This site is dedicated to Dennis Cusick, the Antaeus of Scramsterdam, who keeps me rooted.

In addition, I would like to acknowledge my debt to friends and family whose conversations with me about movies were more consistently entertaining and enlightening than moviegoing itself: my sister Jennifer Simpson and her daughter Sara, my thesis advisor at Princeton and all-weather friend Maria DiBattista, Hilda Daniel, Liz Main, Gina Vanlue, Diane and Terry Rafferty, Steve Vineberg, Stephanie Zacharek and Charley Taylor, Mike Sragow, Stacy Cochran, and Brian Sloan. A number of friends--Maria, Jenny, Liz, Tod Lippy, Christopher Hughes, Sarah Lawsky, and Stephanie--also put their minds and time at my disposal in reading, commenting on, and editing individual chapters, for which I am extremely grateful. I would like to make special mention of Steve Vineberg’s heroism in reading the whole manuscript and corresponding with me by e-mail while doing so.

In addition, I owe a general debt for emotional support to my parents, my sister Emily Dale, my restaurant pal and devoted friend Virginia Bower, my advisors and friends Arnold Rampersad and Marvina White, and the folks at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom where I worked while first beating the manuscript into shape. I would also like to single out my good friends at Yale Law School--Liz Emens, who can make a trip to the grocery store both an intimate get-together and an event, Becca Richards, Adrian Lingaya, John Bozada, Amanda Mills, Laurie Barber, and Elbert Lin, and the rest of the Rubenfeld small group--for keeping me sane while finishing it. On the material plane, Marianne Crusius at the Princeton Language Lab helped me get funding to buy many of the titles on video, which was essential to the composition.

I would like to thank the Theatre Library Association, which gave me an award for Comedy Is a Man in Trouble. That recognition, and the party that Stacy and Eric Cochran gave me after the ceremony, were the high points of the book’s publication and gave me the needed impetus when I was bringing this project to completion.

Finally, I would like to thank my sisters at The Kitchen Cabinet for encouraging me to publish regular movie reviews, Eric Olsen at Blogcritics who supplied the name for this site, and Julie Roth, tireless Web designer extraordinaire who brought me through the looking-glass from print to virtual publishing.