My apologies yet again for the delay between updates of this site. Chalk it up to a combination of illnesses in the last
few years as well as a demanding full time job with a lengthy commute. Thankfully a couple of friends have stepped up to
the plate and have contributed reviews. Many thanks to both Janet Ferrara for her review of "The Social Network" and Shiksa
Kelly Ravelli for her review of "Dying Young". Hopefully one or both of them will be motivated to contribute more reviews
in the future.
Rest assured, I have NOT by any means lost interest in doing this site, or in following Selby's career. However, the mental
energy and enthusiasm to sit down and actually compile reviews has been difficult, for both personal reasons and due to issues
within Dark Shadows fandom.
A correction I've made to my original welcome message is that I have decided against a Selby discussion group on Yahoo groups.
Once home to many interesting and well run DS discussion groups, very few are left there which would fit either of these definitions;
many no longer have any activity, some are just general chit chat groups,and of the rest a large majority have a pattern
of shabby, verbally abusive behavior, rampant cyberbullying and other nettiquette abuses, uncontrolled by the nominal management.
(The one shining exception to this is what is known as the Julia group. Excellent, well run group with common sense rules WHICH ARE ENFORCED -- and enforced across the board, not ignored if the
offender is a friend of a moderator. The conversation and fanfiction are at a correspondingly high level, and to my knowledge
it's the only fanfiction group left which encourages constructive critiques of the stories instead of actively discouraging
any comments that question any elements of a posted work. I only wish there were another group run like this but open to
fiction involving all the DS characters! And,although not a yahoo group, THE place for fans who want fun, yet mature, intelligent
and professionally moderated discussion of the show and its plotlines is the board known as The Dark Shadows Forum )
Latest Site Updates:
Review by Shiksa Kelly Ravelli: LA Theaterworks production
"Dracula"
9/5/12
Review by Shiksa Kelly Ravelli: Dying Young
8/28/12
Review by Janet Ferrara: The Social Network
8/28/12
Review: "The Heavens are Hung in Black"
2/12/09
Photos added from Hagerstown book reading/signing for Lincoln's Better
Angel
10/12/08
Review added: Lincoln's Better Angel
7/26/08
Please Visit My Other Sites:
My Fanfiction site, with information on fanfiction and fandom in general as well as reprints of many of my short stories.
These cover a range of fandoms and were originally published over the last twenty -- in some cases closer
to thirty --years: http://jwmediafanfiction.com/
My Dark Shadows Festival Pictures Site (pretty self explanatory; at present there are only fest photos and pictures from
location field trips. However as of December 2007 I have added some pictures and a review/trip report about seeing
Lara Parker's performance in the play Mrs. Scrooge. In future though I plan to have some articles on the fandom
in general along with a list of REPUTABLE and RELIABLE news and information resources on line): http://jwmediafanfiction.com/dsfestpics
Welcome to my David Selby site. It's still a work in progress as you can see, and probably will be for some
time to come. What I want to offer people with this site is something I hope will be of interest to Selby fans who are interested
in discussions of the work of this talented actor/writer.
First of all, a word of explanation. I have no graphics or web design background, which is why the general
appearance of this site is somewhat primitive. (There's a limit on how much the tripod sitebuilder tool will do.) It's also
why, except for my companion DS Fest photos site, this site is light on photographs.I first became active on on line services
(ISPs before the internet enabled them to talk to each other) when they were nothing but text. To me, unless a site covers
a special event such as a Fest, I want to see CONTENT as well as photographs. Besides, unless the photos are your own,
you have PERMISSION from the copyright holder or you are extremely conversant with copyright law, complicated copyright
issues are likely to arise.
So, why am I doing a website? I must fess up. LIke many Dark Shadows fans of a certain age, I too can count Quentin/Selby
as my first crush. Because of that, I had followed his career casually over the years and had seen him in many TV
series and movies, including the full run of Falcon Crest. Then by a fluke back in 2001 I caught Dark
Shadows from episode 1 and followed it through. During the 1897 storyline, I was struck by what a good
ACTOR Selby was, and what a complicated INTERESTING three dimensional character he made of the Quentin Collins of that period.
From there I looked further into other work he had done, and became more and more impressed by his ability to make something
out of even the smallest and most thankless background supporting role. Yet most of the lists and websites that
I have found concentrate on his looks to a degree where you barely know that the man is an actor.
Thus the reason for this website. I know there are many Selby
fans who are fans for his ACTING and not only his looks. He's had a substantial career playing many multifaceted
and well rounded characters, and has done so in a mixture of mediums which is far more common to British actors than
Americans. Although best known for two of his three TV series roles, Quentin Collins (Dark Shadows) and Richard Channing
(Falcon Crest), he's also done a good amount of movie work, from featured roles in Up the Sandbox and Supercops among
others, thru to his solid character work in movies such as Dying Young. Like most extremely skilled actors, his
career started on stage, and he appeared in such classics as The Crucible, Hedda Gabler and Long Day's Journey
into Night. In the LATheaterworks radio performance of the play The Caine Mutiny Courtmartial, he played
the role of Captain Queeg made immortal by Humphrey Bogart in the screen version -- and managed the not easy task of establishing
a characterization that did not suggest Bogart's version in any way.--using VOICE ALONE.
Given that background, I felt that the best way for this site to go would -- aside from trip reports, etc.
-- be reviews of some of his lesser known but commercially avaliable performances. I am actively looking
for people who have seen him in performance in a play and would like to submit a review or report. If
you have something you would like to submit, please write me at: pansity@optonline.net
On a final note, I do want to make it clear that I have no pipeline to David Selby, and I'm not
claiming that I do. Like most fans, I get my news and facts on him and his career from the two excellent
informational sites out there whose banners appear in my Links section: The Official David Selby site and Criseyde's David
Selby site. You can't do better than one or both of those sites for news and factual information, "straight from the
actor's mouth" in a manner of speaking.
I have no wish to try and steal anyone's thunder or be a pale imitation of an existing site, so I intend
to make it very clear when I cite information from those or any other official sources. One of my
pet peeves is people who copy news word for word from an official source such as these sites to their own site or group
without so much as the common courtesy of citing the original source. Whether this is done thru ignorance or deliberation,
presenting information without crediting the news source implies the person who posts it is claiming to be getting
it directly from the production company or the actor involved. That was considered cheezy behaviour when I first got
into Star Trek fandom in 1975 and isn't any less so on the Internet in 2005 Dark Shadows fandom.
Thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoy the site.
Jeannie
This website is @2004-2013 by JMW. No original article or photograph may be reprinted in any form without prior written
permission from JMW
