History will always regard the finest Movieline era as the one that transpired in the late ’80s and ’90s with that very knowing, vaguely snooty and dismissive, sell-that-horseshit-somewhere-else incarnation that came to pass under editor Edward Margulies and editor-contributors Virginia Campbell, Stephen Rebello, Martha Frankel and Josh Mooney.

Suffice that the late-Bush ’41 and Clinton-era Movieline cut things down. Yeah! And that Margulies & Co. would have choked on the idea of writing “unabashedly” about love for all things Hollywood, which is what the next generation of Movieline guys — Defamer‘s Seth Abramovitch, S. T. VanAirsdale and Kyle Buchanan — are claiming they want to do when the online version launches “in the spring,” according to a N.Y. Times story that ran today.

I thought I knew the Defamer guys. They are not and never have been Hollywood cuddle bunnies and ass-kissers. The Times piece, written by Stephanie Clifford, says that “while Abramovitch says he plans to keep some satirical elements, [his] plans for Movieline make it sound like it may soon be a target for sarcasm on Defamer.” Let me put as plainly as Richard Burton‘s Thomas Becket put it to Peter O’Toole‘s Henry II after learning of his plan to make Becket the next Archbishop of Canterbury. “I beg of you,” Becket said to his king. “Do not do this.”