lot of effort in reviewing old posts, to realize that the phrase *like me* is a whole lot less applicable when I say it than when, say, almost anybody else does (Jimmy Smits, Ciaran Hines, Rade Seberhjiah, Woody Allen, et al). i.e. There ain*t a lot like me out there, and those that they find, they either hire, kill, or lock up.
CHUD is where I get my movie news. Every day. Every fucking day. I know that there are other movie sites out there. I assume that AICN is still in business. I mean, it has to be, or, somewhere else on my Google Reader there would have been a story about Harry Knowles dying, or something. So I assume (again, without checking) that AICN is still a source. For a while from, I would say, CHUD*s launch in December *99 (which, Nick, correct me if that is wrong...I am going off the dates that I myself stumbled onto the CHUD glory, not when you actually kicked it into gear) until, say, some weird period in early (pre 9/11 mind you) 2001 where there was a media-buy pull-away-ad/$$$/conglomerate-driven site base that saw the explosion of HUNDREDS of fucking sites that were all actually STUDIOS, with SPECIFIC MOVIES TO SHILL, whose SITES WENT DEAD THE WEEK AFTER RELEASE, and CHUD was NONE OF THOSE THINGS, and started to get CREDIBILITY, and then MAINTAINED THAT CREDIBILITY, like actual fucking JOURNALISTS, while every other site on the map/web/internet-frontier fucked themselves in their own necks by NOT KNOWING WHAT THEY STOOD FOR and therefore USING WHATEVER KNOWLEDGE THEY HAD to GET THEIR STORIES TO THE WEB FIRST (by the way: I love how, in the early days of all-of-everybody-having-the-web-all-the-time, one of the first negative things to reach back to me [at the time I was a reasonably big deal at an Internet Provider] was someone from a rival publication [not CHUD, but a print publication] saying *I didn*t know what an EMBARGO meant, so I just wrote the story*)...............and then rightfully paid the oh-we-fucked-up price for it. As they should. As they very well should.
And CHUD did none of that. Because of Nick Nunziata, and the people he was drafted, crafted, and loved, CHUD is that rarest of beasts: An actual NEWS SOURCE, about ENTERTAINMENT.
Wow. Just reading that, it still staggers me. Seriously. No bullshit here: CHUD--A NEWS SOURCE (As in, verifiable; as in, call-to-the-carpetable), about (because seriously, who bothers to craft news about entertainment anymore?!: Just let the companies that produce that shit spin it themselves!...fuck you in your neckhole!) ENTERTAINMENT. Yep. CHUD is, and always has been, where you need to go to know what you need to know.
Thank you Nick. For everything you have done for me, and us, and me. Thank you immeasurably.
--grendel, of CHUD
