Coming Soon to the Tribune
His sex aside, Mike Wilmington should turn out to be just what the Tribune wanted in a film critic. He writes gracefully, he’s prolific, and he not only loves film but likes films, lots of them. “Dave [Kehr] would give three movies a year four stars,” an admirer of both told us, comparing Wilmington to his predecessor. “That won’t be the case with Michael. He tends to find something he likes in a lot of movies and he writes chiefly about that. A performance, a well-edited sequence–he tends to focus on the positive.”
He thought the Times was offering him a job on staff. What he got, thanks to management shifts, routine bureaucratic betrayal, and his own naivete, was high- profile piecework–no desk to call his own, no health insurance. Then the Tribune called.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
If he’d known the Tribune wanted a woman more, he told us, he probably would have blown Dretzka off. But he respects the paper’s priorities. “My mother had a really really rough time. I’m kind of angry at how women are treated in the marketplace because of her. So I’m not unsympathetic to the Tribune’s desire to have a woman film critic.”
“I would say so. I had a working mother who had an increasingly rough time. Part of the time I was in college, even though she was an artist and art teacher she went to work in a factory and sent me a good deal of her paycheck to keep me there. I don’t want to belabor that, because there are people from much rougher backgrounds, but in newspapers it’s not common and in film criticism it’s even less common.”
Fuller Up
To no one’s surprise at the Tribune, editor Jack Fuller is moving up and out of the newsroom to become president of the Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune Company subsidiary. To Fuller’s corporate superiors, who don’t necessarily weigh performance by the same standards as mere reporters do, Fuller steadied the ship after relieving Jim Squires as captain four years ago and now merits reward.
