Kurt Loder
A longtime film critic for Reason Online, Loder was born in Miami, where he remained for about a minute before being removed to the Jersey Shore for 17 years or so. Later, after failing to thrive in higher education, he joined the U.S. Army in order to defend his homeland in the beer halls of Bavaria. He also learned everything he figured it was necessary to know about journalism in an Army training school. (It took about two months.)
Returning home in 1972, he eventually made his way to New York, where he worked for a freebie rock-music weekly and spent endless nights marveling at the punk-rock music scene aborning in Manhattan. If it need be said, these were great times.
In 1978, Loder signed on as an editor at Circus, a heavy-metal magazine with an intense interest in sweaty young rock gods. In 1979, he got a call from Rolling Stone magazine to take over its “Random Notes” column. He remained at Rolling Stone for nine years, eventually becoming a staff feature writer and a senior editor. In 1984, he interviewed Tina Turner, who was releasing a comeback album called "Private Dancer," for a Rolling Stone cover story. This turned into a book called “I, Tina,” which was published in 1986. (It was later turned into a movie, with Angela Bassett playing Tina.)
At the end of 1987, Loder was approached by MTV, wanting to know whether he had ever thought about being on television. He hadn’t. Nevertheless, he accepted the channel’s proposition to host a weekly news show called "The Week in Rock." The concept of a news show on MTV was hailed as ridiculous by many media observers, but "The Week in Rock" remained on the air for more than a decade. In 2004, Loder began writing weekly movie reviews for the channel’s website, MTV.com. More than 200 of those reviews are collected in his 2011 book, "The Good, the Bad, and the Godawful."
Today, Loder lives, not in Manhattan, but in Los Angeles, and doesn’t want to hear any wisecracks. His column, "Screener," can be read here.
