Look up Hal or hal in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Hal may refer to:

People[link]

• Hal Ashby (1929–1988), American film director
• Hal Barwood, American game designer
• Hal Holbrook (born 1925), American actor
• Hal Jordan, the silver age Green Lantern comic character
• Hal Lindsey (born 1929), American evangelist and Christian writer
• Hal Sparks (born 1969), American actor and comedian
• Harold Prince (born 1928), American theatrical producer and director
• Jean Ven Robert Hal (born 1970), Italian composer of electronic and new age music
• Prince Hal, Henry V of England in several of Shakespeare's historical plays, especially before he became king
• Hal (A Series of Unfortunate Events), a character from A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Hal (Malcolm in the Middle), a fictional character from the TV series Malcolm in the Middle

Places[link]

• Hal, Azerbaijan

Other[link]

• HAL 9000 computer, mostly known from the Kubrick's "2001: Space Odyssey" movie
• Dr. Hal Emmerich, a character in the Metal Gear games, named after HAL 9000
• Hal (band), from Ireland
• Hal (coyote), a coyote that wandered into New York City in 2006
• Hal, the French name for Halle, Belgium

See also[link]

• HAL (disambiguation)
• Harold (disambiguation), nicknamed Hal
• Henry (disambiguation), nicknamed Hal
• Halbert (disambiguation), nicknamed Hal

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Harold Lee "Hal" Lindsey (born November 23, 1929) is an American evangelist and Christian writer. He is a Christian Zionist and dispensationalist author. He currently resides in Texas.

Biography[link]

He was born on November 23, 1929 to Percy Lacy Lindsey and Daisy Lee Freeman in Houston, Texas. Lindsey suspended his course of study at the University of Houston to serve in the Korean War, then worked as a Mississippi River tugboat captain.

He entered Dallas Theological Seminary in 1958 (with the help of Lt. Col. Robert Thieme, pastor of Berachah Church in Houston, which Lindsey had attended) where he studied with John F. Walvoord, author of the 1974 best-seller Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis. He graduated from Dallas with a Master of Theology, majoring in the New Testament and early Greek literature.^[1] With Jan, the second of his four wives, he worked with Campus Crusade for Christ and continued with them until 1969. He then helped a mission in Southern California which continued until 1976. He was also a frequent speaker and Sunday School teacher at Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California. In 1969, he wrote his first, and most well-known book, The Late, Great Planet Earth.

Published in 1970 by Zondervan, The Late, Great Planet Earth became a bestseller. Coming on the heels of the Six-Day War, the book fueled the popularity of Dispensationalism and its support of ethnic Jews as the "chosen people of God". Many of Lindsey's later writings are sequels or revisions and extensions of his first book. In 1994, he earned his Doctorate of Theology from California School of Theology.^[2]

Lindsey hosted International Intelligence Briefing on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and serves on the executive board of Christian Voice.^[3]

International Intelligence Briefing was removed from the air on TBN for the entire month of December 2005. Lindsey claimed that this was because "some at the network apparently feel that [his] message is too pro-Israel and too anti-Muslim."^[4] TBN owner Paul Crouch, however, contended that "TBN has never been and is not now against Israel and the Jewish people."^[5] Crouch said that Lindsey's show was pre-empted for Christmas programming. Lindsey countered that this was the first time his show had been preempted for the entire month of December. TBN later admitted that a secondary reason for pre-empting the show was that it "placed Arabs in a negative light."^[6]

Lindsey resigned from TBN on January 1, 2006, and indicated that he would pursue another television ministry. His new program, The Hal Lindsey Report, is focused on Biblical prophecy and current events, and is carried on the Angel One and DayStar networks. In January 2007, Lindsey announced that he would be returning to the TBN network. The Hal Lindsey Report airs on TBN under his own financing.^[7]

He wrote in an essay on WorldNetDaily that Barack Obama was paving the way for, and demonstrating the world's readiness for, the antichrist, "Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him — a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib ... The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance."^[8]

Biblical Interpretations[link]

In 1970, Lindsey wrote in The Late, Great Planet Earth that the biblical prophets identified certain nations that would ally with other countries to form four major spheres of political power during the same time era that Israel would be reestablished as a nation ^[9]. Lindsey wrote that these nations and their allies can be identified as: (1) Russia and its allies, (2) China and other oriental countries, (3) Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, and (4) an alliance of Western European nations ^[10].

Lindsey wrote that the Western European alliance is a revived form of the ancient Roman Empire, and is predicted in the books of Daniel and Revelation symbollically as ten horns or ten kings. ^[11]. Lindsey quotes from Time Magazine, July 4, 1969, that the goal of the European Economic Community, which preceded the European Union, was to establish a ten-nation economic community ^[12]. Lindsey concludes, based on this and other sources, that this alliance of Western European nations is fulfilling this prophecy and will ultimately be ruled by the Antichrist ^[13]. The European Union currently has 27 members.

Lindsey also noted that the prophets did not directly or indirectly mention the United States of America, and concluded that the U.S. would lose its leadership position on the geo-political stage by the time the Tribulation of the end times arrived ^[14].

In a later book, entitled, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, Lindsey wrote that he felt compelled to write because "so many things have occurred" in the last ten years (since he wroteThe Late Great Planet Earth). ^[15] He believed that it was possible that the battle of Armageddon could take place in the not too distant future, stating, "the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it." ^[16]. He noted again that the U.S. is not mentioned in Bible prophecy as a leading nation and listed some scenarios that, at that time, seemed plausible to him: (1) A takeover by communists, (2) destruction by a surprise Soviet nuclear attack, and (3) becoming a dependent of the 10-nation European community.^[17] The book was on the NY Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks.

Planet Earth - 2000 A.D., published in the early 1990s, states that Christians should not plan to still be on earth by the year 2000.

Lindsey's earlier predictions all assumed that the Cold War would continue indefinitely, and had eschatological significance; he explicitly identified Russia with the apocalyptic figure of Gog. He also assumed that the 1960s counterculture would eventually become the dominant culture, and become the source of prophesied "immorality" that would lead to the establishment of a false religion.

Bibliography[link]

• The Late, Great Planet Earth
• Satan is Alive and Well On Planet Earth
• The Liberation of Planet Earth
• There's a New World Coming
• The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon
• The Final Battle
• The Terminal Generation
• Planet Earth: The Final Chapter
• Rapture
• Planet Earth - 2000 A.D.
• Apocalypse Code
• Blood Moon
• Vanished into Thin Air: the Hope of Every Believer
• The Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad

See also[link]

• Christian eschatology
• Unfulfilled religious prophecies
• Summary of Christian eschatological differences
• Christian Voice (USA)

References[link]

External links[link]

Find more about Hal Lindsey on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

• Hal Lindsey's web site
• Hal Lindsey commentaries on WorldNetDaily
• The Hal Lindsey Report at Daystar Television Network
• The Hal Lindsey Report at Trinity Broadcasting Network
• Hal Lindsey at Rapture Ready
• Hal Lindsey at the Internet Movie Database
• International Intelligence Briefing at the Internet Movie Database

Hal Hartley
Born	(1959-11-03) November 3, 1959 (age 52) Lindenhurst, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Director, screenwriter, producer, composer
Spouse	Miho Nikaido

Hal Hartley^[1] (born November 3, 1959) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and composer who became a key figure in the American independent film movement of the 1980s and 1990s. He is best known for his films Trust, Amateur and Henry Fool, which are notable for deadpan humour and offbeat characters quoting philosophical dialogue.^[2]

His films provided a career launch for a number of actors, including Adrienne Shelly, Edie Falco, Martin Donovan, Parker Posey, Karen Sillas and Elina Löwensohn. Hartley frequently scores his own films using his pseudonym Ned Rifle, and his soundtracks regularly feature music by indie rock acts Yo La Tengo and P J Harvey.

Early life[link]

Hartley was born in Lindenhurst in southern Long Island, New York, the son of an ironworker.^[1] Hartley had an early interest in painting and attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston where he studied art and developed an interest in filmmaking. In 1980, he was accepted to the filmmaking program at the State University of New York at Purchase in New York, where he met a core group of technicians and actors who would go on to work with him on his feature films, including his regular cinematographer Michael Spiller.

Feature films[link]

Hartley shot his first feature film, The Unbelievable Truth, in 1988. Made on a shoestring budget and filmed in his native Long Island, it was an unconventional love story about a suburban Long Island teenager (played by Adrienne Shelly, a Hartley regular) falling in love with a handsome mechanic with a criminal past (Robert John Burke). The screenplay featured what have become Hartley's trademarks - deadpan humour, offbeat, stilted, pause-filled dialogue, and characters posing philosophical questions about the meaning of life, combined with a degree of stylisation in acting, choreography^[3] and camera movement. The film received positive reviews and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, establishing Hartley as a distinctive new talent in the burgeoning independent filmmaking movement.

Hartley's next film, Trust (1990), followed similar themes and style to The Unbelievable Truth, again an offbeat romantic comedy starring Adrienne Shelly as a Long Island teenager who forms a complex romantic relationship with a mysterious criminal (played by Martin Donovan, another Hartley regular). Trust won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. Hartley followed this with the short feature Surviving Desire (1991), a romantic comedy about a college professor (Donovan) who has an affair with a student (Mary B. Ward). Simple Men (1992), a drama about two brothers (played by Burke and Bill Sage) who reunite to search for their father and encounter two women in a small town (Karen Sillas and Elina Löwensohn), was entered in competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.

His next feature, Amateur (1994), marked a change of pace for Hartley, exploring more sombre themes and with a more tragic tone. Described as "a metaphysical thriller", it starred the French actress Isabelle Huppert as a former nun trying to write pornographic fiction who meets Thomas (Martin Donovan), a man suffering from amnesia, and Sophia (Elina Löwensohn), Thomas's wife and a porn star who reveals that Thomas was a violent criminal and pornographer.

Hartley developed Flirt (1995) as an extension of his short film of the same name made in 1993. The film is a triptych of three separate characters involved in romantic entanglements in different cities - New York, Berlin and Tokyo - with each story using the same dialogue. The film stars Hartley regulars Bill Sage, Parker Posey, Martin Donovan, Dwight Ewell and the Japanese actress Miho Nikaido, whom Hartley married in 1996.

Hartley achieved his greatest commercial and critical success with his next feature, Henry Fool (1997), a darkly comic drama about a near-catatonic garbageman, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), and his slutty sister Fay (Parker Posey), who meet Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), a libertine and aspiring novelist who inspires Simon to write and seduces Fay and her depressed mother (Maria Porter). Simon's literary output, an epic poem written in blank verse, becomes a national sensation, winning acclaim and controversy for its pornographic content. Simon eventually becomes a literary celebrity, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. While Henry's writing career fades, he is coerced into marrying Fay, whom he has gotten pregnant, and abandons writing and takes Simon's old job as a garbageman to support his family. The film garnered positive reviews and was entered into competition at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, where Hartley won the Best Screenplay Award.

Hartley was invited to contribute the American entry to a series of films financed by French television to celebrate the 2000 millennium. His entry, a black comedy entitled The Book of Life (1998) was shot entirely on digital video in New York in 1998. The story imagines Jesus (Martin Donovan) returning to Earth on the eve of the 2000 millennium to open the Book of Life (stored on an Apple Mac laptop) which will start the Apocalypse. Jesus, accompanied by Mary Magdalene (singer PJ Harvey) becomes enamoured of humanity and argues with Satan (Thomas Jay Ryan) as to whether or not to end human civilisation. The film also features Yo La Tengo, who appear as a Salvation Army band. Some sources state that William Burroughs is also featured, but according to the Hartley, this is actually a shot of the film's production manager doing a Burroughs impression. The film screened on French television and had a limited commercial release in cinemas.

Hartley's next feature No Such Thing (2001) tells the story of Beatrice (Sarah Polley), a tabloid journalist whose fiancé is killed by a monster in Iceland. Beatrice's editor (Helen Mirren) orders Beatrice to go to Iceland to interview the monster (Robert John Burke), who is a sensitive philosopher. The pair return to New York where the newspaper makes them celebrities. The film is intended as a satire of news media's obsession with celebrities and manipulating events to create news headlines. The film also stars Julie Christie as a doctor sympathetic to the monster's cause. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

The Girl from Monday (2005) continued Hartley's critical and satiric interest in media manipulation and the negative consequences of business monopolization and globalization. Filmed in New York City and Puerto Rico, the film is set in a future dystopia where people are encouraged to record their sexual encounters as an economic transaction and thus increase their consumer buying power. The film stars Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloyd and Tatiana Abracos. It premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and received a limited cinematic release, receiving mostly negative reviews.

In late 2005, Hartley moved from New York to Berlin and began preparing Fay Grim, an intended sequel to Henry Fool. The film, which starred Parker Posey, James Urbaniak and Thomas Jay Ryan reprising their roles from Henry Fool, was a comedy-drama in which Fay is coerced by a CIA agent (Jeff Goldblum) to try to locate notebooks that belonged to Henry (now a fugitive). Fay learns that the notebooks contain classified information that could compromise US security, leading Fay into a search around the world to find them. The film was shot in 2006 in locations in Berlin, Paris, and Istanbul and premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. It had a limited cinematic release in 2007 and received mixed reviews.

Since 1999, Hartley's films have predominantly been shot with digital cameras, including The Book of Life, The Girl from Monday, Fay Grim and his latest film, Meanwhile (2011), in addition to his short films. His digital aesthetic is significantly different to that seen in the 1990s, and his films shot by Michael Spiller on 35mm film, which exhibit blurring of the image (due to a very low shutter speed), the use of freeze frames, and shifts between colour and black and white footage, also display a considerable divergence from the washed-out colours and straightforward cinematography of the Long Island films from the early 1990s.^[4]

Hartley's latest film, Meanwhile, received its World premiere at the Camerimage festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland on 29 November 2011. The short, hour-long feature is being released on DVD in 2012 following a successful funding campaign by Hartley using the Kickstarter website.^[5]

Short films[link]

In addition to his feature work, Hartley has made a number of short films, many of which have been collected and re-released in DVD anthologies.

Theatre[link]

Hartley's stage play Soon, a drama dealing with the confrontation at Waco, Texas, between the religious community known as the Branch Davidians and the US federal government), was first produced at the Salzburg Festival and then later that year in Antwerp. It was also staged in the US in 2001.

Awards[link]

In 1996, Hartley was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.

From 2001 through 2004 Hartley was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University,^[6] while simultaneously editing No Such Thing, shooting The Girl From Monday, and writing Fay Grim.

He was awarded a fellowship by The American Academy in Berlin in late 2004, where he did research related to a proposed large-scale project concerning the life of French educator and social activist Simone Weil.

Personal life[link]

In 1996, Hartley married the Japanese dancer and actress Miho Nikaido, who had been one of the stars of his film Flirt.

Filmography[link]

• The Unbelievable Truth (1989)
• Trust (1990)
• Surviving Desire (1991)
• Simple Men (1992)
• Amateur (1994)
• Flirt (1995)
• Henry Fool (1997)
• The Book of Life (1998)
• No Such Thing (2001)
• The Girl from Monday (2005)
• Fay Grim (2006)
• Meanwhile (2011)

Short Films Directed by Hartley[link]

• Kid (1984)
• The Cartographer's Girlfriend (1987)
• Dogs (1988)
• Ambition (1991)
• Theory of Achievement (1991)
• Flirt (1993)
• Opera No. 1 (1994)
• NYC 3/94 (1994)
• Iris (1994)
• The New Math(s) (2000)
• Kimono (2000)
• The Sisters of Mercy (2004)
• A/Muse (2010)
• Implied Harmonies (2010)
• The Apologies (2010)
• Adventure (2010)
• Accomplice (2010)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Hal Hartley at the Internet Movie Database
• Official website
• Hal Hartley at AllRovi
• The Director Interviews: Hal Hartley, Fay Grim at Filmmaker Magazine
• Drinks with Tony podcast interview
• Hal Hartley and Parker Posey Interview
• Hammer to Nail interview
• Literature on Hal Hartley