A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
October 1, 1991
Original Title:
Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio
Genres:
Documentary | History
Production Companies:
Florentine Films
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
US: G
Runtime: 113
For 50 years radio dominated the airwaves and the American consciousness as the first “mass medium.” In Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Ken Burns examines the lives of three extraordinary men who shared the primary responsibility for this invention and its early success, and whose genius, friendship, rivalry and enmity interacted in tragic ways. This is the story of Lee de Forest, a clergyman’s flamboyant son, who invented the audion tube; Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant, withdrawn inventor who pioneered FM technology; and David Sarnoff, a hard-driving Russian immigrant who created the most powerful communications company on earth.
Archival Footage Research:
Morgan Wesson
Associate Editor:
Yaffa Lerea
Associate Producer:
Camilla Rockwell
Susanna Steisel
Author:
Tom Lewis
Cinematography:
Buddy Squires
Allen Moore
Ken Burns
Director:
Ken Burns
Editor:
Paul Barnes
Executive In Charge Of Production:
Dalton Delan
Executive Producer:
Ken Burns
Music Director:
Ken Burns
Producer:
Tom Lewis
Morgan Wesson
Ken Burns
Sound:
Morgan Wesson
Alan Barker
Sound Editor:
Yaffa Lerea
Paul Barnes
Sound Re-Recording Mixer:
Lee Dichter
Writer:
Geoffrey C. Ward
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.