Clean Up the AFI--Or Shut It Down

Among film buffs, the American Film Institute has been a subject of scorn and derision for years. Why? Those endlessly stupid TV specials celebrating the 10 Best "whatever" Films. In the 1960s, they were a strong player in film preservation. They ran a film school. The published American Film magazine, now defunct. They began a project to catalog every U.S.-made film--a project now stalled at 1973, because the AFI just laid off the staff.

Read this Nikki Finke post, with the comments by former AFI employees. Clearly it's time for somebody like Martin Scorsese or, er, Congress, to take an interest in the apparently dysfunctional American Film Institute.