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Melissa Mathison (1950-2015)

Alias:
Josh Rogan

Birthplace:
Los Angeles, California, USA

Born:
June 3, 1950

Died:
November 4, 2015

Biography from TheMovieDB

Melissa Marie Mathison (June 3, 1950 – November 4, 2015) was an American film and television screenwriter and an activist for the Tibetan independence movement. She was best known for writing the screenplays for the films The Black Stallion (1979) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the latter of which earned her the Saturn Award for Best Writing and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.  Mathison later wrote The Indian in the Cupboard (1995), based on Lynne Reid Banks's 1980 children's novel of the same name, and Kundun (1997), a biographical-drama film about the Dalai Lama. Her final film credit was The BFG (2016), which marked her third collaboration with film director Steven Spielberg

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Additional information:

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Film Performances

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Film Production

Associate Producer:
1982  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
2016  The BFG

Co-Producer:
1982  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1997  Kundun
2016  The BFG

Executive Assistant:
1979  Apocalypse Now
1982  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1997  Kundun
2016  The BFG

Screenplay:
1979  Apocalypse Now
1979  The Black Stallion
1982  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1982  The Escape Artist
1983  Twilight Zone: The Movie
1995  The Indian in the Cupboard
1997  Kundun
2016  The BFG

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TV Production

Teleplay:
1991  Son of the Morning Star

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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).

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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.