A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
December 20, 2009
Original Title:
A Night at the Movies: The Gigantic World of Epics
Genres:
Documentary | TV Movie
Production Companies:
DreamWorks Television
Turner Classic Movies
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
US: NR
Runtime: 58
A Night at the Movies: The Gigantic World of Epics looks at Hollywood’s biggest screen spectaculars from all sides, including the genre’s beginnings, literary adaptations, great epic directors and actors, the challenges of making big-budget movies, classic set-pieces and epic music scores. The special also looks at how the genre fell out of favor with audiences and filmmakers in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only to be reborn with more recent films like Gladiator, and Dances with Wolves trilogy. Throughout, the special is packed with classic scenes and behind-the-scenes images from such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), Samson & Delilah (1949), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), King of Kings (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).
Director:
Laurent Bouzereau
Writer:
Laurent Bouzereau
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.