..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

January 28, 2008

30 Year Movie Journalism Vet
Jack Mathews Heads To The Coastal Farm

 A Note From Jack...

My wife and I have long been planning to move to a home we own on the Oregon coast, there to allow the view and the ocean air to clear my thoughts for the kind of creative writing I had in mind when I left graduate school at UCLA four decades ago.

 

That plan is about to be activated. I am leaving the Daily News at the end of February and with it a career in film journalism and criticism that began in Detroit in the 1970s and took me to Hollywood and around the world before dropping me off here in New York.

 

What a ride it has been, literally. I’ve worked for some of the biggest and best newspapers in the country – the L.A. Times, the Detroit Free-Press, USA Today – and among them, they have sent me to Borneo, Thailand, North Africa, the Amazon, throughout Europe and from Costa Rica to Alaska on this continent.

 

I got certified as a SCUBA diver to report on the underwater scenes in the Bahamas with Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah for Ron Howard’s “Splash!” I’ve sung (not well) with Rod Steiger in a restaurant in Durango, Mexico, played golf (not well, either) with Clint Eastwood on the Monterrey Peninsula, and spent a total of six months of spring on the French Riviera covering the Cannes Film Festival.

 

It’s been fun being paid to watch movies for 30 years, and I’m happy to say the last one was one of the best. That’s the reason I wanted to work through the Oscars before signing off. Then, it’s on to that long-gestating novel about the college co-ed considered by many to have been the Zodiac’s first victim (it was a murder I covered as a cub reporter) and to the breeze of the Pacific.

 

I thank you for the courtesies extended over the years; I hope it’s been as good for you as it has for me.

 

Until the end of February, it’s business as usual. If you have questions or information about critical movie coverage beyond that, contact Arts & Entertainment Editor Colin Bertram.