A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
November 19, 2008
Original Title:
Diary of a Times Square Thief
Genres:
Documentary
Production Countries:
Netherlands
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 60
Diary of a Times Square Thief documents a journey of discovery: the search for the writer of a mysterious diary that the filmmaker found on Ebay. This manuscript describes the adventures of a young man who, in the late eighties, left the Midwest of the United States to go to New York to realize his big dream: to find a publisher for his work and become a writer. He fails, and the diary gives a frank and confronting account of the author's subsequent downfall. This is where the diary ends; its last pages have been cut out with a knife. Diary of a Times Square Thief consists of small, intimate portraits of some of the colorful characters described in the diary, who could have known its writer. Through these encounters clarity gradually emerges about the fate of the talented but failed author, and about the value of chasing dreams. In addition, the film paints a vivid picture of the world-famous Times Square area when it was still a dramatically brutal urban jungle.
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
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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.