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Richard Davis

Biography from TheMovieDB

Richard Davis is the inventor of the modern-day bulletproof vest who shot himself point-blank multiple times to prove that his invention worked. He was an ex-Marine, bankrupt pizzeria owner, and born showman who mythologized his work by producing his own low-budget movies that were popular with police across America. He created his company Second Chance, which launched a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Davis also published "sex and violence" catalogs to promote his products and dabbled in filmmaking, creating promotional videos recreating the experiences of cops whose lives were saved by his vests. Despite his success, many people thought he was "stupid" for putting his product on full display and shooting himself multiple times. The story of Richard Davis is chronicled in the documentary "2nd Chance," directed by Ramin Bahrani.

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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.