I FINISHED WRITING THE FRACTURED MIRROR!

When I was writing the Kickstarter campaign for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American films about moviemaking, I gave myself a year and a half to finish the book. 

Usually, I only give myself a year to finish books, but I knew that The Fractured Mirror would be a massive undertaking that would require an insane amount of work and research. 

I was right about The Fractured Mirror being a herculean endeavor, but I underestimated just how much work I would end up doing. 

My initial goal was to write up three hundred movies for The Fractured Mirror. I wanted to write up EVERY narrative American film about moviemaking along with a generous sampling of documentaries about the subject. 

Bear in mind, when I say EVERY narrative American film about moviemaking I mean EVERY narrative American film about moviemaking. I did not limit myself to major films or theatrically released films or studio films. 

No, I set out to write about EVERYTHING. That includes LOTS of obscure direct-to-video garbage and low-budget monstrosities. 

I missed that deadline by about a year because I ended up writing about WAY more than 300 movies—300 movies was just a start. I ended up writing about nearly 150 more movies. 

My massive original plan ballooned by fifty percent. I ended up writing about almost 450 movies, and I’m still tackling new entries. 

I would like to officially announce THAT I FINALLY FINISHED WRITING AND RESEARCHING THE FRACTURED MIRROR. 

I worried that I had given myself such an impossible task that it could never be finished, but I just kept working and working and working, and now I have a book that I fucking adore. 

Hopefully, The Fractured Mirror will be like The Weird Accordion to Al in that it didn’t have much of an online following and doesn’t seem terribly impressive as four hundred and thirty-six blurbs, but when the puzzle pieces are put together, the result is something extraordinary. 

I write books that I want to read but do not exist. Researching The Fractured Mirror I couldn’t find a halfway decent list of American films about moviemaking. That would have been wonderful. It would have cut down on the massive amount of time I’ve spent in the last two and a half years compulsively Googling movies to see if they fit the criteria for the book.

I did it! I honestly worried that I would never finish, but I’ve written a six hundred-page book chronicling an entire century of a particularly fascinating subsection of American film. It’s one long story of ego, capitalism, and make-believe told in hundreds of different voices over one hundred eventful years. 

The maddening thing is that I keep finding movies to write about for the book. Yesterday, for example, a member of my Facebook group Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin asked if I included a 2020 satire of opportunistic Christian filmmaking called Faith Based. 

I had not. I did not know that Faith Based existed but I felt like I had to write about it for the book. Would people have been disappointed if I hadn’t included Faith Based? No. They would understand that while I set out to write about EVERYTHING there’s going to be stuff I can’t cover because I am only human and there are a LOT of things wrong with me. 

I nevertheless felt that my book would be at least a tiny bit better and more complete if I wrote about Faith Based so I watched it last night and added it to the book. 

On a similar note, I’ll be seeing Reagan this weekend in the theaters for my Substack, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. Not many people realize this, but Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor best known for making a movie with a chimpanzee. 

Will Reagan focus monomaniacally on filming Bedtime for Bonzo? God, I hope so. There’s a pretty good chance that Reagan will also end up in The Fractured Mirror. 

I’m going to run an excerpt from The Fractured Mirror, a shard as it were, every weekday for the next two years here on the site. I can do that because I wrote about so many films. 

That’s TWO YEARS of quality daily content promoting a book that took me between two and a half and nine years to finish. I started The Fractured Mirror in 2015, shortly after parting ways with The Dissolve for TCM Backlot. 

I sold two columns to the late, lamented site: First and Last, an ambitious feature in which I wrote about the first and last films of major filmmakers and The Fractured Mirror. 

My wonderful editor there, who let me take my TCM Backlot pieces so I could re-run them here and include them in my book, asked me if there were enough movies to make The Fractured Mirror a regular feature. 

That was not a problem. I had the opposite dilemma, in that I kept discovering weird, obscure shit from the 1930s I had to write about for the book, but it was very hard to find filmmakers to cover for First and Last. 

I’m working on my third or fourth edit of the book. The initial word count was something like 146,000 words, which is a little less than three times the length of an average book. 

I’m taking a metaphorical machete to the text and cutting everything that’s not essential. There’s something incredibly liberating about realizing just how much you don’t need. 

146,000 went down to 136,000 in the last edit. I’m trying to get it down to 125,000 on this one. 

I plan to have the book ready for purchase and public consumption by my son Declan’s tenth birthday on October 12th. Giving yourself a hard deadline is good, even if it’s arbitrary. 

I’m embarrassed that on this website The Joy of Trash is still listed as a new book. I put that out three years ago and while I’m enormously proud of it, particularly the extended version, it did not sell as well as I would have liked, nor did it receive much in the way of attention. 

That spooked me. I had a lot of confidence in the book. I hoped that it would bring people to the website and lead to exciting opportunities. That did not happen, and it caused me to lose a lot of confidence. 

That’s part of the reason it’s taken me so long to finish The Fractured Mirror. I really want it to succeed and I know all too well just how difficult it is to sell books independently. 

I cannot wait for y’all to see the finished product. I cannot wait to see the finished product myself. There’s nothing quite like holding a book in your hands for the first time.

I can’t wait to see my words combined with my illustrator Felipe Sobreiro’s artwork. He’s done extraordinary work that makes the whole thing at least twice as good. 

I do not know whether The Fractured Mirror will be a commercial success but I know that I’ve written a book unlike any that currently exists. I suspect that The Fractured Mirror is the only book where Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star is immediately followed by Burden of Dreams. It is a work of serious film scholarship that’s also super fun to read. If you enjoy my writing, and you wouldn’t be here if you did not, holy crap, you’re going to love it.

I’m hoping this will inspire a lot of double features of the two movies. 

I’d like to promote this fucker as extensively as possible, so if you’d like to interview me or have me on your podcast or do a signing at your bookstore or weed dispensary, feel free to email me at nathanrabinauthor@gmail.com 

I did it! I did! I finished my ninth book. I also finished my tenth book, my first novel, which is a story for another blog post. 

The Big WhoopNathan Rabin