A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Tokyo, Japan
Born:
September 11, 1966
Died:
May 5, 2002
He began his career as an action stuntman at JAC (current JAE - Japan Action Enterprises), performing roles of monsters in the tokusatsu genre productions. Given his physical size, he was usually featured wearing uniforms of villains or taller, stronger monsters. His first acting role was on the Cybercop series, where he played Akira Hojo / Cybercop Mars in 1988. According to his interviews, Shiotani always wanted to play a hero in this kind of tv shows because he was always a tokusatsu fan. In addition to the career as an actor and stuntman, he starred in over 20 feature films released in video and had more than 15 appearances on television shows, including sitcoms, dramas and variety shows in his home country. In 2001, Shiotani became a victim the then fatal financial crisis in Japan, which put him in a difficult situation. The actor planned to present a project for a new version of Cybercops series that gave him fame. However, by having his claim denied by the producers, Shiotani became severely depressed. On May 5, 2002, with no money and no job, Shiotani committed suicide by jumping from a building in Dougenzaka region. The Yuki Yoshida and Takashi Koura actors attended his funeral.
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.