Open letter to the Editor of Entertainment Weekly

Dear Editor,

Please cancel my subscription.

I have written countless unanswered letters to Entertainment Weekly begging for you to stop being the sole marketing vehicle behind the Twilight franchise. You have given two movies over 7 cover stories in just over one year. Just so we have a little perspective, all 6 Harry Potter movies have garnished a whopping 9 cover stories, and one of those nine was about the last book. So to recap Twilight = 7 cover stories in 15 months, Harry Potter = 8 cover stories in 8 years.

I painfully pushed my way through this latest Twilight "article": Team Twilight. I am sad to see your magazine reduced to such humiliating standards. Do you really believe that letting three actors prattle on for nine pages of print, covering such topics as muscles, hair, and all things celebrity is the best use of your space? I have never read anything by Karen Valby before, and I hope never to again. This is the most repugnant and lazy style of reporting I have ever read. It's as if Ms. Valby was nothing more than the dorky girl who was just barely holding in her excitement over being so close to these "celebrities". Her questions ranged from irrelevant; "What was it like to sit behind Mickey Rourke?" to idiotic "Here's your chance to say what is purely amazing about enormous fame?" What did she even contribute to the conversation? If you have to keep reporting on this poorly written barely-skirting-plagiary series of movies, then at least find a reporter who isn't... like... the biggest fan... like...ever!

Also, I find it interesting that your memory is painfully short. Your own reporter Jennifer Reece had this to say about the end of the Twilight stories: "...Breaking Dawn, when Meyer takes her supernatural love story several bizarre steps too far. ''I felt like — like I don't know what. Like this wasn't real. Like I was in some Goth version of a bad sitcom,' Jacob confides before he too is swept up in the narrative mayhem. So do we, Jacob. So do we." And then she gave the book a big fat D. As in: it sucked.

You printed this three weeks after giving Twilight the movie it's first cover story (an exclusive first look) and even though you know the end is a bomb, you have devoted unprecedented print space to these two movies. It almost makes me want to call shenanigans on you and the producers of the Twilight Saga. Are you somehow in bed together? I can think of no other reason you would lambaste something and point out it's amateur plot holes and shortcomings and then spend what must amount to millions in advertising dollars promoting the hell out of it. What exactly are you guys over there getting out of constantly selling these movies? If you think I am nutso, then I challenge you to find a single issue of Entertainment Weekly starting July 18th, 2009 in which you DO NOT promote these movies in some way.

I have asked repeatedly for you to cover things that people who actually love the art of film would want to read about (actor stories, development stories, method acting and the lunatics that do it, screenwriter stories, process stories, cinema history, location scouting, seeing like a cinematographer, the art and madness of making a movie, just to give you a few ideas). Yet you seem to have decided instead to head the TMZ route and become just another trashy magazine that covers mass amounts of pop culture while spending less and less print space on anything of substance or quality. You have gotten used to providing the basic minimum on original thinking and quality reporting and in many cases you just retype the studios' PR material and repackage it as your own, or at least that's how a lot of it comes off to me, your reader. Every week when I get the latest issue I am constantly disappointed. There is so little actual content. Now there is shopping, and outfits, and Twilight. If that is the direction that you have chosen, and you have no more originality to bring to the publishing world, than I refer back to my first sentence and request that you cancel my subscription.

I am a thirty-four year old gay man in the prime of your demographic. I have been a loyal reader since your inception and I am tired of having to suffer through articles written for and about the lowest common denominator. If you cant give me quality content, than after 19 years I am sorry to say, I am done reading you.

Shane J Kroll
krollsj@hotmail.com

Ps. I have also noticed that you have stopped including a staff list in your magazine and online. Is it shame?