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In his long career as an arts critic, Godfrey Cheshire built a resume any auteur would envy: a face-to-face interview with Charlton Heston, beers in a dive bar with David Lynch, a romp across Europe with R.E.M. and a dozen-odd trips to Cannes.
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His byline graced Variety, The Village Voice and The New York Times, and, perhaps most importantly, The Spectator, Raleigh’s first alt-weekly and insistent voice for Triangle culture.
Starting in 1978, Cheshire celebrated the headier art coming out of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill — treating them as a unified scene for the first time, building an audience that wanted to see “Days of Heaven” more than “Jaws 2” and who packed into “New Wave Monday Night” at The Pier, Raleigh’s sweaty, subterranean den under Cameron Village.
He penned reviews that UNC professors dissected, drawing in sophisticated readers without seeming pedantic.
A sample from an early-era R.E.M. show:
“While Michael Jackson crashes through the front door of American consciousness,” Cheshire wrote in 1984, “they’re happy to sneak in the back door at odd hours, swiping sandwiches and leaving indecipherable thank-you notes.”
So on Wednesday night, The Rialto Theater will honor Cheshire’s lifelong work pulling the Triangle into the national arts conversation, featuring an onstage Q&A plus signings of his new book of collected works: “Cheshire on Film.”
Fans will especially enjoy the book’s dedication, penned by actor Alex Winter of “Bill and Ted” fame:
“At a time when print media is dying, everyone can publish their opinions online and the dwindling population of serious critics is struggling to maintain the quality of their output and keep themselves fed, Godfrey Cheshire offers a window into a better, richer time for cultural criticism, and a command to the current generation to take art seriously and commit to it with every ounce of themselves.”
In his book, Cheshire describes himself both as “Old Raleigh,” born in the ‘50s when the city’s population barely topped 100,000, and a bookworm from an early age, consuming two newspapers a day and the World Book Encyclopedia.
He delivered The Raleigh Times as a boy, but only after he read A.C. Snow’s column.
At the time, Raleigh had two downtown theaters, both of them single screen, but the Ambassador was the big draw. As a young movie buff, Cheshire shrugged off the usual fare like “Bambi” or “Old Yeller,” considering them sadistic.
The first film that really hooked him: “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
“The thing that really got me was thinking about what the movie meant,” he says in “Cheshire on Film.” “I thought the film created a myth about what America was, where it came from, and the ideas that turned it into what I was experiencing as an American in the 1960s. … I think that was the first time I had an intellectual reaction to a movie.”
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Cheshire would double-major in English and radio/TV/film at UNC, dabbling in Carlos Castaneda, Ingmar Bergman and other counterculture favorites, taking side trips to New York just to see movies. He bounced around Europe, settling on the vague idea of life as a film critic, then stumbling into it for real back in Raleigh thanks to a daredevil publisher named Bernie Reeves.
In his book, Cheshire describes his first boss, who died in 2018, as “a very charming guy with a perpetual twinkle in his eye.”
“He was larger than life,” Cheshire wrote. “Very smart. Very outspoken. Very controversial. He was conservative, a bona-fide right-winger,” but he “hired writers without any regard for their political views. … I always joke that we were the perfect match. I had no credentials and he had no money.”
Before The Spectator, Cheshire would drive to Durham and Chapel Hill to buy their newspapers and find out what movies were playing. But Reeves thought all three cities formed a larger identity, united by their university crowds, and that his alt-weekly would reflect that highbrow quality.
Cheshire imagined an ideal Spectator reader — a Duke graduate, probably a lawyer, but someone who read Norman Mailer books and watched movies made by Jean-Luc Godard. Cheshire didn’t know it at the time, but UNC professors avidly read his Spectator reviews, dissecting them around the water cooler. Soon, the Varsity Theater on Franklin Street started showing art-house movies.
“I saw it as a means of instigating cultural change in the area, especially in helping establish local art houses and encouraging the surge in post-punk/new wave rock and roll,” he says in the book. “I think it worked well for me because I did start to establish this thing, a North Carolina readership that was sophisticated and knowledgeable.”
He carried that flag for more than a decade, guiding Triangle readers through “Paris, Texas,” “Sherman’s March” and “Blue Velvet,” a film which, as many North Carolinians will remember, famously outraged and terrified the citizens of Lumberton, where it was set.
Cheshire doused the “Blue Velvet” flames, urging a cautious, quick-to-judge audience how to think about the art they encountered, and how speak the language that comes from a creative mind.
He would do this for 40 years in hundreds of reviews, now collected in one place.
“We don’t want demonstrations of moral correctness that are dry as dust,” he wrote in his “Blue Velvet” review for The Spectator, “and what we do want, what rivets our gaze and compels our attention, is often what frightens or unsettles us most.”
Godfrey Cheshire will appear at The Rialto Theater in Raleigh at 7 p.m. Wednesday for a celebration of his life’s work as an arts critic and his new collected works, “Cheshire on Film.” Tickets are $16.50 and can be purchased here.
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