My Year of Flops

My Year Of Flops: An Introduction

From an early age, I learned to stop worrying and love the bombs. I've always been a failure junkie. I get giddy over toxic buzz, noxious press, and scathing reviews. I'm fascinated by the art and sociology of flops. You can learn a lot about society by the pop culture it embraces, and just as much by what it angrily rejects. As parents are keen to remind their children, there's no shame in failure, only in not trying. The biggest, most notorious flops generally fail because they try too hard, not because they lack ambition or audacity.

My solidarity with misfits, outsiders, and underachievers helped define my professional development. I began my film-reviewing career happily critiquing the dregs of cinema, forgotten ephemera like Chill Factor and Gone Fishing. As the first head writer of The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion, I've immersed myself in the dark, shadowy corners of the entertainment universe, where saner folks fear to tread: direct-to-video movies (for a column called Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory), cheaply produced books by C-listers and hangers-on (for Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club), the NOW That's What I Call Music! series (for THEN That's What They Called Music!), and audio commentaries on terrible films (for Commentary Tracks Of The Damned).

In The A.V. Club, I found a home and an audience willing to indulge my pop-culture masochism. Ah, but maybe "masochism" isn't the right word, because I love what I do; a trip to the multiplex to see the latest Tyler Perry movie or not-screened-for-critics dancesploitation cheapie fills me with anticipation rather than dread. Thirteen years on, I still sometimes can't believe I make my living writing about pop culture.

So when I decided to embark on a twice-weekly yearlong blog project in early 2007, I naturally gravitated toward an in-depth exploration of the biggest failures in cinematic history. I called the column My

Nathan Rabin is a staff writer for The Dissolve, a new film website from the popular music website Pitchfork. Previously, he was the head writer for The A.V. Club, the entertainment guide of The Onion, a position he held until recently since he was a college student at University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1997. Rabin is also the author of a memoir, The Big Rewind, and an essay collection based on one of his columns, My Year of Flops. He most recently collaborated with pop parodist "weird Al" Yankovic on a coffee table book titled Weird Al: The Book. Rabin's writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Spin, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Nerve, and Modern Humorist. He lives in Chicago with his wife. A.V. Club was founded in 1995 as the arts-and-entertainment arm of the satirical newspaper and website The Onion. The two brands quickly became distinct from each other, with The Onion providing humor and America's finest news, and the A.V. Club becoming a significant, well-received source for pop culture news and commentary. In recent years, the A.V. Club's web presence has become huge, attracting over a million unique users per month who visit for reviews, interviews, listings, and features on film, television, music, books, and more. Inventory will enjoy contributions from the entire A.V. Club staff, but the primary staff members assigned to the book project are Editor Keith Phipps, Managing Editor Josh Modell, and Associate Editors Tasha Robinson and Kyle Ryan.

"Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops is like watching a genius nurse a score of frightened, wounded baby birds back to life--a superhuman level of care and compassion lavished on That Which Never Had A Right To Exist. Truly brilliant."
-Patton Oswalt, author of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland