A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
Smith Robinson
On March 11, 2005, Brian Nichol escaped from the Fulton County Courthouse in Georgia, stole a gun and killed four people. That evening, he forced his way into Ashley Smith's apartment and took her hostage for seven hours. Smith made headlines for talking the infamous Atlanta courthouse killer into surrendering peacefully by gaining his confidence through her prayers and by reading aloud passages from Rick Warren's A Purpose Driven Life. In 2015, the minute-by-minute tale of her experience with Nichol, juxtaposed with the tragedies and triumphs of her own life, were recounted in the nonfiction book Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage. The same year, the book was adapted into a movie title Captive starring Kate Mara.
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.