Longtime LA Weekly film critic F.X. Feeney, who also spent years as a member of KPCC’s FilmWeek critic team, died last week at the age of 66.
Feeney’s work appeared in a number of publications including People Magazine, Variety and Vanity Fair, but he was best known for his “soulful writing” which his obituary in the Weekly says was “an indelible part of the paper’s legacy.” Feeney started in the industry working in animation before he started writing reviews for the Weekly and eventually became the paper’s resident critic. He also wrote, consulted and programmed for the 1980s pay television station “Z Channel,” one of the country’s first of its kind. He would eventually co-produce with Xan Cassavetes a documentary about it called “Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession.”
Today on FilmWeek, we remember F.X. our friend and colleague F.X. Feeney, his career, and what Larry Mantle and our FilmWeek critics learned from him.
Guests:
Amy Nicholson, film critic for KPCC, film writer for The Guardian and host of the podcasts ‘Unspooled’ and the podcast miniseries “Zoom”; she tweets
Peter Rainer, film critic for KPCC and the Christian Science Monitor
Charles Solomon, film critic for KPCC, Animation Scoop and Animation Magazine