Template talk:John Carpenter

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Horror

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Short films

Carpenter's pre-Dark Star work is composed of short films; since they are not "Feature films" (i.e. feature-length films), I moved them to their own section. However, I'm not sure how available they are (or even if they still exist?). There might not be enough written about them to justify even stubs for each one of them. Perhaps there should only be a single article on Carpenter's short films, or maybe they should only be covered in the article on him. Should they be included in the template? Perhaps movies on which he was a writer or producer but not the director might be more useful to include? Шизомби 23:46, 25 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I struggled a bit with this template because it assumes by non-inclusion that it is only for directorial efforts (btw, I was not aware that the early films were shorts, as they are not listed that way on IMDB, thanks for breaking them into a separate section). If they cannot be stubbed, they should probably be removed. The problem as I see it is one of categorizing: how do we decide what to include? He writes, produces and composes; they can all have their own categories in the template, but then it would become massive, and would have to list many films multiple times--that would be unwieldy. Or we could list all the films he has had a hand in--that would also be very large, uncategorized and indiscriminate, or we could have sections for each category of effort and only include notable films but then what criteria do we use for notability and wouldn't that be inevitably seen as POV? I'm open to anything frankly.--Fuhghettaboutit 00:59, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure about the other sections, I was just putting it out there as an idea. I don't know how significant Carpenter's role as a writer or producer is. I don't have any of the books about him, just some more general horror books that may have stuff about him and do have things about his movies. Шизомби 04:08, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More like this?

I've always liked David Lynch's template. It's clear and concise. What if Carpenter's were more like Lynch's?

Films Directed by John Carpenter
1970s	Dark Star • Assault on Precinct 13 • Halloween
1980's	The Fog • Escape from New York • John Carpenter's The Thing • Christine • Starman • Big Trouble in Little China • Prince of Darkness • They Live
1990's	Memoirs of an Invisible Man • In the Mouth of Madness • John Carpenter's Village of the Damned • Escape from L.A. • Vampires
2000's	Ghosts of Mars • Psychopath
Television	Someone's Watching Me • Elvis • Body Bags • John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns • John Carpenter's Pro-Life

I tried fitting it in Template:Navigation, but it won't allow nested tables, and I don't know how to get rows. If anyone can do that, that would be more ideal than this. Anyway, it's just a suggestion. It looks too cluttered as it is. Others to look at: Template:Michael Powell, Template:Martin Scorsese, Template:Truffaut. There're probably more, but that's all I could find. --imaek 03:34, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Funny, I always disliked the David Lynch template. Its colors look like nothing else on Wikipedia, and on a high resolution monitor there's a lot of unused whitespace on the right side of the template.

Anywho, I tried fitting something similar into the {{Navbox generic}}, which is somehow related to {{Navigation}} (you should take a quick look at both these templates' documentation). Behold:

Another approach could be adding the years in parentheses after the movie title, as in {{Garry Marshall Films}} and many other:

Kind regards, Fred Bradstadt 06:23, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]