jim emerson

The founding editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com (2003-present) and proprietor of scanners::blog, Jim is a Seattle-based writer and film critic whose love of movies has led to experience in nearly every part of the movie biz, from writing (and re-writing and re-writing), through "development hell" and production, to exhibition (commercial and academic), marketing (including promotion and advertising), writing features, interviews and criticism for many publications (in print and on the Internet). He was the editor of Microsoft Cinemania, a multimedia movie encyclopedia on CD-ROM and the web, and has been the editorial director of other encyclopedic film-related web sites such as Reel.com and FilmPix.com.

A member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association while covering film in Los Angeles, Jim was movie critic for the Orange County Register, and has written for many other publications and web sites including the Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Film Comment, Amazon.com, Premiere, Alt.screen... He has also created video essays for Scanners and IndieWire's Press Play. He is also the co-author (with his friend and sometime writing partner Julia Sweeney) of the play and screenplay "Mea's Big Apology" and the film "It's Pat: The Movie," was a guest writer for "Saturday Night Live" in the winter of 1994 and was a consultant on Julia's monologues, "God Said Ha!" and "Letting Go of God."

Jim booked independent and foreign films for a successful Seattle "art-house" (the Market Theater in the historic Pike Place Market), booked many film series at his alma mater, the University of Washington, and was a programmer/director of the Seattle International Film Festival and the Floating Film Festival. At the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO, he continues the tradition of the Ebert Cinema Interruptus (with "Chinatown," "No Country For Old Men," "A Serious Man," "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy") since Roger lost his voice.

Emerson lives with his dogs, Edith and Lolita, in Seattle, and is also the creator in 1998 of the never-updated Jeeem's CinePad (http://www.cinepad.com), where you will find Web 1.0 features devoted to his obsessions, including film noir, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, Barbara Stanwyck, "Twin Peaks," and the history of plumbing in the cinema.