A sci-fi film whose climactic choice — red pill or blue pill? — has become so famous that it’s a meme. A found-footage style documentary horror film that achieved cult-classic status. A “Star Wars,” a “Toy Story” and two Tom Cruise movies.
The year was 1999, and it was blessed with an abundance of cinematic riches. So many, in fact, that “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the top-earning indie films ever, was just the fifth-highest grossing film at the U.S. box office three weeks after its release.
“It definitely was an epic year,” said Stephanie Goodman, the film editor for The New York Times. She led a team of more than a dozen writers, editors and designers who produced “Class of 1999,” a monthlong series celebrating the 25th anniversary of what many would argue is the greatest year in movie history.
The multimedia project, which includes features, profiles and critical essays, not only explores directors’ innovation and risk-taking in 1999, but how their films were, at times, chillingly prophetic about the cultural, social and political themes of today.
There’s a look at how the opening scene in “The Matrix” proved remarkably prescient; an essay on how “Blair Witch” foreshadowed the age of misinformation; a profile of Haley Joel Osment, who was 11 when he starred in “The Sixth Sense”; an article about the vulnerability of Tom Cruise; a playlist from the year’s top films; a reflection on reviewing movies in 1999; and a roundup of favorite films from the year, as selected by writers and critics. (Readers were invited to share their picks, too.)
“A lot of people who worked on it had a strong connection to the movies,” said Ms. Goodman, who in 1999 was a copy editor at The Los Angeles Times. “That’s one thing that made the year special, in addition to the fact that just about every major filmmaker of the past 25 years was working that year.”
The year offered so much worthy of re-examining — and rewatching. The team — which included the Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson; the journalists Maya Salam and Melena Ryzik; the freelance film critic Amy Nicholson; the pop music critic Lindsay Zoladz; and Wesley Morris, a critic at large — decided to take an analytical approach mixing reported features and personal reflections.
Ms. Wilkinson, who wrote about the themes — artificial intelligence, fake news, transgender lives and Gen X — that make “The Matrix” a classic, said she knew the film held up today, but hadn’t realized just how prescient it was until her recent reporting.
“This one felt incredibly contemporary and also like it had gotten a lot right about the future,” said Ms. Wilkinson, who first saw “The Matrix” as a high school student. “Even a few years ago, when I rewatched it, I hadn’t clocked the A.I. stuff as much as I did when I rewatched it for this piece.”
Ms. Salam had a similar experience when she rewatched “Blair Witch,” which she first saw the summer before her sophomore year at the University of Kentucky. The fictitious film was marketed as a documentary, with promotional materials that included missing persons posters for its largely unknown lead actors.
“We’re now in an age of misinformation, but the sensation of not knowing if something is real or not, or if something is true or not, was such an unusual sensation back then,” said Ms. Salam, who spoke with the film’s directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, for her article.
For Mr. Morris, who made his debut as a professional film critic in 1999 at The San Francisco Examiner as a 23-year-old, the abundance was not only inspiring, but overwhelming. For the “Class of 1999” project, he wrote a retrospective about the joys and challenges of navigating such a stacked first year as a film critic.
“Not everything was a masterpiece, but everything was interesting,” said Mr. Morris, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism. “That’s all we critics need — something that connects to our brains, our nerves and our hearts. Those connections were everywhere in 1999.”
Mr. Morris’s essay garnered more than 300 comments, many of them personal reminiscences. But all the articles have drawn feedback and memories.
Ms. Wilkinson said she has received many emails from people who remember watching “The Matrix.”
“A lot of people are like me and saw it as teenagers or in college,” she said. “But the ideas in it aren’t necessarily something you might pick up on as a teenager, and then you come back to it as an adult, and it’s really startling,” she said.
Given the enthusiastic response, Ms. Goodman said the team might examine other years. But, she said, there likely never will be another year quite like 1999.
“That was still a year when mid-budget films were being greenlit in Hollywood, and so you didn’t have this pressure to get huge box office results,” Ms. Goodman said. “The fact that filmmakers didn’t have to make such huge swings meant that they could make more creative choices.”
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