Michael Morrison

Michael Morrison developed a love for movies at an early age, living in Tennessee and watching them, mostly on television but occasionally - especially when a new John Wayne film was exhibited - in first-run theaters. When chance took him back to California and eventually to Los Angeles, he attended Los Angeles Valley College, in Van Nuys, and enrolled in a course called Motion Picture Production Technician. He took "lots" of film history classes, also later at Los Angeles Pierce College (made famous in Joseph Wambaugh's "The Onion Field"), and "lots" of theater classes. He was a regular in attendance at the Silent Movie Theater (which theater itself figured in several movies, notably Dick Van Dyke's "The Comic"). At a Western film series shown at UCLA, he met a young film enthusiast from Ohio, Wendell Wethington, who actually found jobs working in the industry they both loved. Wendell asked Michael, and others, to be atmosphere or production assistant (knowing they'd work cheap), particularly in "Johnny Firecloud," Michael's only completed-film credit to date. He has continued to express his love of movies, though, by writing reviews, on Internet sites and for newspapers, and working on so-far-unproduced screenplays (a condition known to probably tens of thousands of other movie lovers). He has also long been a practicing journalist and in that capacity has interviewed such movie greats as (the now late) Elmer Bernstein, Robert Wise, Bo Svenson, Geoffrey Lewis, and many others. He also displays his scholarship by writing biographies and trivia notations at, especially, Internet Movie DataBase, his favorite Internet site, he says frequently.