A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Derek, a Chicago native, is a product of that city's improv scene. As a child he was trained under the Piven Theatre Workshop and Interlochen Arts Camp. He attended Indiana University where he co-founded improv troupe Full Frontal Comedy while taking classes at Second City and iO (formerly Improv Olympic.) Derek has been a mainstay of the L.A. improv community - performing and teaching for over 15 years. He still performs at i.O. West with Opening Night: The Improvised Musical! in over 650 performances. In 2008 after touring with Second City at Sea, Derek landed the series "The Hills: According to Me" for MTV (where he played over 20 roles) and then in 2009 the Comedy Central series, "Sercret Girlfriend" playing the role of Phil and acting as a consulting writer. 2012 saw Derek joining TBS' hour-long comedy "Wedding Band" Derek plays Barry the band's drummer - an instrument he had never played before.
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.