Film School Rejects

» see filmschoolrejects.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Neil Miller founded Film School Rejects in February 2006 and ran it for nineteen years without ever selling it to anybody. That is the whole story in one sentence, and it is remarkable because almost nobody else who started a film blog in 2006 managed it. The independent movie sites of that generation were bought into networks or quietly abandoned, and FSR just kept publishing.

It did reviews and interviews alongside a long run of feature columns, and its weekly podcast, Reject Radio, placed fourth in a Movies.com ranking of movie podcasts in 2012. Total Film shortlisted the site for Best News Blog in 2010 and MovieMaker put it on a list of fifty best blogs for filmmakers the same year. CNN and the Los Angeles Times quoted its writers, and its April Fools' pranks kept getting picked up by MTV and BuzzFeed.

I read the American film blogs of that era across a gap that was mostly language and release schedule. A review of something opening that Friday in New York was a review of something I would see in the spring, if it got a Turkish distributor at all. FSR was one of the names in that pile of tabs. I could not tell you a single piece it ran.

It went up for sale in December 2024, and the notice was still sitting on the front page eleven months later when the site went dark. The Internet Archive has FSR serving a full front page on 4 November 2025 and returning a 404 on 6 November. What is at the domain today is a single page saying FSR is currently offline, with a line underneath confirming it is still for sale.

~ the dossier ~

~ nineteen years ~

Longevity is the thing worth recording here. FSR launched into a web where a film blog could plausibly become a business, and it was still running long after that web was gone. It outlasted the Facebook traffic boom and the collapse that followed when Facebook turned the tap off, and it outlasted most of the venture-funded sites that were supposed to replace blogs like it.

Miller also published Nonfics, a documentary site, and One Perfect Shot, with Reject Media as the name over all of it. It stayed a small operation the entire time.

~ the actual end ~

Money. The for-sale notice described a site that had been owned and operated independently by one person for more than seventeen years and had reached the point where that no longer worked. Independent editorial sites rarely get a proper obituary post, because the person who would have to write it is the person who ran out of money.

The domain is still registered and the page still carries a contact address, so this one has a live seller attached to it. The copyright line at the bottom says 2025 and has not moved since.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »