Ben Hecht 1,000: A subscriber milestone, a mailbag and more

Some exciting housekeeping announcements.

An exciting announcement: Over the weekend, this newsletter hit the 1,000-susbcriber mark. Thank you so much for your reading and your support, which means a great deal to me.

Since I know many of you are new, I thought I’d lay out the basic format of how things work around here: I do five posts a week, always on weekdays, almost always at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time (or around then). On Monday, I write an essay. On Friday, I write a notes column. The other three days, depending on how dates and embargoes line up, I review a new feature film, a new documentary, and I write an essay about an older film, usually on or near a milestone anniversary of its release.

Sometimes I review two, three, or ten documentaries at a time, or more than one feature. Since a lot of review embargoes lately have been lifting at noon, I’ve sometimes published a bonus review in the morning and the embargoed one at noon.

Reviews of new features and documentaries are always free and un-paywalled, and always will be. The other pieces are always partially paywalled. For those of you who are new (or not so new), I invite you to become a paid subscriber and receive all of every article.

And in case you’re wondering about the name: Ben Hecht was a famed journalist, screenwriter, and playwright of the first half of the 20th century, who wrote the original version of Scarface and The Front Page. The S.S. Ben Hecht was a ship that Hecht commissioned to rescue Holocaust survivors in 1947. The name of the newsletter is a tribute to Hecht, while the “S.S.” also stands for both my initials and “Substack.”

If you ever want to find my review of a movie from the recent or distant past, the best bet is usually to Google “Stephen Silver” and the name of the movie, or search the Substack archives. This is my Rotten Tomatoes page, and this is my Letterboxd. I am also a member of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle (which I cofounded), the Critics Choice Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.

This manifesto, which I wrote when this newsletter launched, mostly holds up on my basic worldview about film and the culture around it. Including these ones, which might as well have been written about The Odyssey:

11. Whether a movie is “woke” or “not woke” is the stupidest possible standard by which to judge it.

12. If you denounce a movie as “woke” just because it has, say, a racially diverse cast, or there’s a trans person in it, or its director is an Asian woman, that’s not standing on principle- that’s just naked bigotry.

13. “Go woke, go broke” is a maxim with enough counter-examples to make it completely invalid.

Also, I would like at some point in the coming weeks to do a mailbag column. So if you have questions about anything I’ve written, or any recent or older movie, or what it’s like to be a critic, or anything else…. Leave that either in the comments of this post, or send me an email at stephensilverwriter at gmail.

And finally… I’m writing a book! Much more to come on that, but after about ten years of false ideas, proposals, and false starts on various fronts, it’s finally happening. Look for that in 2027.

Thank you, everyone, once again, and welcome to my newer subscribers.