A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Honey Grove, Texas, USA
Born:
April 26, 1929
Died:
April 15, 2015
Billy Ray Hearn (April 26, 1929 – April 15, 2015) was the founder and chairman of the Capitol Christian Music Group (formerly EMI Christian Music Group) the world's largest religious music label. In 1954, Billy Ray Hearn graduated from Baylor University with a degree in church music. In 1972, Hearn started Myrrh Records, one of the first labels devoted to contemporary Christian music, at Word Inc., the label of Amy Grant. In 1976, he formed his own label, Sparrow Records, the label behind musicians Keith Green, John Michael Talbot, and Margaret Becker. In 1992, Hearn sold Sparrow to EMI Music, the label of artists including Steven Curtis Chapman and BeBe & CeCe Winans. Hearn was a member of the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and in 1999 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gospel Music Association. Hearn was also founder and sponsor of the biannual Hearn Symposium on Christian Music at Baylor University. Billy Ray Hearn passed away on April 15, 2015 as a result of complications from heart disease.
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.