The current downturn in advertising has left many print publications no choice but to trim their staff writers in order to survive — but after 20 years of writing film reviews for the New York Observer (and almost 30 years at the Village Voice) it was sad to see that Andrew Sarris, a pioneer of film criticism, had to experience what Michael Powell in yesterday’s New York Times called a “slow-motion layoff”; in an insightful profile, Powell rightly points out that Sarris (click here to read an excerpt of our interview with Sarris and his wife, film critic Molly Haskell, from our Auteur Issue), “introduced to Americans and argued for the auteur theory, which holds that a great director speaks through his films no less than a novelist speaks through his books”; after 50 years of writing film criticism for newspapers, Sarris, who is now 81, plans to write essays for Film Comment; meanwhile, Haskell recently published a book about Gone With the Wind titled Frankly, My Dear (read the SF Chronicle review here).