By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, April 2011
In late April 2011, FishbowlLA tracked Elvis Mitchell’s latest career shuffle — his termination as chief film critic of Movieline.com. The original FishbowlLA framing noted that fellow journalists were “placing their bets” on the mercurial critic’s next move.
Then
Elvis Mitchell had, by April 2011, one of the more peripatetic résumés in American film criticism — the Detroit Free Press, the LA Weekly, a New York Times film-critic role in the early 2000s, and a series of subsequent positions.
The one constant across all the shuffling — and the detail that gives this piece its lasting significance — was KCRW. Mitchell’s public-radio interview show The Treatment had, by 2011, already been running for years on the Santa Monica station.
Now
The bet the 2011 piece implicitly invited has a clear answer in retrospect: KCRW. Elvis Mitchell’s The Treatment has continued across the entire interval since 2011 — now one of the longest-running interview programs in American public radio.
Mitchell directed the documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? for Netflix in 2022 and has been the curator of film at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment that, in retrospect, missed the more interesting story sitting in plain sight — Mitchell’s most durable platform was the public-radio show he was quietly continuing the entire time.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.