James Wheaton (1924-2002)

Alias:
James Lorenzo

Birthplace:
Meridian, Mississippi, USA

Born:
January 11, 1924

Died:
June 9, 2002

James Wheaton first made a name for himself on the stage. First, as a member of the Bishop's Company, a repertory theatre group which toured the United States, and later with the Ebony Showcase which was based in Los Angeles. After NBC aired an adaptation of "Carnival Island," an Ebony Showcase production, on their affiliate KNBC in Los Angeles, Wheaton began to find work in television and film. He made his major film debut as OMM, the narrator in "THX 1138" (1971), the debut feature of director George Lucas. Throughout the 1970s, he appeared in some of the most popular series of the period including "Sanford and Son," "Good Times," "Kojak," and "Ironside." In 1999, "Masks Before the Altar," a memoir about his experiences with the Bishop's Company was published. He was working on a one man show based on the poetry of Langston Hughes at the time of his death.

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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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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.