The Naked Truth
The 11th Hour staff bares all.
      by Sarah Kendzior

Mr. February, 2000: Vin Diesel

Genre fans are pros at suspending disbelief. These are, after all, the people who have weathered the seven-year downfall of The X-Files, clinging to vain hope as tightly as a Wonderbra on Scully Barbie. These are those brave souls who send e-mails, letters, death threats, and condiments to networks en masse in the vain hope that their beloved series will be revived. These are the bright-eyed, exuberant optimists who waited in line for Episode 1 even after seeing Jar Jar Binks in the trailer. They carouse Trek conventions -- uniformed -- with wanton abandon; they treat eBay like a four-letter word. Nothing fazes them -- not executives, not injustice, not public humiliation, nothing. Except, sometimes, us.

If there is one sentiment we receive from 11th Hour readers more than any other, it is, "Are you out of your mind?" This rarely has to do with the writing, the design, or the quality of the site in general, but with the aspects of 11th Hour that are absent -- in short, advertising and a regular-sized staff. "You people do this for free? Every month? For almost a year?" The main question following this is "Why?" -- usually, and thankfully, followed by an admonition to never, ever stop, even if we are insane -- and I'm sorry to say that, one year after 11th Hour debuted, I have no real answer to that question.

Mr. August, 1999: Kevin Bacon

Although I do have a response to the second-most popular question we receive, the ever-flattering, ever-annoying, "Why don't you update more? I can't wait another month!" This comes from the other end of the genre spectrum, the kind of naíve, sweet-natured fan who's still dead-on sure that a Jar Jar-saturated Episode II has no chance of seriously blowing. The answer to this question lies in the first -- we do this for free, by ourselves, with a tiny staff, for a year, and by the way we update news daily now -- and I should probably warn you that we are planning a brief vacation in the near future. But seeing as this, our June 2000 issue, is the one-year anniversary of 11th Hour, I figure I should probably get around to answering the first question. Are we insane? Or, rather, why do we do this?

The internet has changed a lot since we began. The 11th Hour was born in a time of nerd validation -- the halcyon days before and immediately after May 19th, when the impending release of Star Wars: Episode 1 knocked the mass slaughter of Serbs and Albanians out of the top news headlines. For about four months, it was okay to be a sci fi geek -- hell, it was even encouraged. It got you on TV. We were In Line and the world was watching, wondering what the big deal was, where the root of this odd sense of shamelessness lies. I remember sitting outside the theater eight hours too early, listening to Weird Al belt out "Yoda" in the company of my geek brethren. Weird Al understood, and so did we, even if the rest of the world wasn't quite clued in.

Mr. May, 2000: Russell Crowe

And there was no better place for this sudden rebirth of genre geek cool than the internet. This was, you'll recall, the summer when The Blair Witch Project topped the box office by an audience almost entirely composed of horror fans with fast modems and big mouths. Think what you will of the movie -- and after writing three articles about its theft from another movie, The Last Broadcast, I think plenty -- that website changed everything. Suddenly, movie executives were coming to internet fansites and asking them for help. Studios were willing to deal with you in ways they hadn't before. And anyone, seemingly anyone at all, could run a successful movie fan site. Of course, there was only one problem: anyone, seemingly anyone at all, could run a successful movie fan site, or magazine, for that matter.

I'm not talking about your average semi-illiterate, ellipses-prone, source-stealing fanboy who somehow blundered his way into success, although I'll get to that later. I'd really love to claim that 11th Hour was formed out of some higher purpose, but it really started -- for me, at least -- out of your basic spite, frustration and boredom. To quote the great Keanu Reeves, "I'm sorry my existence isn't very noble or sublime." That's just the way it goes. 11th Hour was formed, basically, because we wanted a really good sci fi/horror magazine -- and one more female-friendly than the rest -- and since the demise of Sci Fi Universe, we just hadn't seen any. So we decided to write one ourselves. I still believe there are some decent genre print magazines, but online is a veritable wasteland. This is a problem that still exists today, despite the continued quality of excellent sites like Sequential Tart, MovieCrypt, Chud, and several others. There's just really not a lot out there. And this is both what keeps us going and what makes us want to roll our eyes one final time and throw in the towel for good.

Mr. January, 2000: Eric Close

We wanted something different. We wanted something better. We wanted actual spelling, grammar, and strong writing to be incorporated, we wanted in-depth interviews with interesting people, and we didn't want to be any kind of studio whore. There are basically two kinds of genre movie sites at the moment -- the kind financially powered by some mass corporation, thus leading to biased over-promotion of films by that company, and the independently run fan pages, which are far more fun but often disorganized and hard to wade through. (Although I must say, one of the things we've been most surprised at throughout the year is how damn near incoherent these professional sites can get, and how much more accurate these independent sites remain.) We wanted something honest but still professional, and that would reflect our deep, philosophical interests as educated females -- you know, whether James Marsters would be a regular next season and where the hell Nick Lea is at. We weren't going to shy away from the tough questions.

Mr. October, 1999: Rodney Rowland

And a year later, I believe that, overall, we've succeeded. But it's been a strange ride. I guess this is as good a time as any to address what's come to be referred to as "the chick thing" -- the question of whether 11th Hour is, as Yahoo! proclaims, a "horror/sci-fi entertainment magazine for chicks." This has continually baffled me, as I know of no other site which had their Yahoo! description rewritten by the management besides us. The original link, which went up June 16, said we were an online magazine covering sci fi and horror entertainment -- not exactly catchy, but it gives you a fairly accurate picture, no? Apparently not enough.

Now don't get me wrong, I love the fact that we are predominantly by women (and that the main three people involved -- Lisa, Linda and I -- are all female), but that's only because I think more women should have a place to go to read and chat about sci fi without getting drooled on by horny fan boys. Any chick who has had been approached at a comic con with the line, "So... I couldn't help but notice that you're a girl" knows exactly what I'm talking about. 11th Hour was, to a degree, meant to be a haven for female genre fans, but in no way is it exclusively for women, or really geared towards them. (And our fan base, on that note, has been pretty evenly split down the gender lines.) The bottom line is, we want good writing and good reporters. And we don't really care who the hell our audience is, as long as they keep heaping on the praise to compensate for our empty pockets. (Of course, you could always compensate for our empty pockets as well. Really. We mean it.)

So I'm disavowing that right now. We're not a chick site. Boys are more than welcome, especially if you're a boy named David Boreanaz or Vin Diesel. And yeah, I know the root of this problem lies with my own e-mail to Aint-It-Cool-News head Harry Knowles, in which I played up the chick factor to no end ("Oooh, Harry, there are girls watching Evil Dead 2 -- hot girls!" was kind of the implied text), which resulted in probably a fourth of our current fan base and put us on the geeker map. And while I really have no regrets about doing that, I do feel that I must address the Harry Issue. Which, of course, The 11th Hour has no place in, because we've been playing in another league the whole time. A League of Their Own, some might say, but I think the distance thankfully established between us and a site like Aint-It-Cool has more to do with the fact that we're a monthly magazine, not a daily news site, than our surplus of estrogen.

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