(Editor’s note: Wellesnet was founded by Jeff Wilson in March 2001. He managed the website during its first decade. To mark Wellesnet’s 20th anniversary, we asked Jeff to take us back to its humble beginnings.)
By JEFF WILSON
Imagine if Eugene Morgan were a Silicon Valley billionaire in the making and at dinner with the Ambersons, discussing the online world instead of the automobile. George Amberson Minafer has just been rude about the web. Eugene responds: “I’m not sure George is wrong about the Internet. With all its speed forward, it may be a step backward in civilization. May be that it won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls, I’m not sure. But the Internet has come, and almost all outward things will be different because of what it brings. It’s going to alter war, and it’s going to alter peace. And I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of the internet. And it may be that George is right. May be that in ten to twenty years from now that if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the online world but agree with George — that the Internet had no business to be invented.”
I daresay Wellesnet has not contributed to the step backward in civilization (or civilized behavior, at any rate) that the Internet is often charged with being. I wanted the site to be a beacon of sorts to help those with an interest in Orson Welles find information about him and his work and provide a place to discuss it. That was the goal, really, way back in 2001. When I was asked to contribute a piece to Wellesnet to celebrate its 20th anniversary, my first thought was “20 years??” and then a deep sigh at how much time has passed. For those not steeped in the history of the site (and why would you be?), I founded Wellesnet in 2001 and ran it until 2011, when its current crew took over from me. Back in 2001, the internet and cell phones were not yet omnipresent in our lives; social media as we know it wasn’t even a thing yet! Ambersonian, halycon days to be sure, in retrospect. So where did this all spring from, then? Let us look back …
We should begin, I suppose, with why I wanted to do this at all, which requires a touch of autobiography, for which I beg your indulgence. Before the ’90s, I knew of Orson Welles through War of the Worlds, a voice on TV occasionally, and his introduction to the black and white noir episode of Moonlighting. I became interested in Welles as a filmmaker in the early ’90s, when the restoration of Othello sparked a deeper interest in his work. As I was getting ready for grad school and had other things going on, it became something of a backburner interest. A few years later, I was working at a Borders Books and Music store, having gotten much more interested in film in the years since. At the time, Borders’ forward-thinking policy of allowing staff to borrow books allowed me to feed my own personal interests. We had a handful of books on Welles stocked at that time, and I borrowed or bought what interested me and special ordered the rest (along with videotapes and eventually DVDs. It wasn’t that long ago that the only way to see Chimes at Midnight was to drop (I think, memory somewhat fails me at this point) around $60 for a sub-bootleg quality VHS tape with a cheap, black and white photocopied cover from Chicago’s Facets Video, which I immediately returned for said quality reasons. It was clear that something great was there, but the inability to properly see or hear it was both frustrating and enticing, which was something that I found appealing about Welles and his career in general. Here was someone who had seemingly fought the system and lost more often than he won, which lent him a tragic quality, and the idea that his work had in some cases been lost or otherwise hidden away was also interesting to me. Tales of hubris and lost works of art have always caught my interest, which also fit nicely with Welles.
So I continued my digging around for more information, which branched into the nascent internet and used bookstores for further, rarer books that were out of print and otherwise hard to find, as well as whatever knowledge there was to be gleaned from various film sites as existed then. In the midst of this adventuring on the frontiers of the web, I came across a bulletin board about Welles on a web site called tierranet.com, and given that these were the earliest, most naive days of the internet, the bulletin board software was such that anyone could post anything; there were no assigned usernames or passwords or moderators, no crazy stuff like that. Generally, at first, people usually chose a name and stuck to it. I think. I can confess here that I posted under more than one name on occasion, for whatever silly reason. Over time, however, more people trickled in (or did they?) and things gradually became somewhat unhinged, which is only a surprise in that it took as long as it did. But, useful information was there, even if you had to comb through occasional garbage to get it. That board lasted about three years or so, before it was overrun, if I’m remembering correctly, by people posting porn, because, well, it’s the internet. If you visit it on the Wayback Machine site, you can even see what it was like.
This is where Wellesnet enters the story, and about time. Having seen that board crumble into ruins, I thought to myself, “This whole internet thing is pretty great. Making my own site would be great, too!” And so I ventured forth. Meaning, I asked people I knew about how it was done. As it happened, a friend who used the internet for more, shall we say, legally, ah, questionable reasons, had lots of cracked software, which included a web design program from Adobe called Dreamweaver. One burned CD later I also had a copy. Oh, and Photoshop, too. This internet stuff was indeed great! Also, sorry about that, Adobe!
Piratically equipped, I began to work on the site, which meant hours of tedious design work as I stumbled my way through making a web site without the crucial knowledge of how such a thing was accomplished. Suffice to say it was not the Citizen Kane of web site debuts. I had no Gregg Toland of web design, alas. It was all stunningly crude and basic (it’s still there, see for yourself), but it was mine, and it worked, and it went live in that very basic form, with a news page; sections for films, theater, and radio, along with pages about books and videotapes and whatnot; and of course, the forum. I don’t recall if I properly understood at the time, or just assumed “ehh, no big deal,” but installing a forum meant that I had to moderate the thing, lest it become, in the immortal words of the Night Man from Touch of Evil, “a stinkin’ mess!” It also meant that I had to maintain the software, making moderation suddenly less of a hassle in comparison. The moderating was generally fine, aside from odd explosions of anger or passion or whatever boiling over and necessitating my stepping in. Boards develop personalities and alpha members, and clashes are inevitable. A calm word usually did the trick, but the ban hammer did very occasionally need to come out, which on one occasion did give me the immense pleasure of having said banned member email to curse me out, tell me he was a champion kickboxer, and if I ever set foot in Los Angeles, I would get my ass kicked (literally and figuratively, I guess). The forum became a vital source of information and debate about Welles, and soldiered on despite my early forum upgrade causing the loss of the entirety of the board’s posts to that point. Whoops. Blame the software, I followed the directions. I’m not still salty about that at all, not me.
As it happened, there were not many other people creating sites about Welles, in fact, very few. Welles remains a relatively niche interest, alas. In time Wellesnet became, and remains, I’m proud to say, the primary source of online information about whatever was/is happening in relation to Welles’ work. As time went on, I moved the site to WordPress, which was a blessed relief compared to the drudgery of working with Dreamweaver. If only blogging software existed in 2001!
In 2005, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Locarno Film Festival as part of their Welles-themed events that year, where I gave a presentation on Welles’ radio career, which was my focus during the ’00s, as I had been working on a book about that part of Welles’ career. Going to Switzerland was not something I had envisioned doing as a result of running the site, but was an amazing experience, and there I was able to meet people from the forum, various Welles scholars, and Welles’ eldest daughter, Chris, and her husband, Irwin, whose support of the site was humbling and meant a lot.
In time, my interest in maintaining the site started to take a backseat to other things in my life (job, young family, etc etc) and I felt like it was perhaps time to give it up. Ray Kelly and Mike Teal have done a fantastic job keeping Wellesnet going, putting my efforts to shame with a plethora of news stories and features I couldn’t have managed. When The Other Side of the Wind finally came to be released, I was happy to see Wellesnet taking its front row place in getting the word out and providing fans with plenty of great material about the film and how it happened.
I pondered while writing this how different it would have been had I been creating the site in a more recent period, with the presence of social media, podcasts, YouTube, and so on, and I feel like I was a bit lucky to do it when I did; sure, it was often lo-fi, but it was suited to what I could do at the time. Having to get into social media would have been awful, as I loathe and avoid it, but the thought of a Wellesnet podcast of some kind would have appealed to me.
I like to think the site was Wellesian in the sense that I was running it seat-of-the-pants style, out of my own pocket, independent just like Welles would have done it. Certainly it didn’t compare in terms of artistry, but it was a fine time, and I’m incredibly pleased that it continues on.
________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.