A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Washington, D.C.
Born:
February 6, 1962
Michael Mack is an Actor, Writer, Producer and Founder/Instructor of the Fearless Acting Workshop in Washington D.C. A native of Washington D.C., Mack was fortunate enough to work at the K-B MacArthur Theater when it featured the world premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. On opening night, Mack met the entire lead cast. As a budding writer, one of his dreams was to write for Star Trek: The Next Generation, in part, because they were the most writer friendly series to work for. He was fortunate enough to join the TNG writing team for a six-week internship in 1994 during the series' seventh season, working with such greats as Jeri Taylor, Brannon Braga, Ronald D. Moore, and René Echevarria. Though he was not allowed to write an episode themselves, he was allowed to contribute ideas to the episodes. His main job was to review the unsolicited scripts that were submitted to the series, where on one occasion he found an idea in one of the submitted scripts that he successfully pitched. Because of Mack's Shakespearean background, he was approached by Taylor, who encouraged him to audition for any guest roles that might arise during his stay. Initially he was offered a role in "Parallels" to portray one of the Enterprise-D captains from another quantum reality, a role that eventually became that of Riker from the alternate Borg conquered Federation. He turned the audition for role down because he felt that it was simply too short and there was no way to play it "credibly" because all the performance required was a "freak out". When the next episode, "The Pegasus", was being cast, he told Taylor that he wanted to audition for the role of the Romulan Commander Sirol, who was originally written as a female character with a single scene. In spite of being a black actor auditioning for a species traditionally depicted by white actors, he reminded Taylor of the black "Vulcan midwife" who appeared in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and seeing as Romulans were "cousins" to the Vulcans, he saw no reason why there couldn't also be black Romulans. Taylor gave Mack her answer the next morning by offering him an opportunity to audition, and after Mack impressed both Taylor and episode director LeVar Burton, he was given the role, becoming not only the first writing intern to act on the show, but more importantly the first actor to portray a black Romulan. Following his being cast in the role, Braga and Moore expanded the role and made the character a bit more complex on Mack's behalf.
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.