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Paul Crifo (d. 2020)

Birthplace:
New York, New York, U.S.A.

Died:
September 22, 2020

Biography from TheMovieDB

Born in New York in 1922, the son of an Italian tailor, Crifo grew up with nine sisters and one brother on the Lower East Side before moving to Flushing and then Bushwick. Right out of high school he got a job in the advertising division of 20th Century Fox where he assisted Saul Bass (who was then an unknown artist himself and only two years his senior), and attended art classes at Pratt at night. He worked for most of his career in the art department of the ad agency Diener Hauser Greenthal (later Diener Hauser Bates) which, according to Crifo, was “the agency of record” for most of the major studios.  He was one of the great movie poster illustrators and art directors of the ’60s and ’70s, but he was also an unsung hero. Over the course of 40 years he illustrated and designed as many as 140 movie posters for Hollywood studios, but unlike peers such as Bob Peak or Robert McGinnis, Paul Crifo never became a marquee name.

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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.