When you were a kid growing up in Central Florida before the digital age, there wasn’t too much reading going on outside of comic books, hobby magazines, and other youth publications. Reading newspapers was encouraged but not often embraced by the younger audience. There had to be something in that newspaper you enjoyed reading, and I read the Orlando Sentinel when I was younger.
A big reason why was because of former Orlando Sentinel film critic, Jay Boyar, who passed away on Friday (story HERE).
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know me and movie theaters in Orlando go back long way (story HERE).
This was in part to Mr. Boyar’s reviews. It was his writing that propelled me into those theaters in the first place.
I would often pull the newspaper out of a machine near the theater, and select my ticket based on what I read in his reviews.
These days, you can type the name of a film into a search engine and get back hundreds of reviews from both professional and amateur critics.
It wasn’t like that before the rise of the internet. You had your newspaper movie critic and a couple of experts on television like Siskel and Ebert (which I also watched on syndication). This was also before the age of the reboot, when new ideas had to be more carefully described and evaluated.
This made the printed review even more important because it could cover more ground. It had to be informative, professional, but at the same time still interesting to read. Mr. Boyar always had all of those components in his reviews.
Over the years, I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of my local media professionals that I read/watched/listened to growing up. I never met Mr. Boyar.
But if I had, I would have said “Thank you for your love of film and transferring that love to me through the printed word.”
