Jeff Wells Festival draws to a close
Two final updates on JeffWellsOxfordGate 2009 (see previous items here and here) and then I believe the matter is closed.
At the Oxford Film Festival’s awards ceremony Saturday night, one of the prepared comedy bits involved a category for Best Performance by a Local Actor in a Film Not Appearing in the Festival. These included two clips from actual films involving actual local actors, and then a third one: “Jeffrey Wells in ‘The Media Panel.’” This was accompanied by a graphic of an empty chair with a sign on it reading “Reserved for Jeffrey Wells.” It got a huge laugh.
I mention this in particular because Wells’ language in his last couple blogs and comments suggests it’s only his colleagues (“the cool kidz”) who think he did something wrong by ditching the panel, and that no one else minded. Believe me, that’s not the case. If nothing else, this joke is evidence that to the festival organizers, blowing off the panel was a big deal.
Wells posted what is presumably his final blog entry on the whole affair, and it is a masterpiece of deflection and justification. As it turns out, every single element of the ugly incident was someone’s fault other than his! That includes his grumpy refusal to go to the panel, which one of us ought to have prevented by talking to him when we saw him looking so downcast in the hotel lobby that morning.
I’m serious! Read his blog! That’s really what he says!
He also continues clinging to the fiction that he was invited to the fest to provide overall coverage, with the panel being only a minuscule part of that. None of the other panelists misunderstood things that way, so I don’t know how he managed it, but there you go.
But after much back and forth between him and his readers, most of whom agree that he screwed up and ought to refund what the festival paid for his plane ticket, Wells finally posted a comment that should be the final word: He continues to blame everyone else in the world for everything that happened, but he ends it by saying he’ll reimburse the fest for the airfare. No admission of wrongdoing, but he’ll make restitution — from a narcissist, that’s as close to an apology as you’re going to get.
February 8th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
What an enema bag!
February 8th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
omg my wifi just went out. OMG MY WIFI JUST WENT OUT. OH MY FREAKING GOD MY WIFI JUST WENT OUT
February 8th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Huh. “Interesting” guy. I woulda posted something on his website, but I’d have had to sign in/join, and as he mentioned, the hoopla may have given him some drop-in readership, and he feigns pleasure and success about it. Yeah. Never heard of this guy, and now I’ve only heard this about him. I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that any publicity is good publicity.
I’ve been to his site a few times over the last few days, following your links, and couldn’t care less what he thinks about movies or the industry — didn’t even read any of that. Not the kind of navel-gazing spoiled “journalist” in whom I’d have any interest. So I’ve visited his site a few times in a few days, and unless he tries to retaliate at you, or you mention him again for whatever, I doubt I’ll ever visit his site again. This is the kind of publicity you get when people rubberneck at you because you drove your car into a river. Piece of work.
February 8th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Quoth the Wells:
“The festival had NO BUSINESS inviting fast-track journos down to their festival without rock-solid wifi at the hotel.”
Exactly. One day we’ll be fast-track. Then we’ll be able to blow off the “journos” part. I dream of that day.
February 8th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Well, Eric,
What about the festival itself? I actually would like some overall coverage from you the panelist. I remember that last year you provided a colorful, if rambly (you and Stephen King have the same editor?), recounting of food you ate, people you met, architecture you saw, and maybe even a movie mention or two. Beyond your investigative reporting, how was the weekend?
February 8th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Wells offends my sense of justice. If I knew where he slept, I’d poop in his pillowcase.
February 9th, 2009 at 12:03 am
Your sense of outrage and righteous indignation is far more offensive than anything Wells did. If you’re so bent out of shape about this, why don’t you include more festival coverage on your own blog. This is the third — the third! — complete posting in which all you did was ***** about another writer. I mean, look at your blog — on Feb. 6, 7, and 8 your entire coverage was Wells, Wells and then more Wells! You can call him a “douche” or “offensive” or whatever you want, but the simple fact of the matter is that his simple dismissal of a festival panel discussion was the most exciting thing going on at Oxford, if anyone bothered to read your coverage. I cannot believe that his behavior disturbed your sensibilities to such a great extent, so I can only surmise that you are jealous of him or the festival was so boring that you can’t think of anything else to write about. So what’s worse? Skipping a lame-o panel discussion or parasitically using another writer’s foibles to fill your own lackluster blog?
February 9th, 2009 at 12:44 am
After reading his latest post, I find myself adoring the phrase “mood pocket” as a catch-all excuse.
February 9th, 2009 at 12:47 am
I hate to boost Wells’ traffic by visiting his site to read about this whole controversy, but wow. I mean, WOW. He is a piece of work. In his comments on the entry Eric linked to, he reams the commenters who called him out on his childish behavior, calling them all sorts of names and proclaiming that he doesn’t care if he loses readers over this. And, my personal favorite, he says he “was drowning in blackness” and expected the other panelists to pull him out of it (even though he clearly stated that they were not his friends at all).
Methinks Mr. Wells needs to take a few deep breaths and gain a little bit of perspective on life if he flies into fits of rage at having his faults pointed out and becomes deeply depressed over having spotty wifi for a couple of days.
February 9th, 2009 at 8:53 am
I tried to review Jeff’s writing style when he wasn’t justifying a temper tantrum, and failed miserably: his site is a steaming mass of video ads with flashing lights and he quotes Ben Lyons in one of his most recent blog posts. Whatever train wreck viewers he may have gotten from these shenanigans probably won’t be long-term.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Wow. Oh… wow. I’m stunned. I just read the blog post that Eric linked to, as well as the comments and I only stopped laughing when my jaw would occasionally hit the floor when I read what Wells had to say for himself. I cannot believe that he can try and equate wanting wi-fi access to the necessity of needing a functioning bathroom. I guess he’s fine with crapping all over himself as long as he has ROCK SOLID internet access!! I’d better hold off on the rest of my comments, lest I be over come by blackness and become enveloped by a mood pocket.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Okay, Mr. Wells might have the most annoying website I’ve ever seen. Ads EVERYWHERE! I thought Eric’s recently website revamp with more ads was a downer, but Wells’ site is much, much worse.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:34 am
There was a small issue with Scott Weinberg being mistaken for another critic Scott Feinberg… and Wells deliberately mis-quotes Feinberg in his last blog entry. In Well’s previous blog entry, Feinberg posted a comment saying that there was a name mix-up and that he was getting a lot of email from people asking questions about the situation. Wells, who put quotation marks around the last part of his post, paraphrases Feinberg’s comment and adds in “I’ve been getting emails for hours from people who think you and I are in a big fight, when in fact I consider us to be friends.”
February 9th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I’m drowning in blackness…I will be unable to do anything about it until some stranger understands my mood pocket and gets me out of it…If they don’t do it right I will call it rudeness, but what do you do…
It sounds like teen angst to me.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Jeffreybrianr: If you’re so bent out of shape about this, why don’t you include more festival coverage on your own blog.
Non sequitur. If I’m so upset that Wells ditched the panel he was obligated to attend, I should write more about the festival to make up for it? What?
I wasn’t there to “cover” the festival. It wasn’t like Sundance or SXSW, where one of the outlets I write for has assigned me to attend the festival and write about the movies. Oxford invited me to attend as a panelist and as a juror for the short film competition. They undoubtedly hoped I would write something about it on my site, too, since I happen to also be a writer, but there was no obligation, nor did the festival organizers ever bring it up. Many of the panelists they had aren’t writers at all, or else work for outlets (like Us Weekly) that wouldn’t want to publish Oxford Film Festival coverage anyway. Attending the festival as a panelist and juror was essentially an extracurricular activity, and whatever Wells or I write about the festival itself has nothing to do with whether we fulfill the obligations that the festival organizers invited us for.
That being said, I’ll have a feature at Film.com later this week about Oxford.
Edited to add: Kim Voynar has written a succinct explanation of why the “he provided so much coverage so it doesn’t matter that he ditched panel!” reasoning doesn’t work.
February 9th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I don’t think that the terms “narcissist” or even “douchebag” do full justice to the piece of work we all know as Jeff Wells. The most applicable terms would require censorship in the forms of multiple asterisks. I can’t stand people like this putz and I can’t wait until one of his “mood pockets” results in severe consequences, blaming everyone else around him for all of his own shortcomings along the way. After all, reimbursing a film festival staff for the travel expenses is unlikely to teach this pompous windbag a lesson. Maybe he’ll have a mood pocket that will compel him to delete his entire website and spend his remaining day as a hobo in Northern Canada where we would never have to hear anything about him again.
February 9th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Oops. I meant to say “remaining days” in that last post. Obviously someone else should have read my comment as I was writing it and corrected my typo.
February 9th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
In fact AdamOndi, it was our responsibility as friends to prevent that typo, and the fact that you typed it was no fault of your own, but rather the result of childish exclusion on our part. Surely, had the roles been reversed you would have prevented us from typing the same typo, and then you would have gone off and solved world hunger or something.
/Jeff Wells is an a-hole
February 9th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Savvy Veteran wins best comment award.
February 9th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
At least you can use this whole incident as evidence that although “everyone” is reading Jeff Wells, Jeff Wells is reading you, Eric.
February 9th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
I think I finally thought of an analogy. It’s like if you were invited to a birthday party, but you don’t approve of the shape of the pinata, so you don’t give him the present you brought, and you won’t play Pin the Tail on the Donkey, you just sit on the birthday boy’s couch with your feet up on his coffee table and eat his chips and drink his soda, and when they call you to eat birthday cake, you tell them to just bring you a piece.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
…and then you leave early.
February 9th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
…and complain about how lame and cliquey the party was for the next three days on your blog.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:56 am
…and then poop on the floor. I don’t know how that fits into the analogy, but I can easily picture Jeff Wells doing something like that.
In repsonse to Jeffreybrianr: I appreciate the fact that Eric will take the time to point out the rudeness/cockiness/douchbaggery of other journalists/junket whores on his website. It helps me decide whose writing I want to avoid.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
….and then you want everyone at the party to concentrate on you & make you feel better.
Selfish b*st*rd!
Seriously, I think this guy might have sociopathic tendencies. Or at the very least he’s an ass