Vent: That AOL chat room where a guy pretended to be a film professor for 6 months

Met this user "CinephileSteve" in a film chat room back in '97. He gave detailed critiques of obscure foreign films for months, then someone found his real profile and he was actually a 14 year old from Ohio who just read a lot of Roger Ebert.

2 comments

2 Comments

the_joel9d ago

Oh come on, you're all being way too harsh on the kid. @derekp70, you say he stole everything but so what? Most film critics start by quoting people they admire. The fact that he was 14 and passionate enough to read Film Comment and Ebert religiously just to have conversations with adults is actually impressive. He wasn't trying to scam anyone for money, he just wanted to feel included in a world he loved. And let's be real, half the people in that chat room were probably faking their ages and credentials too. The only difference is his lie got found out. I see this as a smart kid who found a way to connect with people who actually knew what they were talking about, not some big con artist.

derekp709d ago

The Roger Ebert thing is true but he actually stole most of those critiques from old issues of Film Comment magazine. I remember because I used to read that magazine back in the day and recognized whole paragraphs verbatim from a 1995 issue about French New Wave stuff. That kid was good at pretending but he didn't write any of that himself. The 14 year old part is right though I saw the reveal thread where someone tracked his IP to a high school library in Dayton. Hilarious how everyone thought he was some middle aged professor with a drinking problem because of how he wrote about Italian neorealism.