Bill Warren - Film Critic

Film Critic

Warren was the film critic for a newspaper in Simi Valley, California during the 1980s. In 1989, he created the ShowBiz Roundtable for the online service GEnie to generate discussions about films and other aspects of show business. He seems to have been the first critic credentialled by the MPAA for online reviews. Following the traditions of newspapers, he only posted his GEnie film reviews online the day a film opened. After these reviews were posted, they were archived in a GEnie Library. With weekly postings during the early 1990s, this became the first large film review database available online. Warren also conducted live online interviews with film personalities on GEnie. He eventually left the ShowBiz Roundtable, which continues today at Delphi's online service.

At the request of film director Sam Raimi, Warren wrote The Evil Dead Companion in 1994, but six years passed before the book was published in the UK by Titan Books (2000), followed by an American edition from St. Martin's in 2001. Warren found his friendship with Raimi a life-altering experience:

I started with Sam on Darkman. He did something that actually changed my life. At the time, he was living not far from where I do, in Silver Lake; this was before he was married, and he lived in a little cabin. I went over to interview him and Scott Spiegel, and they were blown away when I said that I used to know Fritz Lang. They said, "OK, who else did you know?" I said Boris Karloff, and they just went out of their minds. At that time, I had been feeling very sorry for myself, and Sam said, "Gee, you must've met everybody you've ever wanted to meet." When I went home I started thinking about it. And I realized I indeed had met everybody I ever really wanted to meet, with the exception of three people; one of those, Vincent Price, I met later that year, and the other two, one of whom was Peter Cushing, never had a chance to meet. But I suddenly realized my life wasn't as bad as I thought it was, and it was because of Sam's remarks. He changed my way of thinking at that point, and it's never changed back, and I have Sam to thank for that. I was going to put that in the book, but someone said it's too personal, so it's not in the book. Sam has read the book and he likes it.