Okay so this is so strange and it happened by accident but like a lot of others I was stuck on creating Table2 in Chapter 4. I mistakenly typed into my URL, this: http://localhost/table2.php
AND IT WORKED! Without the "\" it continued to show up blank but adding that "\" at the end made it display. This is so strange, but I kept checking and rechecking my code and it was all correct, I had no spaces after my EOD statements or anything. And this fixed it. Perhaps it will help others as well. This is what my code looks like:

<?php
$link = mysql_connect("localhost","root","password") or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("moviesite") or die(mysql_error());

$query = "SELECT movie_name, movie_director, movie_leadactor " .
         "FROM movie";

$result = mysql_query($query, $link) or die(mysql_error());
$num_movies = mysql_num_rows($result);

$movie_header=<<<EOD
 <h2><center>Movie Review Database</center></h2>
 <table width="70%" border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" align="center">
  <tr>
   <th>Movie Title</th>
   <th>Movie Director</th>
   <th>Movie Lead Actor</th>
  </tr>

EOD;

function get_director() {
  global $movie_director;
  global $director;

  $query_d = "SELECT people_fullname " .
             "FROM people " .
             "WHERE people_id='$movie_director'";
  $results_d = mysql_query($query_d) or die(mysql_error());
  $row_d = mysql_fetch_array($results_d);
  extract ($row_d);
  $director = $people_fullname;
}

function get_leadactor() {
  global $movie_leadactor;
  global $leadactor;

  $query_a = "SELECT people_fullname " .
             "FROM people " .
             "WHERE people_id='$movie_leadactor'";
  $results_a = mysql_query($query_a) or die(mysql_error());
  $row_a = mysql_fetch_array($results_a);
  extract($row_a);
  $leadactor = $people_fullname;
}

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
  $movie_name = $row['movie_name'];
  $movie_director = $row['movie_director'];
  $movie_leadactor = $row['movie_leadactor'];

  get_director();

  get_leadactor();

  $movie_details .=<<<EOD
  <tr>
   <td>$movie_name</td>
   <td>$director</td>
   <td>$leadactor</td>
  </tr>
EOD;
}

$movie_details .=<<<EOD
  <tr>
   <td>Total :$num_movies Movies</td>
  </tr>
EOD;

$movie_footer = "</table>";

$movie =<<<MOVIE
  $movie_header
  $movie_details
  $movie_footer
MOVIE;

  echo "There are $num_movies movies in our database";
  echo $movie;
?>