Gearing up

We're using the holiday period to compose individual pages for each city listed in the right column. In a change of plans, these pages will now serve two purposes.

1. We will compile any General Providers that are likely to offer free movie screenings.
2. A list of all available Specific Offers in that city will be listed at the bottom of the page.

For an example of what we're doing, check out Las Vegas. You'll notice that the specific offers will now include the date, time, and location of each screening, if known. Also, each page will be open for comments. We welcome any suggestions, especially those that inform us of any providers or screenings we may have forgotten.

Now that each city will have its own list of screenings, it makes less sense to write a master list of movies that are being screened. But since we've been doing it this way for a year, we'll stick with it a little longer.

Right now 17 movies are offered in the United States and Canada:

27 Dresses
The Bucket List
Cassandra's Dream
Cloverfield
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
First Sunday
How She Move
Mad Money
The Orphanage
Persepolis
Rambo
The Savages
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Strange Wilderness
There Will Be Blood
Untraceable
Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins

How it works

As people are starting to navigate here -- and thank you for coming -- we want to explain how this site will (or at least should) work. Over the next month or so, we will compose how-to pages for each city that is listed in the right column of this page. (Right now they all link to a single page of general tips, with some specific advice for various cities.)

Ideally, this site will provide a thorough list of local resources for free advanced screenings for your city, and will then link to a master page of current movie offers, which will also be organized by city. This is a tall order for us, so forgive us while we work the kinks out.

While we pride ourselves on not wanting any personal information from our visitors -- there's no need to submit an name or an e-mail address here -- we could still benefit from our readers' local expertise. Obviously, we can't know everything about every city, so we encourage advice and feedback from you, especially with regards to screening providers (both online and offline) that we may have missed. The nice thing about the blog format is that you can leave comments, even anonymously. If you would like to help us compile sources and screening events, or add cities we've left out, we would appreciate the assistance.

Again, look for THE MOVIE OUTSIDER to approach a finished form in January 2008. We look forward to being the best source of the free information you deserve.

Watch this space

It's time for the biggest and most time-consuming part of my personal blog to be spun off into its own entity.

Well, it's not quite time. The transfer from Brevity's Advanced Screenings Guide to this page should be complete by January 2008.

Please make a note of it.