A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
John Ruggiero was raised in Glen Ridge NJ during the 60's and 70's. He attended Glen Ridge High School where he played baseball, soccer and wrestled. After graduating high school in 1980 and seeing his friend, Tom Mapother/ Tom Cruise, become a successful actor, John also wanted to pursue acting. Being a product of North Jersey John made many friends in questionable professions. He knew these experiences could serve him well in his pursuit of an acting career. John eventually moved to Atlantic City and began working in the Casino Industry. His first acting role came as an extra in "The Color of Money" starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. Shortly thereafter he got married had children and had to put his acting on hold. Over the course of the next 30yrs, he worked in the finance industry as a mortgage banker. His success in this industry made him forget about becoming an actor. Now remarried with 3 additional children , 6 in total, he is ready to take his acting career head on. It is only fitting, based on his upbringing, that his first role is a wise guy in the upcoming Sopranos prequel " The Many Saints of Newark"
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.