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Richard Kelly (b. 1975)

Alias:
James Richard Kelly
리차드 켈리
리처드 켈리

Birthplace:
Newport News, Virginia, USA

Born:
March 28, 1975

Biography from TheMovieDB

James Richard Kelly (born 1975) is an American writer-director, best known for his debut feature, the science-fiction cult classic "Donnie Darko"(2001).  Kelly was born in Newport News, Virginia, the son of Lane and Ennis Kelly. He won a scholarship to the University of Southern California to study at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He made two short films at USC, "The Goodbye Place" and "Visceral Matter", before graduating in 1997.  "Donnie Darko" was his first feature and was nominated for 21 awards, winning 11 of them, including a nomination for a Saturn Award. The film later ended up #2 on Empire magazine's list of 50 greatest independent films of all time, behind Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs".  Kelly wrote the screenplay for Tony Scott's biographical crime thriller "Domino" (2005), and went on to write and direct the postmodern L.A. satire "Southland Tales" (2006) and the science-fiction mystery "The Box" (2009), inspired by "The Twilight Zone" episode "Button, Button". Although his three films differ considerably in setting and characters, they share similar themes of time travel, existentialism, and spirituality.  Kelly's particular filmmaking sensibilities can be traced back to his viewing of Terry Giliam's "Brazil" (1985), as told to author Robert K. Elder in an interview for his book "The Film That Changed My Life" (2011).  The commercial underperformance of Kelly's films has made it difficult for him to secure financing for other projects, and as such he has not directed a film since 2009. In 2016, filmmaker Kevin Smith said of Kelly: "He is insanely creative and is not unlike Christopher Nolan. But Nolan wound up in the Warner Bros. system where he got special handling, and he got a lot of money to make huge art films like "Inception". Richard can be one of our greatest filmmakers. He is right now, but just a lot of people don't realize it. He's still a kid, and someone needs to Nolan that kid."

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Additional information:

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Film Performances

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Film Production

Characters:
2009  S. Darko

Director:
1996  The Goodbye Place
1997  Visceral Matter
2001  Donnie Darko
2007  Southland Tales
2009  S. Darko
2009  The Box
????  Corpus Christi
????  Soulmates
????  Untitled Rod Serling Biopic

Producer:
1996  The Goodbye Place
1997  Visceral Matter
2001  Donnie Darko
2007  Southland Tales
2009  I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
2009  S. Darko
2009  The Box
2009  World's Greatest Dad
2010  Operation: Endgame
????  Corpus Christi
????  Soulmates
????  Untitled Rod Serling Biopic

Screenplay:
1996  The Goodbye Place
1997  Visceral Matter
2001  Donnie Darko
2005  Domino
2007  Southland Tales
2009  I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
2009  S. Darko
2009  The Box
2009  World's Greatest Dad
2010  Operation: Endgame
????  Corpus Christi
????  Soulmates
????  Untitled Rod Serling Biopic

Story:
1996  The Goodbye Place
1997  Visceral Matter
2001  Donnie Darko
2005  Domino
2007  Southland Tales
2009  I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
2009  S. Darko
2009  The Box
2009  World's Greatest Dad
2010  Operation: Endgame
????  Corpus Christi
????  Soulmates
????  Untitled Rod Serling Biopic

Writer:
1996  The Goodbye Place
1997  Visceral Matter
2001  Donnie Darko
2005  Domino
2007  Southland Tales
2009  I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
2009  S. Darko
2009  The Box
2009  World's Greatest Dad
2010  Operation: Endgame
????  Corpus Christi
????  Soulmates
????  Untitled Rod Serling Biopic

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About the Movie Section

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:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

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  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

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.