From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

When senior writer Richard Corliss began reviewing movies for TIME in 1980, the bulk of his working hours were spent in a clutch of screening rooms in mid-Manhattan. To be sure, he paid occasional business visits to Hollywood studios and, each year, to the Cannes Film Festival. But the time that mattered most to Corliss's work for the magazine was largely spent in the dark.

In the succeeding years, though, the line between popular entertainment -- personified by and in the movies -- and everyday life began to blur, and the cross-cultural loops grew ever more intricate and confusing. Fortunately, , his polymathic interests and peripatetic instincts made him an ideal explorer of this new electronic landscape.

A passionate baseball fan -- and devotee of the Oakland A's -- Corliss has for years carefully observed the transformation of a sport into a commercial marketing juggernaut; one result of this absorption was his story in last week's TIME on the practice of municipalities' building ballparks to attract restless team owners. He has also written on a dizzying array of other entertainment-related topics, including theme parks (in both the U.S. and Europe), pop music (from Whitney Houston to Waylon Jennings) and the new rawness in films, rock and books (a cover story on "Dirty Words").

But Corliss has not abandoned films, as his regular reviews and his cover stories on Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise and Jodie Foster attest. "I still love writing about movies. But there's no disputing that nowadays everything from a presidential campaign to a heavyweight fighter's rape trial is show business -- infotainment. That's my beat too."

So when the ugly headlines about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow exploded last week, Corliss was ready to interpret this example of life imitating art imitating life. "As a professional voyeur, I prefer to think of movie people as glamorous fictions up on the screen -- the way the Mia Farrow character did in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. But frequently now, these characters step out of the klieg lights and onto our front page. They become smaller, more vulnerable, contemptible or pitiable. And so, perhaps, do we who watch them."

As Corliss's original subject has expanded, so has his work load, a development he welcomes: "I like it best around here when they keep me busy. If I'm not in the magazine each week, I get to feeling logy and unloved." Given the current cultural hyperactivity and crossbreeding, he is not likely to feel either anytime soon.