The Lawrence Dane Fansite is exactly the kind of site I love finding. It's a one-person research project dedicated to a Canadian character actor who passed away in 2022, built by someone who clearly cares deeply about preserving his work and making it accessible to whoever might be curious enough to look.
If you don't know Lawrence Dane, don't worry. I didn't either. He was born Lawrence Zahab in Quebec in 1937, worked steadily from the late 1950s through the 2010s, and appeared in everything from Mission Impossible and Scanners to Bride of Chucky and The Red Green Show. The kind of actor who shows up in a hundred things and makes each one a little better. The webmaster discovered him through the 1977 survival horror film Rituals, fell down the rabbit hole, and then learned he'd just died. That coincidence turned into what you see here: a proper fansite with reviews, a growing image gallery, a biography in progress, and an impressive archive of his original Flash-based website from 2003.
The reviews page alone is something to behold. There's a massive chronological list of every film and TV appearance the webmaster has been able to identify, each rated on a scale of 0 to 5 based on how worthwhile it is to watch specifically for Lawrence Dane's performance. The rating criteria are wonderfully specific: how much screentime he has, how good his performance is, how good the script and other actors are, and whether the thing has value as a "cultural studies object." Strikethroughs mean they've watched it but haven't written about it yet. Italics mean they have access but haven't watched it. Little dagger symbols (᛭) mean his character dies. It's meticulous in a way that makes me smile.
The most recent review, for a 1982 short film called Julia, is a perfect example of how much work goes into this. The webmaster tracked the film down after someone on Tumblr tipped them off to a Swedish DVD collection. They imported it, watched it, and then because there were only hardcoded French subtitles, sat down and created English subtitles using a transcription app on their phone, cross-referencing against translations of the French. When a particularly explicit bit of dialogue stumped the app, they had to ask their partner to listen and transcribe it. "Not embarrassing at all!!" they write. Then they uploaded the subtitled version to Peertube so anyone can watch it. That's dedication.
The image gallery is full of carefully sourced lobby cards, press photos, and newspaper clippings spanning decades. Each one has a date and citation (or a note that says "detailed citation forthcoming," which I appreciate). The site archive page is fascinating too. The webmaster used a portable Flash-compatible browser to access old Wayback Machine crawls of Dane's original website at the same URL, then converted the Flash animations to GIFs and provided commentary on everything from the Bible verse on his homepage (Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Version, which the webmaster notes is interesting because Dane was raised Catholic and would have been more familiar with the Douay-Rheims translation) to whether or not that was really his signature (it wasn't, just a font).
The FAQ page tells you the webmaster is an archivist and museum technician by trade, which tracks completely. They built the HTML and CSS with, in their own words, "gum, paperclips, residual coding knowledge from the peak of Livejournal's popularity, and various guides helpfully assembled by other people." The site is part of several webrings, has an RSS feed, and the links page connects to other old-web fan pages for shows Dane appeared in. There are even free bumper stickers for Rituals if you email and ask.
What I keep coming back to is how this site feels like a genuine act of care. Not performative, not trying to build an audience or a brand. Just someone who watched a movie, got fascinated by the guy in it, and decided to build a proper home on the web for everything they could find about him. The biography page still says "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" and honestly, I hope it stays that way for a while, because it means they're still digging. Go poke around and see what you find.