The name Jeffrey Wells started trending on Twitter last Wednesday. If that name doesn’t quite ring the bell, Wells is the outspoken writer of Hollywood Elsewhere, a film column site that is the very opposite of politically correct. Aside from his turbulent tendencies, he’s been doing excellent work for 30 years, going back to EW and LA Times and NY Times in the early ’90s. It’s been a distinguished four-decade career for him.
I am friends with Wells. We tend to share guest houses at whichever film fest we go to. He's an all-around good guy, to me at least, but I do know that he's irked his fair share of people over the last few years due to his all-too-honest approach to writing and I do know that he has accumulated a herd of haters in the process.
His name was trending due to a column he wrote and then quickly deleted in which he provoked Twitterdom outrage by posting two separate messages he received from friends speculating about the implications of Tuesday’s shootings at Atlanta-area Asian spas and the Oscar prospects of the Chinese director of “Nomadland”, Chloe Zhao, and the American film about Korean immigrants, “Minari”.
This led to the Critics Choice Awards group, a distinguished and influential journalist organization, ousting Wells from their core group of voters. All this because of a post, not even written by Wells himself, that discussed the ramifications of the recent Atlanta killings and how it might influence the winners of the upcoming April Oscar race.
Do I agree with everything Wells says? Of course not, but isn’t that the whole point? We’re not programmed as human beings to agree with everything that is fed to us via social media and/or the news. Of course, we do have a deep instinct, based on our hunter-gatherer, survival of the fittest DNA, to follow the herd, a tendency to follow packs, and agree with group think because that’s how we’ve tried to survive socially for hundreds of thousands of years. However, journalists can be the dealbreakers; the ones who make you break outside the box, make you think for yourself, open your minds to possibilities you might not have thought of.
Wells is a working journalist who is supposed to cover the film industry's pulse. Also, isn't it unethical, especially as a journalist, to "get with the program" and "follow the grain" in order to escape controversy? Don't you have to be true to yourself and stick to your ideals? Reading some people telling you to just join the club, succumb to the moral police, reeks of censorship to me.
Is Wells a flawed human being? You bet, but that also doesn’t mean he isn’t one of the more honest journalists out there at the moment, unafraid to give his two cents about the hot-button topics of the day. It’s that fearless nature of his work that makes him compulsively readable and one of the more interesting voices in film criticism out there. Fine, Wells got thrown to the dogs by a group comprised of irony-clad hypocrites (CCA), go figure, but maybe the free P.R. will get more readers to go to Hollywood Elsewhere and discover some of the most honest film writing they will find online.
With integrity intact, Wells admitted that he regretted posting about the Asian-American movies, but he shouldn’t have. You don’t deserve to be expelled or canceled for writing against the grain, let alone apologize for it. Too many journalists nowadays try to climb on the high horse of pseudo-morality, celebrating the cancel culture that toxifies the airwaves and resembles neo-McCarthyism. Maybe it’s time to stand up to these people, make these cowards shudder back into their places by not stooping down to their holier-than-thou puritanical attitudes.