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Michael Medved: Distinctions With a Difference
| Article
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18680 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
3,227 Words |
| Author
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Lissa Roche
Lissa Roche is director of seminars at Hillsdale College in
Hillsdale, Michigan. |
One of the brightest young film critics in Hollywood, Michael Medved doesn't fit the mold. Tall, lanky, and openly warm, he seems more like the Midwestern "boy next door" than an acid-tongued reviewer who is the nemesis of such powerful industry moguls as Richard Gere, Warren Beatty, David Lynch, and Oliver Stone.
Two of Medved's recent Reader's Digest articles have blasted Hollywood's hostility toward religion and traditional morality: "If someone turns up on a film today wearing a Roman collar or bearing the title Reverend, you can be fairly sure that he will be either corrupt or crazy--or probably both," Medved says. He also complains that "the movie business regularly offers us characters who are smaller than life, who are less decent, less intelligent, less noble than our own friends and neighbors."
For the past five years the cohost of the popular PBS program Sneak Previews, Medved is also the president and founder of the Pacific Jewish Center and the author of seven nonfiction books, including the bestsellers What Really Happened to the Class of '65?; Hospital: The Hidden Lives of a Medical Center Staff, and The Golden Turkey Awards. He is presently at work on a book about the 1960s counterculture. His wife, Diane Medved, who is a clinical psychologist, was recently profiled in Time magazine for her own bestselling book, The Case against Divorce. The Medveds work out of their Santa Monica home and have two children, age four and two.
Lissa Roche: Do you recall the first film you ever saw?
Michael Medved: The first film that I recall seeing, The Red Pony, was a traumatic experience for me. It was in the late 1940s and I was very small, perhaps only two or three years old. I remember talking to my mother in the theater and being hushed. I had to be taken outside during the scene in which the vultures attack the pony.
Roche: This was not, then, the moment that you suddenly realized that you wanted to review movies for a living?
Medved: It has actually been prophetic as to my ultimate role as a critic; I left the theater howling in pain and protest.
Roche: So you have a love/hate relationship with your work?
Medved: Yes, I often feel great
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