"I feel like Scott Ryan could have written this directly to me and others in our generation who have basically 'given up' on movies. It is at once tribute and eulogy, so bittersweet." - Screenwriter Helen Childress (Reality Bites)"The nineties are lucky to have Scott Ryan." - Actress Natasha Gregson Wagner (Two Girls and a Guy, Lost Highway) Ah, the nineties. Movies were something in those days.
We're talking about a decade that began with GoodFellas and ended with Magnolia, with such films as Malcolm X, Before Sunrise, and Clueless arriving somewhere in between. Stories, characters, and writing were king; IP, franchise movies, and supersaturated superhero flicks were still years away.
Or so says Scott Ryan, the iconoclastic author of The Last Days of Letterman and Moonlighting: An Oral History, who here turns his attention to The Last Decade of Cinema-the prolific 1990s. Ryan, who watched just about every film released during the decade when he was a video store clerk in a small town in Ohio, identifies twenty-five unique and varied films from the decade, including Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society, and The Shawshank Redemption, focusing with his trademark humor and insight on what made them classics and why they could never be produced in today's film culture.