Rex Reed

Rex Taylor Reed (born October 2, 1938) is an American film critic, journalist, and media personality. Raised throughout the Southern United States and educated at Louisiana State University, Reed moved to New York City in the early 1960s to begin his career, writing about popular culture, art, and celebrities for a number of newspapers and magazines. He became a public figure in his own right, making regular appearances on television and occasionally acting in films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Reed has been a longtime writer for The New York Observer, where he authors the "Talk of the Town" column. He is known for his blunt style and contrarian tastes, and some of his writing has garnered criticism for containing factual errors or disparaging remarks about actors. Early life Reed was born on October 2, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Jewell (née Smith) and James M. Reed, an oil company supervisor. In an interview with The New York Times, Reed stated: "My mother came from a family of 10 in Oklahoma, her second cousins were the Dalton Gang. And when my grandfather was a little boy, he was rocked by Jesse James on his knee." Due to his father's profession, the family moved throughout the American South during Reed's childhood. He earned his journalism degree from Louisiana State University in 1960. There, he began writing film and play reviews, not only for the university's newspaper, The Daily Reveille, but also for the Baton Rouge newspaper, The Morning Advocate. He moved to New York City after graduating from LSU, hoping to find success as an actor. Instead, he was hired to work at the publicity department of 20th Century Fox. In 1969, he said his job there was to "write those puffy things about Elvis Presley and—you know—Fabian, and tell everybody how great they were when I wouldn't be caught dead seeing their movies myself. [...] Cleopatra came along and rocked the company financially. We were saving on rubber bands and paying Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to float down the Nile while everybody back at Fox was taking salary cuts, and I was the first one to go—the little guy at the $75 salary, the most dispensable item in the company. I was fired." Later in the decade, he provided many interviews for The New York Times and New York, which at the time was the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune.