Men on film: Leonard Maltin and The Advocate's Alonso Duralde talk about their new movie books, coming out just in time for stocking stuffer season.

Legendary film critic Leonard Maltin gives his fans a twofer this holiday season, with his essential 2006 Movie Guide (Plume, $20) and the brand-new Classic Movie Guide (Plume, $20), which features more than 9,000 entries for films made through 1960. Advocate arts and entertainment editor Alonso Duralde makes his first foray into the film-guide world with 101 Must-see Movies for Gay Men (Advocate Books, $14.95), a compendium of laves from All About Eve and The Apple to Xanadu and Zero Patience. In a recent phone conversation, the two colleagues compared notes on the triumphs and tribulations of making movie books.

Duralde: I have to toll you, every year getting your new movie guide, it's like getting the Sears catalog when you're a kid. I always have to tear through it and find the reviews of the movies that came out since the last one.

Maltin: Well, God bless you and people like you. Your book's a lot of fun.

Duralde: Oh, I'm glad you liked it. It sort of started as a lark, and midway through I realized it was a taxing lark and wished I'd called it 45 Must-see Movies for Gay Men.

Maltin: Yes, well, I've been there and done that.

Duralde: As with your movie guide, I hope it's the sort of thing that people will take with them to the video store or have next to them when they're Netflixing.

Maltin: I think the best part of a book like this--I do it on too large a scale; you've done it on a very well-focused subject--is the feeling that you get of bringing people to good movies. That's the greatest satisfaction. If someone stops me and says, "I was debating whether to stay up late last night to see something, and I read your review, so I stayed up and I really liked it," that makes me feel good. That's very satisfying. And I'm sure you will have the same kind of response, knowing you have turned somebody on to something really good. Or something interesting. Or something that will lead them on a different stream, to investigate more films by the same writer, the same director, whatever it may be. Well, not in the case of Glitter. [Alonso laughs]

Duralde: [Glitter director] Vondie Curtis-Hall is a great actor, at least.

Maltin: Oh, we like him. We're rooting for him.

Duralde: So this year you're diversifying the franchise with the Classic Movie Guide. This is all up to 1960?

Maltin: Yep. The reason behind it was simple: We'd run out of space. There are certain laws of physics that cannot be violated, and they couldn't bind the book any thicker and keep it together. I don't mean that in the cosmic sense; I mean literally keep it together. [Alonso laughs] So finally we came upon this idea--my daughter takes credit for it--which was to segregate the older movies, but not completely. The idea is that in the annual book you should still be able to look up City Lights or The Thief of Baghdad or Metropolis or High Noon, and you can. But you can't look up a lot of the lesser films of the '30s and '40s and '50s. Those are now only in the Classic Guide.

Duralde: And a lot of them have never appeared before, right?

Maltin: Then, while we were at it, we did have space in the Classic Guide, we said, "We should probably add some stuff." We added 1,100 more reviews.

Duralde: That's extraordinary.

Maltin: It's crazy, is what it is. You know, you have to be nuts to do this. Doing a reference book is not for sissies.

Duralde: I feel your pain. I was just reading in your intro where you talk about the challenge of what year you assign to a movie and all that stuff, and now that it's come up for me ... well, let's just say some of my proofreaders took IMDB.com as gospel.

Maltin: Oh, that's a mistake.

Duralde: So I kind of had to say, "No, this movie might have played Toronto in that year, but it opened in theaters the following year." It's a thankless task.

Maltin: It's not thankless when it's done.

Duralde: This is true.

Maltin: It's like virtue; it's its own reward.

Duralde: So how much of your year goes into this?

Maltin: It's never-ending. We used to do the book every other year in the '70s and early '80s, and frankly, we would goof off that off year. We shouldn't have--that was not the smart way to do it--but we did. Then when it became an annual in the '80s, we realized that the only way to do it was to just keep at it all the time. So nobody works on it full-time, but by the same token, nobody's ever not working on it. [Laughs]

Duralde: As someone who observes the industry, do you see the three new gay cable channels giving a home to movies that people have forgotten about that are going to turn up on TV again?

Maltin: I think it's great. When I was a kid, the big, bold promise of cable TV was that there would be narrowcasting. There'd be a stamp-collecting channel; there'd be a dog-care channel. And that never happened, because even the channels that started out narrowcasting decided, oh, we want to make big money. So narrowcasting never came, but it's starting to diversify a bit. The gay channels certainly are good and welcome evidence of that. Just as IFC and Sundance channels have created a welcome home for independent features--and shorts--giving access to those films to people who don't have art theaters in their community and maybe only have a Blockbuster. This is a lifeline, and I would think the same would be true for the gay channels. And that's terrific.