Exploiting the Archives! Corey Feldman month, the Prequel

It can’t be hard to believe, but I wasn’t always a sad, bitter, failed forty-one year old just barely able to scrape by in his chosen field. Before I was unemployable, I was employed for decades in some of the highest echelons of the pop culture universe. Heck, for 16 years I wrote for The A.V Club, primarily as their head writer. Then I quit in 2013 because I didn’t like the direction the site was headed, and the site exploded in popularity. 

Coincidence? Probably not. 

This can similarly be hard to believe, but My World of Flops did not begin with the 86th Case File on Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign here at Nathan Rabin's Happy Place. Nope, the column actually began over a decade earlier in the blog of The A.V Club. Yes, I was a hard-working motherfucker with a beast of a work ethic and I remain a hard-working motherfucker with a beast of a work ethic (that’s actually what I list my job as on both my business cards and my taxes).

So I thought it would be fun to honor the work I did for other sites with a new column called “Exploiting the Archives.” At some point, God willing, I will be exploiting the archives from this here website, but for now, I’m going to dip into the deep, deep pool of work I’ve done for The A.V Club, The Dissolve, Splitsider, TCM Backlot, Rotten Tomatoes and others throughout the years. 

And since we are smack-dab in the middle of Corey Feldman, AKA the month that will be this site’s downfall, I figured it would make sense to begin with pieces that, individually and collectively, serve as something of a prequel to Corey Feldman Month, AKA Feld-Month, AKA “Why do I do these things? Don’t I want to be successful?” 

We’ll start with a piece I wrote for Slate back in the day about Corey Haim’s fascinating video “Me, Myself & I” and what it has to teach the Justin Biebers of the world. I really only needed to watch the video itself but being the obsessive that I am, I decided that I needed to do as much research as humanly possible. 

So I didn’t just watch the heartbreaking homemade video I was writing about. I also read Corey Feldman’s memoir Coreyography for context, and in hope that at some point he would write about "Me Myself & I", but if he did, it was briefly, if at all. I similarly watched all of The Two Coreys, the duo’s ill-fated comeback vehicle/reality show/“soft-scripted” sitcom/pit of infinite sadness. 

And you know what? At no point in The Two Coreys is the “Me, Myself & I” video ever mentioned. But I am glad that I subjected myself to all of that seemingly unnecessary research because it was fucking fascinating, and the way my brain and my career work, I end finding a use for just about everything that I do. 

So I ended up writing about The Two Coreys for the sixty-sixth entry in My World of Flops. It was a creatively satisfying experience, and I came to really know and love and feel for Corey Haim, and, to a very lesser degree Corey Feldman. Actually, I feel enormous sympathy and pity for Feldman, where I genuinely think Haim seemed like a lovely human. 

I probably should have stopped there, as I was always cognizant that page-views were very important to The A.V Club, and that there were enormous dangers in writing about something intensely unpopular, like, Corey Feldman’s music career, which I did for the seventy-second case file of My World of Flops. Less than a year later, the A.V Club decided to kill the column for not being popular enough.. 

Coincidence? I think not. Because if you’re going to irrevocably harm your career writing excessively about Corey Feldman and Corey Haim for no discernible reason, why not follow the directive of Feldman’s biggest single and just go for it? To that end, I wrote about the culture-wide mockery that greeted Feldman’s infamous The Today Show performance for Mel Magazine. I have not written for them since. Coincidence? I think not.

Anywho, I believe those are the only times I wrote about Haim & Feldman outside of Feld-Month, but I’m looking to make this a regular feature so if there is a piece I’ve done pre-Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place that you’d like to see me write about or include in this column, please do so in the comments. And yes, I definitely will cover the Bronson Pinchot Random Roles in this column. It would be foolish of me not to. 

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