A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Born in 1910, Spokane Washington. He worked in the oil fields as a rough neck. Competed in the 1932 Olympics in race walking. Worked as an extra in several movies. Joined the US Marines in 1942? where he eventually rose to the rank of Commissioned Warrent Officer. Instituted swimming programs at Camp Pendleton prior to shipping in the Pacific Theater of WW2. Fought in hand to hand combat on Iwo Jima and several other Japanese held islands. After the war Mel came back to the LA area where he worked as an illustrator for the Westmore Bros make up artists. Eventually he moved on to working as the head of the art dept for Pacific Title and Art Studio, supervising the creation of backgrounds and titles for many epic movies, among them: The Alamo, How the West was Won and many others. Mel worked at Pacific Title until his untimely and early death at the age of 53. Struck down in the prime of his life by pulmonary embolisms (blood clots in his lungs) Mel left his beloved wife Leatrice and 3 children, Melanie, Kim (Mel) and Jennifer. It was long suspected that his blood clots were caused by the numerous bayonet wounds to his legs from the combat.
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.