WHAT'S NEW?

SITE OF THE WEEK

When we want to know about a film or a movie star, there's simply one place to go. IMDB is to movies, what eBay is to acutions. How we lived without it, is hard to imagine.

VISIT IMDB

Movies r’ us. Films are so embedded into our culture, that we can hardly speak without them.

"I was so happy!" the woman at the party exclaimed the other day. "I felt just like Meg Ryan in "City of Angels", you know, right after Nicholas Cage turns into a mortal, but before she gets hit by the truck!"

The frightening thing is that we all knew what she meant. It’s that moment when Meg is riding no-hands on her bicycle in sheer ecstasy. Then- -- WHAM, she’s dead and Nicholas Cage, who has given up immortality to woo Meg, has to learn how to live without her. We’ve all seen so many films and experienced so many of the identical cinematic moments, that we share an emotional vocabulary. And it’s a growing vocabulary. Watch any couple in Blockbuster trying to rent a film they both haven’t seen. It can take hours.

We even use films to talk about films.

"It was okay," a friend might say of a new film, "but one part was so much like "Deer Hunter" that it reminded me of that scene in "Silence of the Lambs", which is just like the part in "Joe Dirt" where the person is down in the pit."

It’s a whole new way of talking, and it’s a language shared by people all over the world. Everything in our culture – our history, our literature, our news, our mythology, our religions, our music – has all been recast into film. I was at an exhibit of artifacts brought up from the sunken ship Titanic recently and watched a mother explain the story to her children through the fictional lives of Leonardi DiCapria and Kate Winslet. That 1997 film, by the way, was the fifth cinematic version of the disaster.

I hardly ever see movies at the movies anymore. Who needs the expense, the hassle and all those loud speakers? I get my videos free from the local library. I also subscribe to the Independent Film Channel on the Dish Network. I like to think that makes me a high-brow film junky, not like those lowly people who watch HBO. The Dish offers a package that includes 59 movie channels. That’s 59 separate CHANNELS full of movies running all day and night. Too much. My friend’s kids watch DVDs on their laptop computer in the back seat of the car. I watch old films on the Web. Even buses play movies now.

Let’s avoid tough moral questions here. Yes, movies are too violent. Yes, Disney and GM are getting into the softcore adult film business. Yes, American filmgoers are more overweight than at any time in the history of the world. Yes, quality seems to go down as budgets go up.

But I still love movies. The other day I asked myself – what one web site do you visit more than any other? The first was eBay.com of course. But the second you may not know. It’s the Internet Film Database or IMDb.com. I go there a lot. Soon you will too.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

The original IMDb concept was pure Internet genius. It began as a simple user group on the Usenet bulletin board, back when the WWW was text only. By 1990 the groups had collected information on 10,000 films. That’s about the time that founder and managing editor Col Needham posted a set of Unix shell scripts that allowed users to actually search the accumulated data pile – a search engine, as we call them now. The original name "rec.arts.movies movie database" was replaced by Internet Movie Database and IMDb was born. The first Web version appeared on servers in Cardiff at the University of Wales in 1993.

By 1996 the site was rapidly expanding with the submission of volunteers and usage was increasing. But the founders, who continued to work from their homes and hold down day jobs, decided not to go the venture capital route. Instead, they paid the rising hosting bills with advertising and licensing fees, enough at least, to keep the servers humming.

The original idea was breathtakingly simple. Why not create a giant database that includes every film ever made? It should include the film shooting locations, all the actors and the parts they played, release date, the director and writers and producers, of course. I don’t know how many films are in the database today, but there were 250,000 online two years ago. A million actors are listed and each can be tracked.

If I type in, say, Ernest Borgnine. I can see that he was born in Connecticut in 1917 and that he has performed in 147 major movie and TV productions. I can see that his first film was "Whistle at Eaton Falls" shot in Dover, New Hampshire. When I click on Dover to see how many other major movies were filmed there, the database says -- none. I can also drill down to read a biography of Borgnine, see the names of his five wives, view about two dozen photos, see ratings on his films, check out any major awards he’s one. And that’s just one of the one million people listed in the database.

THE UP SHOT

In 1998 IMDb.com was purchased by the most successful Internet company, Amazon.com. The history of the process, as published on the company’s web site, makes it clear that Amazon, unlike the IMDb founders, was motivated more by dollar signs than by the love of film trivia. IMDb had the content. Amazon had the videos and the DVDs for sale, the delivery system, and the customer base. Now with a simple mouse click, readers can BUY all the videos featuring Ernest Borgnine too. It seems like the perfect match.

Today, according to a CBS online report, IMDb has about 100 paid employees, mostly working out of Seattle, where Amazon.com is headquartered. Founder Col Needham, who is only in his mid-30s, still works for the company, but operates from his home in Bristol, England. Needham says he started the project to keep track of the videos he was watching, so he wouldn’t rent the same one twice.

It’s a fairy tale ending. But not everyone in Filmland is happy.

Many purists reacted negatively to the Amazon sale in 1998, seeing the site as a group project created by thousands of volunteers. One writer compared it to selling off a natural resource like Old Faithful.

The official online IMDb history page stops abruptly in the year 1999. Since then Amazon.com has lost some of its golden reputation. The tiny company that started a revolution in the bookselling industry has become the 10,000-pound gorilla of online sales. Amazon’s legal battles to patent its one-click sales process ticked off a lot of people. Some fear that Amazon.com could become Big Brother with so much personal user data in its files potentially for sale. Others note that, under Amazon.com, some of the featured data has disappeared from IMDb and the emphasis on knowledge has been replaced by more opportunities to buy movie paraphernalia.

Amazon did the same to book fanatics when they purchased and pulled the wings off Bibliofind.com, the amazing used book database. It still works, but much of the data is missing, and books are harder to find and harder to order now.

But so far IMDb remains largely intact -- if you ignore the glossy sales stuff and stick to the little search box on the left. The My Movies section allows readers to personalize their own film database, but all that data goes into Big Brother’s vault. You can also type in your zip code to see what’s playing in your home town, keep up on unreleased films, play trivia games, read entertainment news, and so on. All that stuff is fine, but the original database is still the magical part for me.

Angry film buffs have been looking for ways to pull the core data onto a less commercial venue, but don’t hold your breath. Personally, I don’t have a problem connecting tackiness with film. I mean, IMDb isn’t exactly the Bodleian Library. That reminds me of that scene in "Citizen Kane", you know, where Orson Welles … (etc. etc. blah, blah, blah)…