a sea of desktop computers manned by 20-something Oompa Loompas
August 4, 2004 6:37 PM   Subscribe

"I'll IMDB you."
posted by xowie (32 comments total)
 
Ahh... the IMDB. The first website that I fell in love with. That was until I found metafilter, you dirty little whore.

Does anyone else scan the trivia section of every single movie that they just saw?
posted by graventy at 6:43 PM on August 4, 2004


Trivia, crazy credits and goofs. The message boards are pretty inane, but then again, I read the celebrity news and studio briefing every day so who am I to talk.
posted by tetsuo at 7:14 PM on August 4, 2004


graventy: yes.
posted by pmurray63 at 8:02 PM on August 4, 2004


Wow. Very, very cool -- on more than one occasion over the last 7 or 8 years, I had indeed wondered: who made this? Where did it come from? Now I know.

Thanks for the post, xowie.
posted by davidmsc at 8:35 PM on August 4, 2004


IMDB is a must-bookmark site for everyone from the casual moviegoer to the most self-absorbed filmic storyteller.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:09 PM on August 4, 2004


Cool article.

Metafilter: you dirty little whore.
posted by DyRE at 9:10 PM on August 4, 2004


I added internet access to my phone just so I could access IMDb on the run. I am a total film geek and I can’t imagine what I would do without it. Tonight I went to a documentary that I already knew a lot about, but I was able to quickly check its run time and the festivals where it had been shown. This may not seem like a big deal, but I went to the filmmaker’s home page and they didn’t even list the run time!

I will admit that the message boards are usually a teenage wasteland, but I love to go there after an interesting movie. I went there first to discuss Donnie Darko and I discussed “The Ring” vs. “The Ringu” on those boards. It’s a great place to talk about those nagging plot points and unanswered questions.
posted by supershauna at 9:10 PM on August 4, 2004


I have wasted more time on IMDB than on Plastic, Metafilter, Amazon and Django, combined. And I've spent a lot of time on Django.

There are days when I go to look up a simple thing, and rise from the muck of Hollywood trivia two hours later to find the coffee in my cup gone cold and the coffee in the pot turned to sludge. (And, oh, BTW, none of my work getting done. As though that mattered.)

I always assumed -- wrongly, I now suppose -- that SAG or the Directors Guild provided them with post-facto information. Now that I know (do I know?) that's not true, it's all that much more amazing.
posted by lodurr at 9:10 PM on August 4, 2004


My earliest web memory is impressing my girlfriend's father that I knew an actual URL: us.imdb.com, off the top of my head.

I really must be into these new computer things to know one without even using a bookmark!
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 9:12 PM on August 4, 2004


A friend of mine has a confession - he has friends who are involved in the film business on various levels and he sometimes submits factoids to IMDB that are false, but very funny. He uses as much real info as possible, but then he spices it up with some so-off-the-wall factoid that might make people say "you can't make that stuff up." I'm sure that he's not the only one that has done this.
posted by crazy finger at 9:22 PM on August 4, 2004


Yeah - IMDB and I also AllMusic... (and shed a tear at the recent redesign that broke my Tag&Rename... FreeDB will have to suffice for the time being...)
posted by wfrgms at 9:40 PM on August 4, 2004


so who else is in it?
posted by muckster at 9:45 PM on August 4, 2004


An old coworker's 1995 book on internet technology features a background look at the IMDB. Do a control-F on this page and look for "movie" to find the chunk.

It's so old the URL is http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/
posted by mathowie at 9:59 PM on August 4, 2004


IMDB is essential for me as well. As a film fanatic, I used to buy those huge Videohound movie guides every year at Christmas

*shudder.
posted by Quartermass at 10:06 PM on August 4, 2004


gatekeeper.dec.com was the first site I could not live without. altavista.com was number two. IMDB was the next. Like lodurr I have wasted (happily) a great deal of time on IMDB. Back when I was teaching "the Internet" to newbies IMDB always seemed to be the most popular destination.
posted by arse_hat at 10:39 PM on August 4, 2004


I just this afternoon used the imdb to prove that the location used for exteriors of Kevin Spacey's house in American Beauty was two blocks away from where I live. I've never used the imdb for anything remotely important, and yet it's an absolutely invaluable resource. What an odd juxtaposition...
posted by jonson at 10:44 PM on August 4, 2004


For anyone even tangentially involved in the world of film, IMDB Pro is more than worth the $100 a year price. It adds in film-by-film business and box office data, compiled with the same compulsive completeness as the free part of the site's information.
posted by thomascrown at 10:48 PM on August 4, 2004


The IMDb, born this July 1990.

IMDb, hacked by Randal Schwartz.
posted by dhartung at 10:53 PM on August 4, 2004


IMDB is an incredible site, great content, great design. I too check the "goofs" and "trivia" sections after every movie I see, then read Roger Ebert's review.

We're really lucky it didn't turn out like allmusic.com, which has alright content (no user input) and horrible design (like why does it use javascript calls instead of hyperlinks?). I use allmusic a fraction of the amount as imdb because I dread the interface.

The imdb message boards are great, sure a lot of it's crap but there's also a lot of interesting content, better than a lot of message boards.

One criticism I have of IMDB is the foreign content is a little thin, I usually go to LoveHKFilm or KoreanFilm.org to read up on films from those countries.

Gamefaqs is another resource I use a lot that strikes me as very similar to imdb.
posted by bobo123 at 1:05 AM on August 5, 2004


I cited the IMDB in an essay I did back in 1995, when its URL was msstate.edu/Movies.

I read somewhere that the current IMDB design is actually the only site Jakob Neilsen was ever paid to design/implement -- anybody care to confirm or clarify?
posted by John Shaft at 1:35 AM on August 5, 2004


I am, Muckster.
posted by ciderwoman at 1:47 AM on August 5, 2004


Possibly my all-time favourite web resource. I remember using it when it was still based at Cardiff University. Back in the days when I'd scan Yahoo's "What's New" pages each day to see which organisations had gone online. Exciting times, before even banner ads, let alone popups or the like.
posted by salmacis at 2:42 AM on August 5, 2004


hey muckster: me three!
posted by pxe2000 at 4:44 AM on August 5, 2004


Really enjoyed that Alphabet film pxe2000. Great shot from under the chairs as the teacher approaches. What's the music?
posted by ciderwoman at 4:58 AM on August 5, 2004


The best thing for me about IMDB is being able to instantly solve that nagging "where-have-I-seen-that-actor-before" itch.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:22 AM on August 5, 2004


Interesting. I never knew Amazon owned them...just figured they had some kind of marketing partnership.

My only criticism with the IMDb is how needlessly complicated their submissions/update apparatus is. And how ineffectual it is, in my case: I've submitted corrections (along with corroborating information) twice, and nothing ever came of them. Until, that is, the DVDs came out and the IMDb folks could update based on that. Frustrating.
posted by Vidiot at 7:53 AM on August 5, 2004


Yeah. And looking up the name of the actor whose trailer happened to be parked on your street. Yeah Ben Jensen!
posted by DrJohnEvans at 7:55 AM on August 5, 2004


If you know you've seen an actor in a few movies but don't know his/her name, is there any way to plug in film titles in IMDB and find all the actors they have in common?
posted by gottabefunky at 9:38 AM on August 5, 2004


I've been lovin' the IMDB for at least ten years. It's one of the earliest great things I remember finding on the young web (back in gopher days!), and it's still one of the resources I reach for most desperately to answer those nagging questions that I just can't let go of. Right up there with Google and Amazon, at least for me, and I've been using it a lot longer.

On preview, check out the Common Name Search, gottabefunky.
posted by Songdog at 9:47 AM on August 5, 2004


Me Four
posted by davros42 at 4:13 PM on August 5, 2004


Mrs. Xowie
posted by xowie at 4:34 PM on August 5, 2004


davros, was it too exciting for words to be an additional second assistant director? Come on, we want the juicy details.
posted by billsaysthis at 2:01 PM on August 6, 2004


« Older Astrolabes   |   Fake Sites Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments