Recent writing around the web

Haven't had much of a chance to do any blogging this week so thought I would share some of the bits and pieces I have been writing around the web over the last few days instead:

The World's End Review at Filmoria

Deconstructing Cinema: This is England at Static Mass Emporium

The Deep Review at Filmoria

Roland Emmerich Retrospective at Filmoria

Not film related but I've also been blabbing away at Yahoo about all sorts of stuff like:

Why we should celebrate the NHS

Why conflict avoidance will make a happy relationship

I'm currently writing a James Wan retrospective for Filmoria ahead of the release of The Conjuring and then I'll be writing ones on Paul Greengrass and Edgar Wright later in the year. For regular readers, you may know I'm currently writing a book on The Blair Witch Project. I'm trying to get the first draft finished in the next two weeks and then hopefully I will make revisions when I get back from holiday and perhaps it may get published this year!

I hope you will be tempted to go and check out some of my writing elsewhere and particularly the top two which I am very proud of.

Also check out my top 10 films to see in July. If you haven't got a copy of Starbust magazine for this month, there may still be some on shelves for a little while longer and I'd love it if you checked out my two articles inside. Better still, subscribe to Starburst here.

The History of Internet Movie Marketing

I'm currently writing one of the last chapters of my book on The Blair Witch Project for the Auteur Devil's Advocate series and I'm trying to find out a bit about the history of movie marketing using the internet as a tool. Everybody knows about the effectiveness of the website that was made to promote The Blair Witch Project but I'm curious about how ground breaking it actually was.

I'm finding it pretty hard to find out much about the history of internet movie marketing so I've put a few tweets out to see if anyone can help. Here are the tweets. This is, by the way, one of the many reasons I love Twitter. There are so many movie buffs out there and their knowledge, passion and desire to communicate astounds me. I'm just waiting for the day when I run out of movie buffs to follow but I hope that never happens.

Anyone know anything about the history of movie marketing on the internet?
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) June 17, 2013

Anyone know the first film to have a promotional website?
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) June 17, 2013

When did promotional movie websites become commonplace?
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) June 17, 2013

And as usual with the power of the internet, I got a response to one of these question almost immediately. How good is that? Love Twitter. Love the internet. Very grateful to @beckygracelea for the information. I recommend you go follow her for being awesome!

@ilovethatfilm Oddly, I do know this one - it was Stargate in 1994.
— Becky Lea (@beckygracelea) June 17, 2013

So Stargate eh? Freaky that I've just finished writing a Roland Emmerich retrospective for Filmoria too (to be published next week). You'd have thought I might have stumbled across this little nugget of information. Here is the proof that @beckygracelea was right:

"Stargate was the first movie to ever have an official website. It was set up by Dean Devlin in 1994 and featured images, trailers and behind the scenes clips and actor information."

So now my other questions still stand, what happened next, when did it become commonplace? Was Blair Witch really the one that made movie makers see the power of the internet as a marketing tool?  Any help would be extremely generous and much appreciated!