Little white lies: movie magazine

from The Guardian 

 Publishing
A film magazine less ordinary
“If you line up most film magazines side by side you’ll see that, really, they’re basically the same magazine – same covers, same features, even the same marks for each film review,” says Danny Miller, editor of Little White Lies – a new, underground film quarterly. “When I was growing up, I loved magazines so much I’d collect them. The only thing I loved more than magazines was film. Gradually, because film magazines were so boring, I stopped buying magazines altogether.”

Miller’s answer to the problem of repetitive publishing came to him eight years ago. He conceived Little White Lies with his schoolfriend Matthew Bochenski when aged 17 and they carried the dream with them through university and into their first jobs at skate and snowboard magazine Adrenalin. When the independent publishers behind Adrenalin collapsed last November, he put together the first issue of Little White Lies with Bochenski and various friends writing about film “in the same way you talk about it in the pub”.

“If you’re talking about a film you don’t endlessly discuss camera angles or try to imagine what it would have been like visiting the set,” he argues. “You use the film as a springboard to talk about all sorts of stuff. That’s our philosophy. Each issue of Little White Lies is themed on a film, but then our writers are at liberty to come up with stuff on whatever the film inspires in them.”

Thus, the third issue takes George A Romero’s Land Of The Dead as a theme to riff on rock stars who should be dead and voodoo practitioners in London, while the next issue – on King Kong – runs features on great fights in nature and the Donkey Kong videogame.

Since launching the magazine, Miller has has got his old job at Adrenalin back after a new publisher was found for the title. He’s kept going with Lies, however, and is developing the kind of solid, paid-for business plan that recent launches such as Stool Pigeon and Good For Nothing have proclaimed impossible. Little White Lies is sold in Borders, Virgin and Fopp stores as well as independent clothing and music stores. With a cover price of £2.75, it is currently shifting a modest 10,000 copies, but that accounts for almost 80% of the print run.

“Obviously we don’t expect the likes of Empire and Total Film to have even heard of us,” Miller admits, “They sell 200,000, we sell less than a tenth of that. But we don’t have their tired formula, we don’t cull our news section from the internet and we don’t just choose the same films as everyone else to run with. That’s all we want to do – provide somewhere for people who are really passionate about film to go.”
Stephen Armstrong