My name is Jonathan Haisty Winchell. I was born on December 25, 1991, in Greenville, South Carolina. I lived the first 19 years of my life in Clemson, SC, where both my parents taught English at Clemson University. I graduated from D.W. Daniel High School in Central, SC, in 2010. After spending one year at Tri-County Technical College, I moved to Columbia, SC, where I spent the next three years at the University of South Carolina. I graduated from there in 2014 with my BA in Film and Media Studies. In 2015 I moved to New York City to attend New York University, which I graduated from in May of 2017 with my MA in Cinema Studies.
My whole life I have been obsessed with film and television. Like most young people my age, I grew up watching typical children’s fare such as Disney films, Looney Tunes, The Wizard of Oz, and Nickelodeon. However, my father introduced me to older films before I was old enough to read the intertitles in the silent films. Once I was watching the 1961 Disney film of Babes in Toyland starring Annette Funicello, and my father told me that there was an earlier version starring two funny men named Laurel and Hardy. He did not have that 1934 film at the house, so he showed me their later film The Flying Deuces (1939). It sparked my life-long love of old films. There were two types of films that got me interested in older cinema at an early age. They were the classic comedies by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Fatty Arbuckle, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, W.C. Fields, Mae West, and Bob Hope, just to name a few, as well as the classic Universal monster films such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the sequels, most notably the Abbott and Costello films, which tied my two childhood passions together. As I grew older, my film interest and knowledge grew exponentially from all different directors, genres, eras, and countries. My fascination with the moving image does not stop with just theatrical films. Television series, movies, and mini-series are consumed by me also.
This blog will be my forum to review, discuss, and post about film and television and what-have-you in the world of entertainment. I will regularly post reviews of films and television, home video and streaming releases, and links to articles about films and television. This is just the beginning, so I do not know exactly how this blog will change and morph, but I hope it is a source of entertainment, information, and inspiration.
-Jonathan H. Winchell
Winchell's Film Column 