By Michael Miner
This brought Ratny to her story’s capper–her plunge a few days before into the elevator shaft of the four-story brownstone on West Erie where she lives and puts out her magazine. She wrote that she fell half a floor “and landed on my back on the mechanicals, a tangle of electric wires and criss-crossed metal tubing….For 90 minutes I half-sat, half-lay, half-stood in the black, 3×5-foot enclosure, fingering with enormous frustration the recalcitrant cell phone.” The phone finally kicked in, and she dialed 911. “I am bruised, achey and frequently cranky,” she reported, “but I am alive.”
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So even before her accident it was common knowledge that Ratny, who’d begun Screen as a mimeographed newsletter in 1979 and is now in her mid-60s, wanted out from under. She might sell the magazine. She might bring in a partner with money and a head for business. Or she might just stop publishing. “It wouldn’t have surprised me two months ago if Ruth had just shut the door,” says Ver Kuilen. “But she didn’t. Part of it is ego, and part of it’s her drive not to see Screen go away.”
She’s not alone in hoping that doesn’t happen. “Ruth has a reputation of sometimes not getting it right,” says Ver Kuilen. “But in the big scheme of things people respect the magazine, and I don’t know anybody who doesn’t read it religiously. It’s a part of the infrastructure.”
What Kozlowski thought Ratny was telling him was that she didn’t know if Screen would be in business on Monday. He says, “My assumption was that maybe the magazine will sell, maybe things will work out, and in the interim I should cool my heels and wait.”
Lundbom didn’t mention any of this to Ratny. What if she finds out? “I think she’d be surprised,” he says. And angry? “I hope not. This didn’t really kick into gear until we felt in our heart that Screen was going to cease publication, or we’d have tried it years ago. I don’t think this market can support two publications serving the same niche.”
One former Screen feature Lundbom hopes to resurrect in his new magazine is a column on the Internet and media called “Jane.com.” Jane Burek wrote it until she quit last December.
