My apologies for the delay between updates of this site. Chalk it up to a combination of illness last year (or as I think
of it, the year of the four surgeries)and a number of crises/reorganizations at my job throughout the present one.
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!)
In any case, that brings us back to the lack of a real discussion group centered on Selby's work. So, if anyone is interested
in a group dedicated to discussion of Selby's roles and acting -- something like Jonathan Frid's group USED to be, when they
would discuss roles he played in various productions and have a sort of readers club where they read plays he had done (Discussion
there is now deeply disappointing, being largely off topic, and nearly identical to that on every OTHER Dark Shadows yahoo
group.) -- I am experimenting with Facebook. I recently responded to a friend's invite and looked around over there, and
the discussion level seems very like what the DS groups were like a few years ago, so I figure it's worth a try. The link
to this Facebook group is:
Synopsis, review & image added for Big Finish Productions' "The Christmas Presence"
12/11/07
Synopsis, review & image added for Big Finish Productions' "The Rage Beneath"
12/9/07
Touched by an Angel "Beautiful Dreamer" Review added
12/3/07
"The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" Broadway production. Playbill exerpts added.
11/29/07
"The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" Ogunquit, Maine, production. Playbill exerpts added.
11/29/07
"The Heiress" Playbill excerpts added
11/28/07
"The Girl in Blue", "Larva" & "The Black Hole" Screencaps added
11/26/07
The Waltons "The Romance" Review and Screen caps added.
11/26/07
"Horton Foote's Alone" review and screen caps added
11/25/07
Update note added
11/25/07
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:quentinscockney@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 @2004-2008 by JMW. No original article or photograph may be reprinted in any form without prior written
permission from JMW
