A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
November 20, 1916
Original Title:
Fish
Genres:
Comedy
Production Companies:
American Mutoscope & Biograph
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 10
In an unprecedented move for its day in 1915, Biograph Company executives hired actor Bert Williams to star, produce, direct, and write his own films, having full control, the first time a Black-American ever had such control given by a mainstream movie company. The two films made for Biograph were A Natural Born Gambler (1916) and Fish (1916). Bert lives in a rustic-looking cottage with his parents and two much younger brothers. The three sons have been ordered to chop wood, but Bert would rather shirk his chores and go fishing. When his father orders him to take kindling to the stove, Bert sighs and wearily totes a couple of tiny sticks while his kid brothers carry large stumps. As soon as he can manage to escape Bert does so, and happily fishes at a nearby stream. Almost immediately he catches a large fish, and decides to head for a more affluent neighborhood to sell his catch to anyone willing to buy it.
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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.