Tim Lucas

Tim Lucas (born May 30, 1956) is a film critic, biographer, novelist, screenwriter, , and publisher/editor of the video review magazine Video Watchdog.

Lucas, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, was the only child of Marion Frank Lucas, a typesetter and musician, and the former Juanita Grace Wilson; his father died six months prior to his birth, on November 14, 1955, of a congenital heart ailment at age 33. He subsequently spent most of his childhood in the homes of various relatives and caregivers, seeing his widowed mother only on weekends, when she took him to drive-in theaters. After publishing single issues of two fanzines, he became a film critic and cartoonist for Norwood High School's newspaper The Mirror while still a freshman. He began writing professionally at the age of fifteen, when his first reviews were accepted by the influential fantasy film review Cinefantastique. He served at one of the magazine's midwestern bureaus for the next ten years.

Though Lucas never formally graduated high school, he succeeded in placing an essay in Purdue University's literary quarterly Modern Fiction Studies on the occasion of its Autumn 1981 issue, dedicated to British novelist Anthony Burgess. Jokingly, Lucas has described this accomplishment as his "honorary doctorate" because his letter of acceptance was addressed to "Dr. Timothy Lucas." His article, The Old Shelley Game: Prometheus and Predestination in Burgess's Works, was subsequently anthologized in Modern Critical Views: Anthony Burgess (1987, ), a collection "of the best criticism available upon the novels of Anthony Burgess" in the words of its editor, Harold Bloom.

It was in 1984, while reviewing Betamax and VHS releases for the Chicago-based magazine Video Times, that "Tim pretty much invented video reviewing as a genre distinct from movie reviewing," innovating the way in which home video releases are generally reviewed today. While other writers at the time preferred to review only the films, without venturing any comment whatsoever on their presentation, Lucas focused on how films were being treated by this new medium: the transfer, the picture cropping, the completeness of the source element. Pleased with his work, the editors of Video Times hired him to edit and co-author a series of twelve paperback video guides published in the summer and winter of 1985 by Signet Books. Of these, he wrote the introductions to all twelve and the entirety of four: Movie Classics, Horror, Science Fiction & Fantasy and Mystery & Suspense. The books, his first as a published author, were formally credited to "The Editors of Video Times" with Lucas receiving credit only on the copyright pages.

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