A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Born:
September 4, 1968
Aylam Orian (pronounced Eiy-lahm Or-yahn) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Israeli parents of Polish, Russian, and Romanian descent. Soon after his birth, the family moved back to Israel where he grew up as an artistic kid, taking up painting, sculpting, photography and playing the guitar. But it wasn't until after his military service of 4.5 years that he decided to give art a serious try and enrolled in Tel Aviv University Film School. A short film he made there, A Nightmare on Bialik Street (1994) (a witty homage to the famous Russian film Battleship Potemkin (1925)), won several prizes and was later shown at the Cannes Film Festival. While acting in his own films, Aylam caught the 'acting bug' and so in early 2000 he returned to the US to study acting at The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, and later The Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. While a student at the Strasberg Institute, he was hired to organize and preserve Strasberg's extensive collections of materials on acting - a position he held for the next 9 years, before starting to teach there. Upon graduating, he made his TV debut in the A&E mini-series Between the Lines (2004) hosted by Robert Downey Jr., where he joined the ranks of Hillary Clinton, John Goodman and Priscilla Presley in reading unknown letters written by famous people - his was no other than a love letter written by a young Adolf Hitler. Soon after, he played the leading role of a fugitive on the popular Fox show America's Most Wanted: America Fights Back (1988). He also wrote, produced and played the leading role in the movement-theatre show and film Beautiful World... (2006). Other film and TV roles followed, such as in the independent films Color of Truth (2009), Joy Incorporated (2012), Keep the Lights On (2012), and The Cold Winter (2016); the CBS film In God's Name (2007), and the hit NBC comedy show 30 Rock (2006), before Aylam made his way to Los Angeles. There, he kicked things into high gear with multiple co-star and guest-star roles on such shows as Code Black (2015), NCIS: Los Angeles (2009), Shooter (2016), and The Guest Book (2017), while also lending his multilingual skills to ADR on numerous other TV shows and films. In 2017, Aylam filmed a supporting role opposite Rosamund Pike in the upcoming thriller The Informer (2019), and the series regular role of the villain in the new installment of the "Stargate" franchise: Stargate Origins (2018).
Director:
1996 The Garden
Writer:
1996 The Garden
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.