October
20
IMDb's 18th Anniversary: Founder Needham's Ten Best List
It's hard to believe that the IMDb--or Internet movie database--is 18 years old. I don't know about you, but I probably go on there 20 times day, checking movie or actor or director or writer or producer spellings, dates, company affiliations, release dates or awards history. IMDb is the most visited movie site on the Web, with 57 million unique users per month and 2 1/2 billion page views per month.
The site's founder and managing director, Col Needham, 41, is an ebullient, cheery film enthusiast. He manages about 100 employees around the globe from his home base in Bristol, England, where he lives with his wife and two teenage kids. Since IMDb was bought by Amazon ten years ago, there's another satellite office in Seattle. But Needham insists IMDb is "headquartered on the Internet."
Eighteen years ago Friday he posted the first version of the IMDb software onto the internet for anybody to download. IMDb started as Needham's own private database of films he'd seen. (The Alfred Hitchcock fan's top-ten list is on the jump.) Starting in the mid 1980s, he and a few film nerd friends started sharing their info. "I did the film geek thing of trying to create a paper diary of films," he says. "It lasted two weeks." Needham began to meet up with other film fans from around the world for a movie discussion group, before the Web existed. "It was all just text based postings," he says.
One person started collecting actresses. Needham was collecting a list of actors based on films he had seen. They started pooling information. Other people sent in missing credits. The files began to accumulate. In October 1990 somebody in the group said, "What we really need is a database so we can search." Needham took some software he had written in the past and converted it to work so that any computer could use it. "Everything spoke the same language," he says.
He collected experts in each area to add to the database. All volunteering, of course. Somebody would say, "I love writers," and that would be their area of responsibility. The third man recruited, who lived in Switzerland, took up composers. "He's still here to this day," says Needham. There was no corporate entity until January 1996 when the four founding partners all met for the first time in the same room with a lawyer to sign incorporation papers.
IMDb is still growing, in concert with Amazon, which takes care of the company's server and hardware needs, and indie site Withoutabox. "We're coming up with new features, listening to what our customers want," says Needham. The number one demand is video, a growing part of the site. IMDb has already launched 6000 TV episodes and feature films from a variety of sources, not to mention shorts. They offer Withoutabox filmmakers opportunities to upload and distribute content on Imdb, as well as share with each other films and reactions. They've also beta-tested a German-language version.
Here's an Awards Daily story on the top- rated movies on IMDb as Oscar indicators.
Needham, a wealthy man, spends some of his hard-earned pounds on DVDs--he just got a new 50th anniversary Vertigo edition from Amazon--which happens to be his favorite movie of all time. "I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it," he says. "I know I have a record of it on the computer somewhere."
#1 Vertigo (1958) "All-time favorite"
#2 North by Northwest (1959) "next best Hitchcockand a proxy for all the other Hitchcocks"
#3 Double Indemnity (1944) "A proxy for all film noirs"
#4 Bringing Up Baby (1938) "a proxy for screwball comedies and all-time fave actor Cary Grant and actress Katharine Hepburn"
#5 Aliens (1986) "A proxy all James Cameron movies"
#6 Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
#7 Se7en (1995)
#8 The Apartment (1960)
#9 Touch of Evil (1958)
#10 Jaws (1975)
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18 years old and you'd think they'd know how to get my name off the credits as a Sound-Mixer on a Co-Ed Confidential 2 : Sophmores
Posted by: seanH | October 20, 2008 at 10:01 PM
Eyes Wide Shut? Really???
(And not even as "a proxy for all Kubrik...")
Posted by: Anon | October 21, 2008 at 12:09 AM
My favorite imdb-ism is the chronic flipping of Asian names.
The great martial artist Yu Hai from "The Shaolin Temple" becomes: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0950494/
Posted by: David C | October 22, 2008 at 02:14 PM
Hi Anne!
Hope all is well. As always, I enjoy reading your work, but I wish I had known you were going to talk to the founder of IMDB, as I would have given you a few questions for him. As a unit publicist, it is incredibly frustrating to find a film I'm working on has dozens of credits/rumors/etc. listed there with no checking being done. I could add myself to any number of films I never worked on, and no one would blink twice at the IMDB. Extras regularly give themselves character names, and add themselves without a question. Then, when trying to have it removed, it takes weeks/months, if it ever happens. After a while, one gives up.
As for its value as a research tool, many people are given credits that never happened or never existed in the first place and are reported as fact. Many journalists (yourself NOT included) do not bother to check the veracity, and take what they see there as fact.
I realize that given the traffic they attract and the conglomerate it's become, they probably don't really care about the petty gripes of a person such as myself, but it would be really nice if there was some sort of quality control, or control of any kind. There should be a way for someone in the business with legitimate credentials to be able to call them to make corrections or whatever. One would hope that they would want to do what they could to better their product. At least I would hope...
Best,
Michael
Posted by: Michael Klastorin | October 25, 2008 at 08:51 PM
What in the world is the Kubrick film doing on this list -- it's nowhere near even the best of his films?
Posted by: Pat Evans | November 03, 2008 at 04:37 AM
Great to see 'Eyes Wide Shut' on the list! :)
I watch it every 6 months - a film of novelistic depth and so underrated.
Posted by: Jett Loe | March 24, 2009 at 07:14 AM