Introducing Raspberries in Review, a New Column Only on Patreon
If you’re anything like me, you rely on the Patreon income from your website, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place to make a living. If so, that would be weird, as I’m pretty sure Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place is my thing. Consequently I am perpetually looking for ways to gain new patrons and attract new donors to the site.
I make enough from crowd-funding that I can devote the vast majority of my time and resources to it and pay my bills and keep the lights on in the process. But I seem to have hit a wall about a year back. If you remove Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledges from the equation and I’ve remained stuck in a place of about 640 patrons and about 3200 dollars in pledges a month for a while. That’s not bad. In fact it’s quite good and I am almost obscenely grateful for every penny this site generates. But it could be better and I would love for this site to grow instead of hitting a wall and then staying there forever or growing less popular and lucrative with time. Those are both very real possibilities!
To that end, I’ve tried to make the Patreon as appealing as possible. I have a pair of Patreon-only columns that I’m very proud of, The Bigger Whoop, a larger, more personal, super-sized version of the Big Whoop blog where I wrestle, and I mean really wrestle, with all of the heavy shit that comes with being a writer and a dad and an American and a human being at a very strange period in our nation’s history.
Patreon is also the exclusive home of Control Nathan Rabin 3.0, a more personal version of Control Nathan Rabin, Control Nathan Rabin and Clint and Control Nathan Rabin 40 (I guess you could say I’m something of a “Control” freak!) where I’ve written about stuff like The Onion Movie, Big Money Rustlas, Ghost Dad and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.
Now I am adding a third Patreon-only column to the mix in the form of Raspberries in Review. It's a column that takes a long, rambling journey through the history of the Golden Raspberries, the notorious bad movie awards that has been taking cheap shots at easy targets since 1980.
AND as if all that isn’t exciting enough, Clint and I will be talking Raspberries in Review as a patron-exclusive feature on our page, https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappycast .
I am not writing Raspberries in Review because I’m a fan of the Golden Raspberries. I’m not. I think they’re empty and glib, mean-spirited and smug. But I’m fascinated by what was considered the worst of the worst at the time, and how it’s seen now. To cite two particularly galling examples, Stanley Kubrick and Shelley Duvall were both nominated for their legendary, all-time great work in The Shining, while Faye Dunaway actually WON a Golden Raspberry for her performance in Mommy Dearest, which I honestly think is one of the greatest performances in film history. I’m not kidding.
At the same time, the Golden Raspberries has carved out a weird place in bad film history for ephemera that might be completely forgotten otherwise. The first entry in Raspberries in Review, for example, is devoted to the first-ever winner of worst original song, “The Man With Bogart’s Face.”
Does it deserve to be “win” an award for being terrible? You’ll just have to sign up for my Patreon to find out. Is it worth a dollar a month? Yes. Definitely. Heck, I think my piece on The Test alone is worth pledging a dollar for. Also, pledge at any level and get instant access to all of my other patron-only content.
I’m hoping this will prove the proverbial “killer app” that will get us over the hump and take us to that next level, to borrow a favorite hip hop cliche.
So join the Patreon and embark with me on yet another journey through the detritus of our cinematic past. I’m hoping to update the column at least once a month along with either Control Nathan Rabin 3.0 or The Bigger Whoop, so God willing, there’ll be at least two meaty patron-only pieces a month.
Join us! It’s gonna be great!
Support independent media, get access to patron-only content and be an All-Star over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace