Stinkers Bad Movie Awards

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

~ the obit ~

In 2004 the Stinkers took the vote away from the public, and the reason they published for doing it is the most honest sentence any awards body has ever written about itself. They had opened the ballot to anyone who wanted one and then read what came back, which told them most voters had not seen most of the films and were picking whichever famous person they liked least. So they shut the ballot. From that year on it went out by invitation to a small group of critics and film obsessives who had actually sat through the year.

The Stinkers Bad Movie Awards began in 1978, which puts them a couple of years ahead of the Golden Raspberries and about nineteen years ahead of owning a website. Mike Lancaster and Ray Wright had been ushers at a Pasadena theater, which is the right origin for this. Two people who had to stand at the back of the same bad film twenty times in a week needed somewhere to put it.

The first public ballots went out in 1997 and the awards lived on the web for the next ten years. Worst Picture and Worst Actor were in there with everybody else's, along with categories no other organization has attempted, including Worst Fake Accent and Worst On-Screen Hairstyle. Every year they invented a one-off prize for whatever the year had specifically done to them.

There was never a ceremony. The Golden Raspberries built an event with a podium and people turning up to accept, and the Stinkers posted the results. Winners were announced online and that was the entire production, for twenty-eight years.

A year-end worst-of list is a document about a release calendar, and I was on a different calendar. American films arrived in Turkish cinemas late when they arrived at all, and the bottom half of any American year, the comedies nobody asked for and the sequels to them, mostly did not travel. By the time a Stinkers ballot made sense to read here, the films on it were two or three years old and had turned up on a disc or not at all. The list read like a weather report from a country I had never been to.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the toilet ~

In 2002 Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered took four Stinkers including Worst Film, and the organization had a trophy made for him: a miniature toilet that flushed. The part worth keeping is that they had it made. A group with no ceremony and no budget went and had a physical object fabricated for a film they hated, which tells you the whole operation ran on affection rather than on contempt.

That is the gap between the Stinkers and everything that copied the format. Most bad-movie prizes are a press release with a joke stapled to it, written by people who saw the trailer. This one came out of two ushers who had watched everything and kept watching everything long after they stopped working the door, which is why the categories got so specific.

~ ten years on the internet ~

The closing notice is the line that dates the whole thing. They did not announce that the awards were finished after twenty-eight years. They announced that the site was closing after ten years on the internet, which is exactly how an organization older than the web thinks about the web: a place it had been living recently, and could move out of.

The 2004 ballot decision has aged into something larger than it looked at the time. Open public voting had produced a popularity contest about actors instead of a judgment about films, which is the failure every open ranking system online has since found on its own. The Stinkers hit it early and fixed it by making themselves smaller. Almost nothing that came after them was willing to do that.

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