A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Original Title:
The Man on the Fifth Floor
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
An intoxicating look inside New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel through the witty, irreverent lens of composer Gerald Busby. ​Swirling around Busby's humorous and heart-breaking life, from his Baptist childhood in Texas to his salvation as a gifted piano prodigy; from gay witch hunts at Yale University in the 50s to gay liberation in New York City in the 70s; from a creative, energetic life inside the legendary Chelsea Hotel to the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, the death of his partner of seventeen years, his descent into crack addiction, the loss of his friends, his money, his career, the film is also a journey through New York's most exhilarating and devastating decades, the 1970s - 1990s. Using interviews and archival footage, it vividly captures the zeitgeist of New York's most creative and tumultuous years, the years that witnessed the dawn of the gay sex revolution, the birth of the disco scene, the world of all-night bars, drugs, street cruising and the anonymous sex in the trucks.
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.