Roger Greenspun

Roger Greenspun is an American journalist and noted film critic. He is best known for his work with The New York Times in which he reviewed near 400 films, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s,^[1] and for Penthouse for which he was the film critic^[2] throughout much of the late 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor of film history and criticism at Rutgers University in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as at Columbia University.^[3]

Career

Greenspun, who also contributed to Sight & Sound, Film Comment and other periodicals, was "one of the first (and still one of the few) mass-media reviewers to have emerged from the film quarterly underground," Variety wrote in 1973. He was ranked 4th out of 26 reviewers appraised in Variety for their accuracy in reflecting films' commercial success.^[3]

Further reading

• Hoberman, Jim (December 28, 2000). "Five critics dish over the year in film: The dangers of a good review". Slate. Roger Greenspun--a very intelligent and film-literate second-string reviewer--wrote a rave review of Robert Bresson's Lancelot. Evidently some Times big shot (it might have been Abe Rosenthal) went to see the movie on his lunch hour, expecting some sort of Camelot-like spectacle. Naturally, he returned to the office furious, and, according to the legend, Greenspun lost his job soon after. 
• Greenspun, Roger (2001). "Cinema and Television". In Laqueur, Walter; Baumel, Judith Tydor. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Yale University Press. pp. 119–127. ISBN 9780300138115. OCLC 46790189.  Greenspun's short contributor biography mentions his reviews for the New York Times and Film Comment, and his teaching at Rutgers University and Columbia University.

References