The walls came tumbling down.

The Inky broke the news yesterday that the Wilma Theater, ever mindful of the widening gap between what they used to call the “high arts” and, well, everyone else, is seeing fit to reduce the bulk of its tickets to around 25 bucks, for the forseeable future. How do they do it? Rich guys! Philanthropist/actor […]

As the strange beast known as “cable television” found its footing in the ’80s, burgeoning networks struggled to fill the daylight hours with content. While MTV and Nickelodeon scraped together their shoestring budgets to produce charming, low-rent entertainment, no amount of improvising could possibly fill an entire schedule. So, along with importing content from overseas, many networks looked to the past to pad out their programming—the last half-century of cinema provided countless hours of filler, and for cheap. Many of these films, though, only existed in black and white, and programming executives believed that colorless content was a hard sell for viewers who presumably wanted nothing but Technicolor bliss from their television sets.

The solution was “colorization,” which promised to revitalize decades’ worth of movies seen as too dated to be shown in their extant forms. In practice, this ...

Q: What is Stan Lee's actual legacy? -- @TheMikeLawrence

A: I don't think there could be a more complicated subject to tackle in a single column than this one, because as an industry and as an art form, I think we all have a lot of complicated feelings about Stan Lee. Depending on who you ask, when you ask them and what he's been up to lately, he's a conniving credit-stealer, a shameless self-promotion machine, a "driven little man who dreams of having it all!!!" and got it by coasting on the hard work of others, or he's a charismatic innovator who got put into that spotlight because he's a natural showman, a smiling ambassador of the medium and everybody's friendly comics grandpa. And it's further complicated because you can't really talk about him without talking about collaborators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, either.

That's what makes him hard to talk about, even if you've spent nearly your entire life being aware of him. There's just so much to get through that's filtered through so many angles, and as a result, I genuinely think that he's simultaneously the most overrated and underrated creator of all time.

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