Todd McCarthy joins IndieWire

Less than two months after losing his gig as chief film critic at Variety, Todd McCarthy has signed on with IndieWire. He'll do film commentary at a blog they are calling Todd McCarthy's Deep Focus. He sounds happy to be making the print-to-digital jump, and abashed by the reaction to his involuntary uncoupling from Variety.

I was amazed and somewhat embarrassed by the attention it all received, but deeply gratified by the support that came from so many quarters.

I really was feeling the love in a way I hadn’t in a long time. In some cases, particularly with what my old pal Roger Ebert wrote (see Variety loses Ebert), I rather felt in the peculiar position of being privileged to read my own obituary, so detailed were the anecdotes and memories being conjured up.

Happily, along with all this came some intriguing proposals to venture out in new professional directions, offers I imagine would never have been advanced had I remained ensconced at Variety. Needless to say, there were no invitations to become a critic at what used to be called major metropolitan newspapers or national magazines; such jobs barely exist anymore and the few critics who have them know how lucky they are but still may find their minds wandering during boring movies to thoughts of alternate future careers.

No, the majority of possibilities lay in the electronic world, a domain I felt no need to embrace early on but which now clearly represents the only expanding arena for the written word.

IndieWire's stable of writers also includes Anne Thompson and Leonard Maltin.