Archive for category Newsletter

Newsletter #17

Posted by admin in Newsletter on August 24th, 1998

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Short subjects:

Weekly changing URLs are no more
“In Production” section new look
“Awards” section changes
Authorized photos
Appearances in long-running TV-series
Outline list

Web interface changes
WASHED-UPdate washed up
More reliable template submission interface

Features:

The merger
User comment system

New aka format

Trailers:

Hot searches
Hot movies
IMDb in the news
Database statistics

Future developments

WEEKLY CHANGING URLS ARE NO MORE

by Rob Hartill
We know you loved them but we’ve finally gotten rid of those pesky
weekly URLs containing numeric values that made it awkward to link to the
database. As you’ll notice while wandering the site, those URLs have been
replaced with more permanent ones (some names/titles will change over time,
so there’s a <0.5% chance that a title/name will use a different URL from
one week to the next from now on).
You may also have noticed that many URLs changed, e.g. from /M/title-exact?

to /Title?. This should compensate for some of the extra space consumed
by the permanent URLs.
All existing links into the database are unaffected. If you have links that
use the old style URLs, please consider moving them to the new style when
convenient as this will help browsers and proxies to cache the new URLs
rather than new and old together.

“IN PRODUCTION” SECTION NEW LOOK

by Giancarlo Cairella
The “In Production” section has
been revamped and now includes more detailed information about the production
status of each title. This can be one of the following:

Announced:

greenlighted/confirmed projects in a very early stage of
development. The sequels to high-profile productions that are immediately
announced after the original film has hit the box office would fall
into this category (like “Men In Black 2“).

Pre-production:

the film is in development and in the initial stages of
production (casting, location scouting etc.) but it’s still not filming.

Filming:

self explanatory. Principal photography is currently being shot
on location or in the studio.

Post-production:

filming has been completed, the film is now in the
scoring/editing/effects phase.

Completed:

the film is more or less complete but is still awaiting a
proper release. In this phase the film might be shown during test/sneak
previews for further editing or reshoots.

Unknown:

self-explanatory

Each entry may include more extensive comments about the status of the
project, including news, updates, rumors and other data submitted by users.
A date field will also tell the user when that title’s information has been
updated for the last time.
The “In production” data is now also listed on the corresponding title details pages.

“AWARDS” SECTION CHANGES

by Oliver Heidelbach
The IMDb awards section is filling out well with many awards covered
completely. As a result, the old method of tagging awards by cryptic
attributes in filmography listings (as in “BS:AAN”) has been largely phased
out. Some old abbreviated award attributes will remain attached to
filmographies for a little longer until they have a corresponding entry in
the dedicated awards section.
The awards pages have also been redesigned for easier viewing. Here are a
sample title and a
sample name.

AUTHORIZED PHOTOS

by Rob Hartill
We’ve occasionally been asked by people if we can put photographs they have
online. Sometimes these photographs have been scanned by fans of actors
and actresses, and due to copyright issues we cannot include them directly
in the database (i.e. served from our machines). However, other times the
requests have come from the subjects themselves, their agents, friends or
family. We now accept authorized photograph images from these individuals
if copyright issues permit.
If you own a photograph or have the right to allow IMDb to publish a
photograph of a person in the database and would like us to add it to this
person’s biography page then please contact us to arrange a convenient way
for us to receive the image.
The photographs will appear on the biographies page and should preferably
be headshots; no pin-up photos please (those can be sent privately .

Please send enquiries (do not include the photo/image)
to photo-content@imdb.com. Please do not use this address for any other
correspondence, requests for photographs will be ignored.
For an example of how this new feature appears,
see this photo sent to us by Michael Driesch.

Note that we may need to shrink and/or crop images to more appropriate sizes.

APPEARANCES IN LONG-RUNNING TV-SERIES

We’ve improved the way filmographies are listed when the actor/actress has
appeared in a long running TV-series. The year they first appeared (as used
in the character name field where known) now overrides the year the series
first aired in the filmography sort order. For example
see Meg Ryan and
her early 1980s appearances in “As the World Turns” (1956). There
is more information on this issue in the FAQ.

OUTLINE LIST

by Jon Reeves
Over the years, one popular request has been for a brief summary of a
movie’s content on the main movie page. Since the existing plot summaries
were usually too long to display conveniently, a new list has been started:
the plot outline list. A plot outline is one or at most two lines long.
Only a single outline is stored for each title, and while we retain the
author’s name internally, it’s not displayed.
The outline list was started with the shorter entries from the existing
plot list as well as some outlines written by team members; in its short
life, it has proved to be very popular.
To submit a plot outline, use the keyword OUTLINE and the same tags as the
plot list — MV:, PL:, BY: — but be sure to use no more than two
80-character lines for the PL tag or your outline will be rejected.

WEB INTERFACE CHANGES

Over the months, we’ve made a number of minor improvements to the web
interface that you might have noticed. The year and country browsers now
include release data; there’s a title browser; and, most significantly,
there are a number of new search options available at the main search page.

You can now search taglines; more search options have moved from the obscure
advanced search page to the main search page; you can now do a new search
from any search result page; and there’s a new power search.
The power search makes complex searches easier; for instance, if you have
already found all movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, you can use the
power search to limit the display to only those that were in color without
having to start a new search.

WASHED-UPDATE WASHED UP

by Jon Reeves

Longtime IMDb contributor Greg Bulmash decided to stop writing his column,
The WASHED-UPdate, in March (he swears it was a coincidence that he had
just met me in person). However, he has recently become an IMDb employee
and has plans for several new features. Since he will also be taking over
the newsletter, I’ll let him explain them himself in the next issue.

MORE RELIABLE TEMPLATE SUBMISSION INTERFACE

by Mark Harding
To complement the mail server TEMPLATE method of submitting data, we’ve
added a new method, called KEYWORDS, which aims to improve the accuracy of
the submissions made, resulting in data being added in an accurate and
timely fashion to the site.

The KEYWORDS method places some extra responsibility on you, the submitter,
to ensure that what you submit is correctly formatted and conforms to the
current IMDb rules for data submission. The upshot of this, as noted above,
is that data can be added more quickly because less of the information will
be rejected during team processing due to problems.
The problem with the existing template method is that very little checking
is possible until the template has been processed and packaged up for the
IMDb team to process. By this time, important contextual information can
be lost, leaving the manager unsure what to do, which in turn can lead to
errors in the data or outright rejection of information.
The KEYWORDS method attempts to solve this problem by handing responsibility
for “correctness” back to the submitter, who, after all, knows what they
are trying to submit
Using this approach, templates are edited as normal, and submitted using
the new command KEYWORDS TITLE, but rather than being passed directly to
the IMDb team, all the new data in the template is converted into keyword
additions and returned to the submitter. The submitter then checks that
they are happy with the conversion before submitting the new keyword data
to the traditional additions interface for processing. Any
problems with the submission are then returned to the user for attention,
correction and resubmission.

We hope that you will take the time to familiarize yourself with this method
of submission because, at the end of the day, we all want the IMDb to be
the best movie resource in the world!

AMAZON.COM ACQUIRES IMDb

by Col Needham
At the end of April IMDb was acquired
by Amazon.com. The details were
widely circulated in a press release at the time.
As mentioned in the release, Amazon expects IMDb to support its eventual
entry into online video sales on their web site. In addition, the intention
is to continue to maintain and grow the existing IMDb site at www.imdb.com.
The difference being that IMDb will now be properly funded, staffed and
supported, so the long term future and success of the site is secured.

All the existing IMDb staff are staying on so the site is being run by
exactly the same people as always. I will continue as the managing director
of IMDb Ltd which is now a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. Everyone at IMDb
is pleased to see the deal completed and we’re all looking forward to the
future with Amazon. There is an excellent match between the cultures and
people at the two companies.
The changes to current features and options at the regular www.imdb.com
site should be minimal, aside from improvements we will be able to make as
a result of access to better resources. We’ve already been able to expand
the staff significantly and many new features are starting to appear as a
result. This week saw the launch of the user comments system — something
we’ve wanted to add for a long time. A long overdue site redesign is on
the way too.
Thanks to everyone who has supported the IMDb over the years. We hope this
support will continue. Please contact the
IMDb feedback address if
you have any specific questions regarding this
announcement.

USER COMMENT SYSTEM

by James Herbert
One of the new features we’ve been able to add as a result of the
acquisition by Amazon is a user submitted reviews section. We’ve wanted
to add this for so long but previously didn’t have the resources to do so.
To add your own comments about a movie or TV series you have views on, look
for the link at the bottom of the production’s page saying “I’ve seen
this movie and would like to comment on it”. After clicking on that
link entering your comments is very easy. You can read comments by clicking
on the appropriate menu item.
Please note that you must read the guidelines before you start posting
comments; each comment is checked by a human and it is always a shame to
reject comments in which people have gone to great lengths to spell out
the entire story or discuss the views put forth by others.
In order to comment, you must be a registered user.

NEW AKA FORMAT

by Michel Hafner
We have introduced a new format for the collection and display of data
about alternative titles. The main change is that the old attribute field
has been replaced by two new fields, one for the country and language and
one for the title type. In addition these fields are now based on finite
sets of valid attributes that are accepted by the mail server. Attributes
not in these sets are rejected. Also, the country-language attribute must
be defined. The new data format is
AKA

primary title|alternative title|country-language attribute|title-type attribute|

The country-language field records the country in which the alternative
title has been used together with the language of the title or alternatively
the language region of a multilingual country. The valid set of
country-language attributes contains all currently valid countries, plus
several other members that include a country and language. See
the submission guide for the complete current list.
The type of a title should be explained in the title-type field. Again,
see the submission guide for the current complete list; a few common
ones follow:
(TV title)
(abbreviated title)
(promotional abbreviation)
(working title)
If these sets do not provide the specific attribute you need please use a
COMMENT-AKA and define the new required attribute for your alternative
title(s). If it’s appropriate and generally useful it will be added to the
set of valid attributes. The new format will allow for easy integration of
general alternative titles that go beyond the current set of acceptable
titles that is limited to titles in the (co-)producing countries of a film.
But keep in mind that for the time being we still do not accept general
alternative titles. There are some additional aspects worth mentioning that
have been added to the additions guide for alternative titles. If you intend
to mail in new alternative titles please have a look at this updated guide
before you do so.

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves
Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending August 23. Since it’s been so long since the
last issue, I’m going to skip the comparative positions. Suffice to say
Titanic was on top for a long time.
Titles:

The usual batch of new releases, cult faves, and new-to-video, with the
newsworthy
Wag the Dog making a strong showing. The
Pam-n-Tommy tape is lurking in its trenchcoat at #91;
27 different TV series in the top 300 (up from 22 last time); 25 of the
AFI 100 titles made the list, but 23 made it last time without the publicity,
so it’s not clear if the AFI helped. Big prerelease interest in
Dogma, helped by
Kevin Smith‘s strong web presence. And renewed interest in everything connected to
Hanks,
Spielberg, and

Kubrick as well.
People:

No big surprises in the top of this list.
Mark-Paul Gosselaar apparently made a strong impression in

Dead Man on Campus to land at #37; in fact, nominal star
Tom Everett Scott only made #89, also losing to wild man
Lochlyn Munro (#71). And after an initial strong showing, the
Saving Private Ryan supporting ensemble has dropped off sharply, mostly landing lower than
Edward Burns (#61).
Lark Voorhies landed at #99 for no apparent reason except an old guest shot on

ST: DS9.

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham
Movies opening in the US from January to July sorted by number of votes
(to July 24):

0000011101	2198	6.5	Deep Impact (1998)
0000000123	2065	8.5	Truman Show, The (1998)
1000000002	1951	5.5	Godzilla (1998)
0000001113	1509	8.1	X Files, The (1998)
1000000112	1481	7.0	Armageddon (1998)
0000001222	1414	7.9	Big Lebowski, The (1998)
0000001112	1371	7.4	Wedding Singer, The (1998)
1000011101	1342	5.9	Lost in Space (1998)
1000001112	1220	6.5	Man in the Iron Mask, The (1998/I)
0000001112	1028	7.3	City of Angels (1998)

Movies opening in the US from January to July sorted by average votes
(to July 24):

0000000123	423	8.6	There’s Something About Mary (1998)
0000000123	2065	8.5	Truman Show, The (1998)
0000000232	386	8.5	Spanish Prisoner, The (1997)
0000000123	583	8.3	Mulan (1998)
0000000223	258	8.3	Shooting Fish (1997)
0000001113	1509	8.1	X Files, The (1998)
0000000114	378	8.1	Apostle, The (1997)
0000001222	241	8.1	Mask of Zorro, The (1998)
0000001222	509	8.0	Out of Sight (1998)
0000001222	1414	7.9	Big Lebowski, The (1998)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves
Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada).
Arizona Star [10 January].
Tampa Bay [8 January].
Wilmington NC Star [8 January].
Santa Rosa Press Democrat (online feature);
reprinted in, Charlotte Observer.
Syndicated TV Q&A column.

Computerworld.
Journal Now (Winston-Salem NC).
Austin Chronicle.
Contra Costa Times.
Weekly Mail & Guardian (South Africa).
The Internet Cafe.
The Guardian (UK).
Variety.
The Industry Standard (several times).

Nando.net.
TIME.

We’ve also won several new awards. See selections from the
gallery here.

PC Magazine Top 100 sites.
Virgilio site of the day.
Global Information Infrastructure Awards Finalist.
Cool Site of the Day (finally).

Los Angeles Times Pick (6 July).

And again this year, we won both the Judge’s and People’s
Choice Webby award in
the film category. Thanks
for voting for us. We are the only site to win both awards both years.
Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate, before he stopped writing it, was mentioned in:

Wild Wild Web Site of the Week

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves
This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 50,000 and 75,000 additions
every week (to all lists, not just those in the totals below) from
thousands of users all over the world.

   Number of filmography entries: 2,406,554
   Number of people covered:        616,324
   Number of movies covered:        156,133

Size of the database (Mb): 244
Not-so-recent milestones (some are far surpassed now):

100 trailers
500 titles with crazy credits
500 DVDs
1,000 awards known

1,000 movies with alternate versions
1,500 posters
4,000 mini-biographies
5,000 titles with taglines
7,500 titles with outlines

10,000 titles with literature entries
10,000 miscellaneous company entries
10,000 name URLs
25,000 awards entries
25,000 alternate names

25,000 certificate entries
25,000 distributor entries
25,000 location entries
25,000 titles with plot summaries
50,000 biography entries

50,000 editor entries
50,000 release dates
50,000 sound mix entries
50,000 title URLs
50,000 alternate titles

100,000 color-information entries
100,000 guest appearances
100,000 language entries
100,000 producer entries
100,000 production company entries

125,000 country entries
125,000 director entries
125,000 writer entries
150,000 movies
200,000 genre entries

250,000 titles
750,000 actors
1,250,000 acting credits
2,250,000 filmography entries

A note on the plot summary milestone: very short summaries were split out
to the separate outline list, so the 25,000 milestone was reached once before.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

This is a regular section listing some enhancements we’re currently
looking at. Please bear in mind that some of these may take quite
a while to come to fruition or even fail to materialize because the
original volunteer decides not to proceed.

a long-overdue redesign is in the works; don’t worry, we know you
like our lightweight use of graphics and lack of useless glitz.
In fact, the redesign should make the site even faster.

online review and updating of your voting history

a company information list, analogous to the biography list, with
details about both current and defunct companies.

a split of the “miscellaneous” filmographies into more manageable
departmental lists

improved handling of episodes in television series

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

Academy Awards and Oscar are registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences. UNIX and X Window System are registered trademarks
of The Open Group. The WASHED-UPdate is a trademark of Greg Bulmash. All
other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

No Comments

Newsletter #16

Posted by admin in Newsletter on December 3rd, 1997

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Short subjects:

New biography field: PI

Internet Explorer Channel

Registration and live votes

Features:

Partnerships: TV listings, trailers

Year in review

Trailers:

Hot searches

Hot movies

IMDb in the news

Database statistics

Future developments

NEW BIOGRAPHY FIELD: PI

by Mark Harding

A new field that complements the existing BT: field has been added
to the Biography list. The “Portrayed In” field is used to denote
films in which people have been played by other actors but that are not
biographical movies about that particular person. A good example would
be a biographical movie about a particular person in which other real
people appear; the primary actor would receive a BT: entry while all
others would be eligible for a PI: entry.

For example, in the movie:

Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story (1995) (TV)

Woody Allen was portrayed by Dennis Boutsikaris while the movie is a
biographical movie about Mia Farrow. So, Woody Allen would receive a PI:
entry and Mia Farrow would receive a BT: entry.

INTERNET EXPLORER CHANNEL

by Alan Jay

The IMDb now offers quick access to a range of pages via the Channel
function of the latest versions of Internet Explorer and PointCast.
This allows quick access to the regularly updated content on our site
including Movie News, Anniversaries, and the Quote of the Day. For further
details see the Channels page.

REGISTRATION AND LIVE VOTES

by Mark Harding

A new optional User Registration system was launched recently. Registering
with IMDb will allow you to customize the site to your own preferences
as well as giving you access to a number of new features that are only
available to registered users.

The number of current services is small but some major additions are
planned for the coming months including on-line vote histories, personal
movie databases, movie recommendations, local cinema schedules, chat
areas and many others.

The LiveVotes section is a new area of the IMDb that complements the
existing vote ratings sections. The current ratings are updated on a weekly
basis and published each Monday. The LiveVotes section is updated every
hour using votes collected from our registered users throughout the week.

A number of reports are generated from the data, including weekly, daily
and hourly reports as well as ones based around films in release and film
released this year.

On each page you can update your own vote history by casting your votes
against those already listed. Your votes will then be included in the
next set of reports.

New reports will be added over the coming weeks.

PARTNERSHIPS

by Alan Jay

Since the last Newsletter the IMDb has announced partnerships with
a number of sites to provide a more integrated service in a range of
areas. These include:

TV Listings

We now offer links to TV Listings both via a “Movies Now Playing on
US TV” which lists the current schedules for movies playing and a more
sophisticated linking process which places an “OnTV” Icon on movie pages
that are playing in the next 7 days – somewhere on US TV.

In addition to this you will also find “OnTV” links on people’s pages
from stars, directors, and producers to members of the crew. This allows
you to quickly find out what movies, with say John Travolta or directed
by James Cameron, are playing this week on US TV. This service is in
partnership with GIST TV Listings and is sponsored
by Roxy Systems.

Trailers

We now offer links to trailers for many current and recent releases. This service is provided in
conjunction with the VideoDome.Com Network using the VDO plug-in (built
into IE 4 and a plug in to Netscape). In addition you will find links
to studio sites and other locations with trailers in alternate formats.

Movie Schedules

For some time we have linked to MovieLink to provide US users information
on US Show times in major cities. We now offer a similar service for UK
cinemas times in conjunction with Scoot offering links to movie schedules
throughout the UK, see their site for further details
or see the “Now Playing” Icon on our title pages. Also on those pages
are links to other services around the world.

Video Purchase and Rental

Just a reminder that our Video Sales and Rental partner in the US is
Reel.com and links can be found behind the “Buy” Icon on the site.

Posters

Another reminder that the Nostalgia Factory support and sponsor the Posters
list; see the Poster Browser for further details.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

by Col Needham

IMDb recently completed its seventh year of operation, and its fourth year
as a web site. The rate of growth still amazes us. At the end of last
year we covered 90,000 movies (growth of 25,000 in 1996) and here we are
now at nearly 127,000 movies; the number of filmography entries grew by
over 600,000 (growth of 450,000 in 1996) to over 1,950,000. This year a
total of 47,900 people (30,349 in 1996) submitted a total of 2,852,250
lines of data (1,858,457 in 1996), averaging 54,850 lines per week
(35,740 in 1996). At the start of this year I expected to be reporting
smaller growth rates now given there are fewer holes in our coverage,
but here we are again with record submissions! What can we say but thanks
for helping IMDb maintain its position as the number one movie web site.

This year has been a busy one once again with many new data types,
searches and features added to the database. There’s a good reminder on
the What’s New page.

Many thanks and have a great 1998.

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending December 7.

Titles:

18. Alien: Resurrection (1997)

32. Titanic (1997)

9. Scream (1996)

23. Men in Black (1997)

5. Star Wars (1977)

14. Pulp Fiction (1994)

-. Flubber (1997)

69. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

21. Scream 2 (1997)

-. Rainmaker, The (1997)

37. Aliens (1986)

250. Amistad (1997)

3. L.A. Confidential (1997)

8. Star Wars: Episode I (1999)

77. Alien (1979)

56. I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

-. Spiceworld (1997)

39. Blade Runner (1982)

7. Contact (1997)

42. Braveheart (1995)

The only real surprises here are the sudden resurgence of
Braveheart and the heavy interest in
Spiceworld. Seasonal boost to
A Christmas Story at #36, #53 the
Alastair Sim version of
Scrooge; we’ve seen a lot of visits
from Christmas-theme pages lately. Actually, lots of interest in classics,
like
Taxi Driver,

Casablanca, and
The Godfather. Plus a smattering of understandable interest in the
older Bond titles as well.

People:

5. Shannon Tweed

8. Sharon Stone

3. Pamela Anderson

17. Petra Verkaik

4. Tom Cruise

1. Kim Basinger

7. Brad Pitt

6. Demi Moore

12. Teri Hatcher

10. Harrison Ford

14. Michelle Pfeiffer

11. Traci Lords

9. Mel Gibson

27. Leonardo DiCaprio

16. Alyssa Milano

21. Jennifer Connelly

15. Salma Hayek

38. Bruce Willis

-. Kelly Preston

35. Robert De Niro

Total “people” pages are up dramatically from last time; the #1 spot was
over 4 times as popular as last issue’s #1 spot; getting on the list took
twice as many visits as last time. Big rise for a couple of Playmates,
maybe because of search engine placement.
Cary Grant just out of the money.
Matt Damon lurking at #35, waiting for
Good Will Hunting to open. And aside from
Red Skelton,
Sandra Bullock falls the hardest, from #13 to #26.
Huh factor: #154
Izabella Scorupco; #167
Tami Stronach (tied to unexplained interest in
The NeverEnding Story).

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US from September to December sorted by number of votes
(to December 4):

0000000112	1124	7.1	Starship Troopers (1997)
0000000125	966	9.1	L.A. Confidential (1997)
0000000123	659	8.3	Game, The (1997)
0000001113	567	7.5	Bean (1997)
0000000112	561	7.1	Alien: Resurrection (1997)
0000000222	488	7.9	Devil’s Advocate, The (1997)
0000000123	486	7.8	Boogie Nights (1997)
0000001111	392	7.1	In & Out (1997)
0000001212	365	7.5	Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
0000011211	357	6.8	Peacemaker, The (1997)

Movies opening in the US from September to December sorted by average votes
(to December 4):

0000000125	966	9.1	L.A. Confidential (1997)
000.000015	126	8.6	Soul Food (1997)
0000000124	190	8.5	Ice Storm, The (1997)
0000000123	659	8.3	Game, The (1997)
0000000122	298	8.1	Gattaca (1997)
0..0001123	103	8.1	Anastasia (1997)
0000001222	160	8.0	Edge, The (1997/I)
0000000222	488	7.9	Devil’s Advocate, The (1997)
0000000123	486	7.8	Boogie Nights (1997)
0000000222	143	7.6	Life Less Ordinary, A (1997)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

USA Today.
Entertainment Weekly.
Premiere (USA).
Louisville KY Courier-Journal.
Allenstown PA Morning Call.
Editor & Publisher.

Ciak (Italy).
HomePC [1 Oct].
Newsday [29 Oct, 31 Oct].
The European [11 Sep].
The Jerusalem Post [8 Aug, 1 Oct].
Time International [11 Aug].
PC Magazine (highly recommended).
Boston Globe [24 November]; reprinted in
San Jose Mercury News.
Dayton OH Daily News [31 October]; reprinted in
Minneapolis Star-Tribune and
Philadelphia Daily News.

(Phoenix) Arizona Republic.
Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia).
Yahoo! Internet Life (both
Dec. and
Jan.).
Nuts & Volts.
Newsday.
San Diego Daily Transcript.
Media Daily.
Ad Age.

News.com
Internetnews.com.
Computer Shopper.
Globe and Mail (Canada).

We’ve also won several new awards. See
selections from the gallery here.

cmc.net Site of the Week.

Internet Treasure Hunt Bureau.
News-Herald (SE Michigan) Cool Link.
Cool Central Site of the Hour (glossary).
Los Angeles Times Pick.
Mining Company World Film Guide.

We’re also nominated again this year for a
Webby Award in the Film
category. Please vote for us again.

Our good friend Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate was mentioned in:

Newsday [11 November].

A NewsBytes item referring to his fictional evil twin, Dave, showed up in:

Palm Beach FL Interactive.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 50,000 and 75,000 additions
every week (to all lists, not just those in the totals below) from
thousands of users all over the world.

Number of filmography entries: 1,977,522
Number of people covered: 525,321
Number of movies covered: 128,456

Size of the database (Mb): 183

Recent milestones:

500 awards known

500 titles with recommendations

2500 crew completion entries

5000 tag lines

5000 titles with literature entries

5000 titles with soundtrack entries

7500 name URL entries

10,000 rec.arts.movies.reviews

25,000 titles with plot summaries

50,000 composer entries

50,000 guest appearances

75,000 producers

100,000 technical data entries

125,000 movies

150,000 genre entries

500,000 people

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display
on the main title page.

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the producing country(s).

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

No Comments

Newsletter #15

Posted by admin in Newsletter on September 3rd, 1997

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Short subjects:

Video sales/rental and more

Glossary

New xregal location

Feature:

Awards section

Trailers:

Hot searches

Hot movies

IMDb in the news

Software changes

Database statistics

Future developments

VIDEO SALES/RENTAL AND MORE

by Col Needham

The video buy links are back! We’re pleased to announce an exclusive
arrangement with Reel.com to provide video sales
and rental links from titles in the IMDb direct to the corresponding
pages at Reel.

Reel.com sells a total of over 80,000 movies on various formats as released
(VHS, LD and DVD). In addition over 35,000 movies are available for rent
by mail. We currently link to over 10,000 of the titles with coverage
expanding each week. If you’re looking for a movie and we don’t yet have a
“buy” link, please search the Reel database directly.

As part of this arrangement, Reel are also providing a weekly home video
festival, recommending a selection of movies based around a theme.

The festival focuses on a current event, blockbuster movie release, or
seasonal theme, and provides a tongue-in-cheek commentary along with a
descriptive list of movies that match the topic. The festival also
demonstrates the IMDb cobranding facility which can be used to provide
customized branded access to the database.

Finally, banner ads will promote Reel’s recently-launched online film
school, Cinema U.

As a reminder of how you can help the IMDb by supporting our sponsors
please reread the article in newsletter #14
and see our merchandising page.

GLOSSARY

by Murray Chapman

The IMDb team regularly fields questions from users asking us to explain
various terms used in the movie industry, such as “gaffer,” “best boy,”
or “film noir.” We soon realized it would benefit our users (not to
mention ourselves) if we provided an on-line glossary which explained
terms peculiar to the movie industry.

A film glossary has been on the back burner at the IMDb for at least a
year, and with a bit of research we were able to provide entries for the
more common terms. The glossary is by no means complete yet; there are
many more terms that can be added. As with other areas of the IMDb, users
are encouraged to make submissions.

Accessing the Glossary

The Glossary is located here.

Entries are stored alphabetically, and an index is available.

At present, the glossary is available only in English, but should in
the near future be available in other languages such as French, German,
Italian, and Spanish. If you are fluent in a language that has not been
covered and you are willing to provide translations on a regular basis
please contact us at .

Feedback and Submissions

If you wish to make a correction, add an entry, or give feedback, please
email the glossary editor, Murray Chapman, at glossary@imdb.com.

NEW XREGAL LOCATION

by Jon Reeves

If you’ve been using the X Windows interface to the local copy of the
database, xregal, you may have noticed it didn’t change when we added ISO
character support, along with several other minor enhancements it didn’t
reflect. Well, there’s a new beta test copy that mostly adapts to changes
in the database, along with a few minor bug fixes. More importantly,
there’s a new location for the xregal home page and a new address for
its author, Lachlan Wetherall.

Lachlan can now be reached at Lachlan.Wetherall@compsys.com.au and the
home page is now http://users.hunterlink.net.au/~dglw/xregal/xregal.html
Suggestions for improvements and bug reports are always welcome
(especially if they come with code).

INTRODUCING THE AWARDS AND AWARDS MASTER LISTS

by Oliver Heidelbach

If you are a regular reader of the IMDb Newsletter, you may have spotted
a small paragraph in the “future developments” section since Newsletter 2,
indicating a new enhanced awards section. The development for this section
took quite a long time, but at the time you will read these lines you
will probably be able to see an awards icon on some of the movie and
filmography pages on the web interface of the IMDb.

What Is It?

The awards section is designed to hold any awards given in the world of
movies, should it be widely recognized ones like the Oscars or Golden
Globes, international ones like the Golden Palms or Golden Berlin Bears,
national ones like the C�sars or German Film Awards or even local ones.

The awards section will make the “most comprehensive source for movies on
the Internet” even more comprehensive, as the awards a movie or cast/crew
member has received can certainly be considered important, at least as
interesting information for movie-goers as well as for the professional.

The awards section of the IMDb consists of two closely related lists:

The AWARDS MASTER list

A list containing a canonical listing of events and awards currently
known to the awards section and including data keys about awards’
criteria, awards’ formats, official web sites as well as hosts, jury
members, locations or trivia for any particular year and more.

The AWARDS list

A list containing the nominees and winners of the awards known to
the AWARDS MASTER list. Most people like to think of it as the more
important one of the both awards lists.

As of the time being (beginning of September 1997) the AWARDS MASTER list
contains 113 awards given at/from 16 events/organizations. The AWARDS
list contains information on 13745 winners or nominees of these awards
including the complete Oscars and Razzies listings.

Current WWW Support and Availability

Currently only the AWARDS list is being used in the web interface of the
IMDb, meaning that you cannot access the information contained in the
AWARDS MASTER list from the web.

As the AWARDS MASTER list grows, its data will be used to compile event
overviews like we have today already for the
Oscars.

However, as with most IMDb data sections, you will be able to retrieve
both lists via the IMDb FTP distribution at the usual sites.

How to Submit

For contributors to the awards lists there are some issues to deal
with, some of which may not be obvious on the first look, so these
deserve a special mention here.

All awards not known to the AWARDS MASTER list must be first “registered”
in the AWARDS MASTER list before you can submit the award’s nominees and
winners to the AWARDS list. The usual newspaper or magazine information
like “Jurassic Park has received the Golden Lion in Venice” is not
sufficient information to be submitted to the AWARDS list.

To submit an award new to the AWARDS MASTER list you will need to gather
at least the following information as far as the AWARDS MASTER list
is concerned:

the (preferably English) name of the event/organization

the (preferably English) name of the award

the time impact of the award, i.e. regular, irregular or one time

the geographic impact of the award, i.e. international, multinational,

There is more information all of which you may submit, but the above
must be submitted, if not already known.

To submit an winner or nominee of an award already known to the AWARDS
MASTER list you will need to gather at least the following information
as far as the AWARDS list is concerned:

the movie title, if the award is related to a movie

the name of the recipient or nominee if the award is related to a person

the name of the event/organization as known to the AWARDS MASTER list

the name of the award as known to the AWARDS MASTER list

the awards category if any, i.e. Best Director, Best Short Film etc.

the year in which the award was given.

the ranking information, i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd best or nominee

Please see the submission guide for a complete overview and
in depth discussion of the structure of both awards related lists.

The IMDb mail server has been set up to accept the new keywords AWMASTER
for the AWARDS MASTER list and AWARD for the AWARDS list. A WWW submission
interface is planned and will be released later this year.

Future

It may be a bit too early yet to discuss the future of the awards lists,
but as already mentioned the next step will be to make use of the data
contained in the AWARDS MASTER list on the WWW.

Odds and Ends

Structure of the lists and new awards

The current (data) structure of the awards lists grew after looking at
several awards, film festivals etc. and should have a kind of general
format which will fit most award events. My past experience in designing
the list was that one day there will always be an award or event which
will not fit well into the current structure and which will give you a
real headache submitting it.

In such a case please feel free to contact me describing your submission
problems or suggesting a change or addition to the current structure of the
lists. I am open to it. However, I would like to gather some overview about
problems with the current structure, so please don’t expect your suggestions
immediately to be implemented. Let’s see how it works out for a while.

Names already in the awards lists

The AWARDS list will be started officially with quite a number of winners
and nominees already in the list (currently 13745). These names were
checked against the pool of names already known to the IMDb, but intense
checking has been only done for names not matching any current name. Thus
it may be that some of those 13745 names have wrong IMDb references,
because of e.g. persons having the same name and so on. If you spot any
errors in the awards lists please help to correct those.

You can send corrections via the IMDb mail server interface. Two new
keywords, CORRECT-AWMASTER for the AWARDS MASTER list and CORRECT-AWARD
for the AWARDS list, have been set up for this. As already mentioned,
a WWW interface for submissions and corrections is planned and will be
set up later this year.

Please remember to always clearly identify/reference the awards you would
like to correct with the event’s name and the award’s name. Please see
the awards lists submission guide for
more information.

Awards information already in the IMDb

As you probably know, the IMDb had rudimentary information on awards
before the introduction of the awards lists. Occasionally those little
tags like (S:AA) or (C�sarN) can be seen for movies as well as for the
cast or crew. Although this kind of information has been collected for
quite a long time and covers many awards from around the world, it is
not possible to transfer it directly into the new awards lists. This is
because these tags are simply pointing to awards and missing important
information all of which is required for the awards lists. If you have
submitted a lot of such information in the past, please don’t think it
was useless. It was not, because it provided all users with information
on awards in a way the IMDb was set up at that time.

However, I think most users will agree that the shift to the new lists
and the still-to-come overviews of events/awards are quite worth the
shift. For a while the IMDb will provide both the old and the new style
of awards information. That way no information will be lost from the
user point of view. As the new awards lists will grow and the existing
information is resubmitted, the old tags may disappear some day. Please
help to have this day come not too far in the future.

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending September 21.

Titles:

-. The Game (1997)

16. Men in Black (1997)

177. L.A. Confidential (1997)

-. In & Out (1997)

4. Star Wars (1977)

1. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

53. Contact (1997)

10. Star Wars: Episode I (1999)

9. Scream (1996)

-. The Full Monty (1997)

186. “Star Trek: Voyager” (1995)

2. The Fifth Element (1997)

141. Face/Off (1997)

12. Pulp Fiction (1994)

153. Air Force One (1997)

32. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

5. Batman & Robin (1997)

23. Alien: Resurrection (1997)

3. Jerry Maguire (1996)

-. A Thousand Acres (1997)

Like the box office results,
Lost World faded fast. Lots of new releases
catching our visitors by surprise since we checked in 3 months ago.
Scream‘s video release maintains the high interest factor in it, and its
sequel (#21).
Titanic sunk slightly to #32. Surprisingly little interest in
Amistad, dropping from #127 to #250.
The Peacemaker, at #25, will probably be higher next time.
Co-ed Call Girl at #67 because
Jeri Lynn Ryan is in it. And our Europeans have pushed
Bean to #27.
Fifty-Fifty (1925) at #71 and
Canto, ma sottovoce at #83 for no apparent reason.

People:

12. Kim Basinger

-. Red Skelton

1. Pamela Anderson

3. Tom Cruise

23. Shannon Tweed

14. Demi Moore

7. Brad Pitt

4. Sharon Stone

18. Mel Gibson

13. Harrison Ford

22. Traci Lords

9. Teri Hatcher

6. Sandra Bullock

16. Michelle Pfeiffer

45. Salma Hayek

15. Alyssa Milano

8. Petra Verkaik

-. Jeri Lynn Ryan

31. Val Kilmer

43. Jamie Lee Curtis

A couple weeks ago,
Tracy Scoggins was #1 when she joined the cast of
“Babylon 5″ (she’s dropped to #63); now
Jeri Lynn Ryan comes from nowhere with a debut on
Voyager. Lots of
L.A. Confidential interest, with
Basinger and
Kilmer climing steeply, and
Guy Pearce and
Russell Crowe at #44 and 45.
Red Skelton was helped by a link from CNN.

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US from June to September sorted by number of votes
(to September 5):

0000000015	2466	8.8	Contact (1997)
0000001123	1975	8.1	Men in Black (1997)
0000000124	1175	8.5	Face/Off (1997)
3100000000	1125	4.3	Batman & Robin (1997)
0000001212	1011	7.5	Con Air (1997)
0000000123	769	8.3	Air Force One (1997)
0000001222	545	7.8	My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
1000000101	486	5.6	Event Horizon (1997)
2000001001	417	5.0	Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)
0000011212	345	7.5	Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Movies opening in the US from June to September sorted by average votes
(to September 5):

0…..0116	79	9.3	Full Monty, The (1997)
0000000015	2466	8.8	Contact (1997)
00.0000016	189	8.6	Wild America (1997)
0000000124	1175	8.5	Face/Off (1997)
0000000123	769	8.3	Air Force One (1997)
.000000123	113	8.3	Ulee’s Gold (1997)
0000001123	1975	8.1	Men in Black (1997)
0000001213	115	7.9	G.I. Jane (1997)
0000001222	545	7.8	My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
0000000212	271	7.6	Hercules (1997)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

com! (Germany).
Weltwunder der Kinematographie.
Boston Globe. [3 July]
.net.
Chicago Sun-Times.
Entertainment Weekly.

Newsday.
WebWeek.
IEEE Internet Computing.
PC Magazine.
USSB Preview Channel.
Christian Science Monitor.

Miami Herald.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Tampa Tribune.
Augusta [Georgia] Chronicle.

And new media that covered our reel.com partnership:

Wired News.
news.com.
Media Daily.
Internetnews.com.

We’ve also won several new awards. See
selections from the gallery here.

The International Web Award.
Cool Clixx (MCI One).
Suite 101 Top 5.
Computer Life Stellar Starting Points.
PC Magazine Top 100 Hall of Fame.

We were up for a UK Web Award, but lost to the Spice Girls.

Our good friend Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate has its awards:

PC Magazine Site of the Week.
MonsterVision’s 100% Weird website.

And it was mentioned in:

PC Magazine.

Wired Magazine.
PEOPLE Weekly.
Newsweek. [~12 Aug]
Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia).
Dummies Daily-Web After Five.

SOFTWARE CHANGES

by Rob Hartill

Style sheets

Those of you with Netscape Communicator 4.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer
3.0 or higher may have noticed some presentational changes in IMDb pages
since the last newsletter.

Using Style Sheets, we now offer browsers
the option to either display our HTML pages in a no-frills basic HTML
rendering style or to download IMDb’s style hints to alter the way the page
is displayed so it appears as we believe is best.

Some browsers will offer users an option to disable or override style
hints. Check your browser’s documentation for more information on
configuring style sheet support.

On this business day

The “on this day” feature that has proved to be very popular has now
been expanded and split into two sections. The on this day page now
concentrates on people, listing birthdates, dates of death and dates of
marriage. A new business this day section covers box office grosses,
opening weekend grosses and release dates for events on any given day of
the year.

Top 250

The top 250 list has recently been adjusted to only report the top 250
movies voted by regular users of the database. Users who contribute few
votes tend to inflate the ratings of some highly visible films; this had
been seen to distort the top 250 rankings.

In addition to reorganizing the top 250, each of the movies listed in
this list are now marked with their top 250 ranking.

Restricting title searches to movies or TV

From the main title search page an option
has been added to restrict the search to just movies or to just TV
series. This option was primarily added for people who consider the TV
series listings in the database to be a distraction. Of course, those who
love the TV series coverage in the database can now ignore the distracting
movie titles too

By-rating filmographies

Most filmography listings now offer a link to a view of the filmography
that is restricted to that person’s more appreciated movies and sorted
in order of the most popular first.

Combined filmographies/biographies

Also in the area of filmographies, a new view offers a combined
filmography and biography for an individual.

Fuzzy name search

On the main name search form a fuzzy search
option has been added. Fuzzy searching compensates for some misspellings
and differences in formatting. A fuzzy search for “Thom Hancs” will find
“Tom Hanks” as well as a few other possibilities that you might have
been thinking of.

Calendars

Due to the success of the “on this day” features and popularity of looking
for “on this day” information for a specific day of the year, we now
offer a collection of calendars for various IMDb
features. We hope to add more calendars in the future, so watch this space.

What’s playing features

A new “what’s playing” icon has been added to titles that are currently
likely to be playing at movie theaters worldwide. The icon appears if the
film is very recent and IMDb has a pointer to local cinema show times for
that particular country. As an extension of this service, we now also allow
extended searches to restrict the search to titles now
showing in theaters of the country of choice. The recent releases pages
make use of the new extended search features to link
to ordered lists of movies with the highest ratings and highest votes count.

New browsable sections

Just before presstime we added two new browsable areas. You can now
browse titles by country
and movies in production.
More details on these two areas will be included in the next issue.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

Number of filmography entries: 1,794,150
Number of people covered: 484,858
Number of movies covered: 118,232

Size of the database (Mb): 164

Recent milestones:

1000 special effects company entries

1000 posters

5000 miscellaneous company entries

10,000 quotes

15,000 distributor entries

20,000 certificate entries

20,000 titles with complete casts

20,000 location entries

40,000 sound mix entries

40,000 release date entries

50,000 running time entries

75,000 color info entries

75,000 language entries

100,000 writer entries

100,000 movie link entries

200,000 titles (includes alternates and translations)

1,750,000 filmography entries

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

optional user registration to allow user customization, localized
content, and other features.

a separate list of films in production, with their current status.

outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display
on the main title page.

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the producing country(s).

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

No Comments

Newsletter #14

Posted by admin in Newsletter on June 3rd, 1997

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Short subjects:

Studio Briefing

Guest appearances changes

Magazine covers added to bio list

Features:

Supporting the IMDb

Trivia-spotters handbook

Trailers:

Hot searches

Hot movies

IMDb in the news

Software changes

Database statistics

Future developments

STUDIO BRIEFING

by Mark Harding

IMDb has partnered with Lew Irwin at StudioBriefing to bring you daily
Movie and TV news. Each day’s news will
be posted on the site between
10 AM and 1 PM Pacific Time.

We hope to secure other sources of news over the coming months.

GUEST APPEARANCES CHANGES

by Mark Harding

The guest appearance data has been spun off from the biography list into
its very own section. To accommodate the change a new keyword, GUEST, has
been created which supersedes the original GA: tag.

Full details of submissions for the GUEST keyword can be
found here.

MAGAZINE COVERS ADDED TO BIO LIST

by Mark Harding

A new field has been added to the biographies list which records magazine
covers that people have appeared on. The format for the new field is:

CV: * “journal” (country), date, Vol. vol, Iss. iss

e.g.:

NM: Barrymore, Drew

CV: * “Empire” (UK), May 1997, Iss. 95

IMDb PRIVACY POLICY

by Col Needham

US readers may have read about concerns over privacy on the net. We’re
in the middle of writing our formal privacy policy which will be
published on the site. In the meantime just to point out that IMDb
respects the privacy of its users; unless you enter a contest (in
which case we may share it with the sponsor) or write a bio or plot
without asking us to withhold your name or address, we don’t release
your e-mail addresses (or any other personal information for that
matter) to anybody outside the company for any reason and under any
circumstances. We may provide aggregated statistical data from the
surveys, and of course any movie data you provide us (including movie
ranking votes) becomes part of the database.

SUPPORTING THE IMDb

by Col Needham

This is a follow-up article to the similarly titled one published in
the March newsletter which highlighted the importance of supporting
the database by visiting our sponsors sites through clicking on the
ad banners whenever you see something of interest.

The purpose of this follow-up is to draw your attention to another area
covered in the original article where we need your help. IMDb is an
independent site (and we like it that way) but it does mean there are
fewer opportunities and resources for us to promote and market the
database than exist at other sites which are part of global media empires.

Please remember to tell friends, family and co-workers about the
site. If you can’t easily recall our primary URL, remember that the
site is also available at:

http://www.moviedatabase.com/

so just typing ‘moviedatabase’ in modern versions of Netscape and MS
Internet Explorer will get you to the site quickly.

We encourage you to mention the site in USENET articles, .signature
files and on your own personal web pages. If you maintain a movie or
celebrity fan page don’t forget you can link direct to any name or
title in the database as described in
our linking guide.

Similarly if you come across sites on your travels around the web which
could be improved by such linking, please point them at the above URL.

Feel free to nominate us for any awards, cool site services and so
on too. If you’ve not already seen them, there’s a good collection
of quotes on the site from professional reviewers.

Just as this newsletter was being finalized we were adding the finishing
touches to a downloadable IMDb demo to show off the depth and breadth
of the IMDb. This is a self-extracting archive for Windows 95/NT/3.1
which contains around 50 selected IMDb pages in a revolving demo,
taking you on a tour at the rate of a couple of pages per minute with
jumping off points to the live site available throughout. You
can view the demo and download it.

A regular zip file version containing the demo pages is also available
for non-Windows users. Point your browser at the index.html file to
start the demo locally.

Please download a copy and pass it around whenever you get the
opportunity. In particular if you have contacts at Internet/computing
magazines which carry a cover CD-ROM, let them know they are most
welcome to distribute the demo.

Thanks for your support as ever.

TRIVIA SPOTTERS HANDBOOK

by Murray Chapman

INTRODUCTION

When the Lumière brothers first demonstrated their primitive “moving
pictures,” they could have hardly guessed that a mere century later
people would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on creating
movies. Even when compared to today’s cost of living, $100 million
is an incredible amount of money to spend producing a single piece of
“entertainment,” and yet it happens several times over each year.

It seems that every year a new film inherits the title of “The Most
Expensive Film Ever”;
Blade Runner (1982) was considered a
financial juggernaut when it weighed in at $27 million, a sum which
would barely produce a romantic comedy today. With some reports putting
the budget of Titanic (1997) at $240 million, it’s obvious that
the playing field has enlarged considerably in the last 15 years.

One factor that has permitted the budgets of films to increase is
the discovery of the power of merchandising. It’s become almost
routine for a large budget film to be accompanied or even preceded
by an avalanche of action figures, drink cups, posters, T-shirts,
and memorabilia. It’s nearly impossible to walk into a fast food
chain and not see a promotion for the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
As well as providing money, such merchandising increases visibility
for a film, which in turn contributes to the profit margin.

Always looking to exploit the public’s cultivated thirst for movie
information, “The Making Of” television specials often appear around
the time that a major film is released. Producers have recognized that
the process of actually spending $100 million can generate just as
much public interest as what the $100 million actually achieves. From
their humble beginnings as journalistic documentaries, “The Making Of”
specials have grown to be a vital marketing component of big-budget
films; the crews responsible sometimes receive billing in the credits
of the movie itself.

The fact that these specials are made indicates that there is some
market for information about the magic of making films: how do we
create seamless alternative realities? What’s it like to be around
celebrities? What created the film as it stands today? What was
nearly done differently? Can we better understand the film and the
filmmakers by understanding the production history and the personalities
and events involved?

It is this thirst for background understanding that gave birth to what
is now the Trivia section of the Internet Movie Database. A very early
version of the Goofs List had an entry
for Out of Rosenheim (1988)
(aka Bagdad Cafe) which indicated that during the opening credits, the
shadow of the camera crew could be seen on the ground. I happily included
this goof, as it seemed to be another example of sloppy filmmaking.
A few weeks later, however, I received email from an astute reader who
indicated that maybe this “mistake” was deliberate: the shadow is only
visible while the credits for the cinematographer were on screen!

I was immediately struck by the subtlety of this possibility: the
credits directly inform us who has created the film, but at a less
conscious level we are told the same information by seeing this
person’s shadow on the ground. The credits on the screen and the
“breaking of the fourth wall” formed a synergy that sparked my interest.

Movies are loaded with subtleties that can only be appreciated when
you know relevant background information: had this reader not known
what a cinematographer’s function in filmmaking was, I would have
continued to label this brilliant shot an filmmaking error. I began
to look for further instances of “messages” or “in-jokes” in film -
the more I looked, the more I found.

These items were included in the Movie Goofs list, but their popularity
soon made it apparent that they deserved their own list. The Trivia
List was born, and has never looked back! Today, it is approximately
twice the size of the Goofs List, and continues to grow each week.

WHAT EXACTLY IS “TRIVIA”?

As well as documenting “did you notice”-type events in films, the Movie
Trivia file originally contained the answers to some “frequently asked
questions” about movies, such as:

(a) What was the origin of the “stinking badges” line in
Blazing Saddles (1974)?

(b) Which film is the most expensive of all time?

These questions were frequently asked in rec.arts.movies, the forum in
which the Trivia List was originally published. Since its incorporation
into the Internet Movie Database, the questions posed above are better
answered by other sections of the database: we have sections for Quotes,
Business Information, and Versions. Storing this information again in
the Trivia List would duplicate effort, and lead to possible quality
control problems.

Unfortunately, the name “Trivia List” has stuck although the contents
have changed over the years. Perhaps a more accurate description would
“a collection of behind-the-scenes and did-you-notice information that
allows us to see films in a different light.” Perhaps this could be
shortened to “Production Information,” but that is uncomfortably close
to the existing “Business Information” section.

So what is left in the Trivia List? Essentially, it records significant,
unexpected, unusual, or interesting events that affected the production
of the film. It also documents subtle references to other movies
and or the movie industry. There are two important parts to this
definition. First, unlike most other sections of the IMDb, the contents
of the Trivia List are not entirely objective. Second, the items in
question must have affected the production of the film.

THE TRIVIA LIST IS SUBJECTIVE

What is interesting or unexpected for one movie fan does not necessarily
hold true for others.

As editor of the Trivia List, I often have to make judgment calls about
how “interesting” a particular piece of trivia is. In some cases it’s
easy: if it’s scandalous or in poor taste, it is rejected. The difficult
cases are situations where I am unfamiliar with the film and/or events
in question. In these cases, the IMDb’s foundation of user support
in invaluable. Among the users of the IMDb are fans of nearly every
genre of movie, and we rely on each of these groups to “police” their
own field of expertise. The end result is that the data in the IMDb
becomes more accurate and reflects to a greater extent the views of
those who care enough about films to be proactive in utilizing the IMDb.

As with any part of the IMDb, we are open to suggestions and feedback
regarding how to better present movie information. I’ve personally
entertained many lengthy discussions regarding the merits or otherwise
of individual items in the Trivia List. I tend to set a fairly stringent
standards for trivia to satisfy before being included in the list,
but it’s not impossible to persuade me on particular items. In general,
if your submission is similar to something that already exists in the
list, chances are it will be included.

TRIVIA MUST AFFECT THE PRODUCTION

I often receive information that – while interesting and important -
can’t be included in the Trivia List because it didn’t affect the
film. Here are some examples:

(a) John Belushi‘s death by overdose is likely due to his
depression following the box-office failure of
Blues Brothers, The (1980)

(b) “Nine Inch Nails” used a sample from THX 1138 (1970)
in their single “Closer”

Both of these items are related to specific films, but had absolutely
no effect at all on the film itself, as they occurred after the film
was completed:

Belushi’s death is tragic, especially considering that although it
bombed when released, Blues Brothers, The (1980) has subsequently
been hailed as a masterpiece. His suicide had no effect on the making
of the film. Accordingly, this information can be stored in Belushi’s
biographical entry.

Conversely, the events that transpire in Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
take on a whole new significance when you understand that author
John O’Brien (II) committed suicide while the film was being
made, apparently afraid that the film of his life story would be a
disaster. It’s unquestionable that the suicide of the author had an
effect on the filmmakers, and thus knowing this information adds to
the viewing experience.

It’s beyond the scope of the Trivia List to document the non-film
phenomena that have been inspired by a particular film. This is an
open-ended task; certainly an immense job if it is attempted for all
films. Sampling is merely a single instance of this, and there is an
entire web site devoted to this subject. Did you know that the $27 million
juggernaut Blade Runner (1982) is the world’s most sampled movie?

The Trivia List (and even the IMDb) can’t hope to store all information
that relates to every film. The Trivia List will go into a certain
amount of detail describing production events, but beyond this level
we draw the line. The Trivia List should have “good” trivia coverage
over many films, rather than “exhaustive” coverage of a few at the
expense of other equally worthy films.

I regularly encourage people who send in mountains of information on
a particular film to publish the information themselves. We will be
only too happy to link from a particular person/title to someone’s WWW
page. In this way, people’s own interpretations beyond the guidelines
for acceptable trivia can be found via the IMDb.

At the other end of the scale, the Trivia List is not designed to
point out the obvious. We like to leave room for viewers to discover
the major story-telling subtleties on their own. Having said that,
however, it should be recognized that there are many plot “spoilers”
in the Trivia list.

…AND THAT’S ALL?

Well, not quite. Movies have their urban legends, just like any other
part of life. Despite being thoroughly debunked and specifically
mentioned in the submissions guides, people still send in the ghost
rumors about Three Men and a Baby (1987), and the suicide rumors
from Wizard of Oz, The (1939). In the hope of eventually quashing
these persistent rumors, I break the rules and make some mention of
them in the Trivia List.

I enjoy editing the Trivia List, as it offers me the chance of deeper
understanding of films. It’s my hope that by providing this information,
the IMDb helps distribute this chance for understanding to users. I
also sincerely hope that users find the Trivia section of the IMDb an
entertaining and informative resource.

A browser for the Trivia List
is available.

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending May 31.

Titles:

10. Lost World: Jurassic Park, The (1997)

17. Fifth Element, The (1997)

5. Jerry Maguire (1996)

1. Star Wars (1977)

4. Batman & Robin (1997)

35. Jurassic Park (1993)

3. Romeo + Juliet (1996)

-. Addicted to Love (1997)

9. Scream (1996)

13. Star Wars: Episode I (1999)

25. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

14. Pulp Fiction (1994)

23. Basic Instinct (1992)

2. Saint, The (1997)

6. English Patient, The (1996)

38. Men in Black (1997)

192. Absolute Power (1997)

27. Rock, The (1996)

19. Independence Day (1996)

18. Fargo (1996)

Well, just like the box office,
The Lost World
demolished the competition, with roughly a 3-to-1 margin, and brings
its
older brother
up to #6 as well.
Titanic

slips to #22, probably because of the delays.
Con Air
at #35 at this pre-promotion snapshot.
Scream
has legs, but
Chasing Amy
dropped to #43. Huh factor: #84
Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima (1987)
(OK, you folks must know *something* about it; send it in!).

People:

1. Pamela Anderson

-. Milla Jovovich

2. Tom Cruise

3. Sharon Stone

26. Ren�e Zellweger

13. Sandra Bullock

5. Brad Pitt

38. Petra Verkaik

8. Teri Hatcher

9. Leonardo DiCaprio

-. Julianne Moore

12. Kim Basinger

6. Harrison Ford

10. Demi Moore

11. Alyssa Milano

16. Michelle Pfeiffer

7. Elisabeth Shue

14. Mel Gibson

24. Nicole Eggert

-. Kelly Preston

I see people have discovered
Milla Jovovich‘s
acting (and I use the word loosely) career. The drop of
Harrison Ford
is mildly surprising, though it mirrors the drop in
Star Wars.
And it’s nice to see
Julianne Moore

getting recognition, even if it is just for screaming (OK, cheesecake boys:
rent
Short Cuts).
Huh factor: #57
James Montgomery Flagg
(only 1 behind
Quentin Tarantino!);
#102
Spike Cherrie.
Jake Lloyd
at #83 will probably rank higher next time.

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US from mid-April to June sorted by number of votes
(to June 5):

0000000124	1546	8.5 Fifth Element, The (1997)
0000011112	713	6.8 Lost World: Jurassic Park, The (1997)
0000000113	270	7.6 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
0000001112	219	7.1 Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)
0000011101	194	6.8 Volcano (1997)
1000101101	181	6.0 Anaconda (1997)
0000001212	157	7.5 Breakdown (1997)
0000002112	92	7.5 Addicted to Love (1997)
0000002211	71	7.1 Murder at 1600 (1997)
00.0101111	59	7.3 Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)

Movies opening in the US from mid-April to June sorted by average votes
(to June 5):

0000000124	1546	8.5 Fifth Element, The (1997)
0.0..00124	44	8.5 Twin Town (1997)
0…000132	35	8.3 Paradise Road (1997)
10…00015	23	7.9 Nowhere (1997)
0000000113	270	7.6 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
0000001212	157	7.5 Breakdown (1997)
0000002112	92	7.5 Addicted to Love (1997)
00.0101111	59	7.3 Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)
0000001112	219	7.1 Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)
0000002211	71	7.1 Murder at 1600 (1997)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

Washington Post.
New Media Age.
Fangoria.
ZDF (TV, Germany).
Courier-Mail (Brisbane Australia).

Watch for articles in: CNR Magazine (Spain)

And it’s hardly “traditional media” but our time on top of the Netscape
What’s Cool page was certainly significant.

We’ve also won several new awards. See selections from the gallery
here.

Yell for the UK (Reader’s Choice nominee).
UK Plus: Editor’s Choice.

CyberTeddy Top 500.

Our good friend Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate has its awards:

Dr. Daniel’s Movie Emergency: Panacea Pick of the Week.

And it was mentioned in:

Boston Phoenix.

Washington Post.
The Internet News with Charles Bowen.
St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Newsbytes.
Internet Tourbus.

SOFTWARE CHANGES

by Col Needham

Want to know what was happening in the movie industry in the year you
were born? You can now browse over 100 years of movie history via our
In This Year feature which is accessible via the main search page,
the “go” menu and also by clicking on the year shown under the title
on any movie page. A series of reports are available for each year,
including a full list of titles; top grossing movies in the USA; main
Academy Awards; most popular movies in our user poll; births, deaths
and marriages; top countries and genres; world events; and finally, a
title search which operates on titles for the chosen year. In addition
you may browse various IMDb sections for each year, for example, look
at goofs from last year or posters from 1948.
A year by year index for
each of the sections provides an alternate view of the same data.
In This Year also
provides convenient access to movies planned for the next two or
three years.

We’ve created a separate mailing list for IMDb announcements to cover
new features and updates to the site as they are added. To subscribe
send a blank e-mail message to announce-subscribe@mlists.imdb.com

The biographies searcher has been extended to allow searches for all
the births, deaths and marriages in a specific year and also to search
by birth location (if you’ve ever wondered if your town has produced
any celebrities). The biographies search is available via a link
towards the bottom of the main IMDb search page

The “On this day in movie history” page
now has links to the Studio Briefing

news for that day (see earlier). We’ve also linked the
birth/death/marriage years to complete lists of the corresponding
information for the same year.

The local cinema schedules for the USA
now includes a MovieLink form to obtain times and tickets for cinemas in
your area.

On the local software front, Steffen Siebert’s Alternative Movie
Database package (AMD) is now available for Windows 95 and NT (text
interface only) from the usual IMDb FTP sites.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

The most important milestone this month: 100,000 theatrical movies.

Number of filmography entries: 1,642,728
Number of people covered: 448,214
Number of movies covered: 109,941

Size of the database (Mb): 146

4,000 soundtracks

10,000 alternate names

10,000 titles with distributor entries

50,000 production company titles

50,000 cinematographer entries

100,000 director entries

100,000 theatrical movies

100,000 genre entries

250,000 miscellaneous filmography entries

300,000 actress entries

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

a separate list of films in production, with their current status.

outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display
on the main title page.

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

enhanced awards section for the database covering more
international festivals, national film institutes etc.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the producing country(s).

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

No Comments

Newsletter #13

Posted by admin in Newsletter on April 15th, 1997

NEWSLETTER #13

mid-April 1997

To unsubscribe from this newsletter, send a blank message to newsletter-unsubscribe@imdb.com – *not* newsletter@imdb.com. To subscribe, fill out the survey form on the web site and check the appropriate box.

Welcome to issue 13 of the IMDb newsletter. The newsletter is intended to keep database users and contributors informed of the latest developments from the management team. Comments and suggestions are welcome and should be directed to newsletter@imdb.com. Issue 14 is scheduled for June.

See the further information section at the end of this file for more information about The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Short subjects:

Features:

The great ISO swap

Trailers:

WE ARE NOT SPAMMERS

by Jon Reeves

Some of you may have gotten some mail recently that offered deals on magazines, as well as extolling the virtues of our site. While we appreciate the kind words of the message’s author, we were totally unaware of this message until people started forwarding it to us, and we deplore the tactics of its sender. Rest assured that we are not advocates of junk e-mail (in fact, I spend quite a bit of time each week dealing with it) and would never use it; if you’re getting this newsletter, you asked to get it. We’ve also taken steps to prevent people from using us as a relay for their junk mail. In addition, unless you enter a contest (in which case we may give it to the sponsor) or write a bio or plot and don’t ask to be anonymous, we don’t share your e-mail address with anyone.

WE’D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY…

by Jon Reeves

You may have seen an ad for IMDb on the official Academy Awards site. There’s an interesting story behind it.

The designers of that site apparently used an ad from one of our old campaigns, served from our machines, when they were testing their site. We noticed and asked them not to do this, and they said they would stop. However, after their site went live, they continued to serve up that ad to people who had JavaScript turned off. We assumed this meant they wanted to help us, and replaced it with an ad promoting the Internet Movie Database, which got an excellent response. The ad was present on Oscar night and most of the next few weeks but as of this writing is gone again.

Once again, our emphasis on information over glitz meant we were able to do real-time updates and our servers were able to handle the load with ease.

So, if you came here from the Oscars site, welcome! We are not affiliated in any way with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

FILM THREAT

by Col Needham

By special arrangement with the publisher, we’re pleased to welcome the Film Threat Weekly to the IMDb. Check the feature of the day every Monday for the latest issue containing news and information with a focus on independent film. Regular features include reviews of the latest movies; film news; picks of the week in several categories; and the US box office top 10.

All names and titles are linked into the IMDb where appropriate to provide background information and we’re also maintaining an archive of past issues.

THE GREAT ISO SWAP

by Michel Hafner

INTRODUCTION

After promising it for a long time IMDb has finally replaced its old official character set, the 7 bit ASCII character set, with the new 8 bit ISO-8859-1 character set (aka ISO Latin 1). This new character set belongs to a family of ISO sets that were designed to cover the majority of the important languages of the world.

ISO-8859-1 is optimized for West European languages and can display almost all characters that are used in Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. That’s one of the reasons it was chosen. Many of the important film nations are fully covered with this set. In addition it’s widely supported by e-mail software, web browsers and operating systems in general.

The main difference between ASCII and ISO Latin 1 is the addition of 96 new characters used in the above mentioned languages among others. These characters are:

    ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª « ¬  ® ¯
  ° ± ² ³ ´ µ ¶ · ¸ ¹ º » ¼ ½ ¾ ¿
  À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï
  Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß
  à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï
  ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ÷ ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ

More details about the different ISO sets can be found here.

ISO Latin 1/2/3… and IMDb

ISO Latin 1 is now the official character set of IMDb. This means that

all new names and titles and all other new text entered into the database that need these new characters to be spelled correctly must be submitted using ISO Latin 1.
all old names and titles and all other old text already in the database that need these new characters to be spelled correctly MUST be converted to use ISO Latin 1.

We have used the long preparatory phase to industriously collect the ISO versions of titles and names so we were able to start with a sufficiently large portion of data already converted. But there remain literally thousands of names to be adapted, lots of character names to be swapped, attributes in different lists to be replaced and general text to be updated. We hope you will help us here and mail in corrections as time goes by. The corrections can be mailed in like regular corrections using the mail server and the usual keywords.

Since not all computer systems/mail software do support ISO Latin 1 we have provided for alternative ways of entering data.

All names and titles that are mailed in with ASCII and have a ISO Latin 1 counterpart already in the database are automatically swapped to the ISO Latin 1 version. So you can mail them in with ASCII and cause no problems doing so:

Examples:

You mail in	The mail server swaps to
Bunuel, Luis	Buñuel, Luis
Aberg, Anders	Åberg, Anders
Aaberg, Anders	Åberg, Anders
Beart, Emmanuelle	Béart, Emmanuelle
Bene, Gyoezoe	Bene, Gyözö
Bene, Gyozo	Bene, Gyözö
Bressler, Gunter	Breßler, Günter
Forque, Jesus-Maria	Forqué, Jesús-María
Wer zweimal lugt (1993)	Wer zweimal lügt (1993)
Was fuer ein Genie (1985)	Was für ein Genie (1985)
Voeroes grofnoe, A (1984)	Vörös grófnö, A (1984)
Vi paa Vaeddoe (1958)	Vi på Väddö (1958)
Ultima pelicula, La (1971)	Última película, La (1971)

If a name has a ISO Latin 1 version but only the ASCII version is correct, since the ASCII version is for one person and the ISO version for another, you have to use Roman numerals to turn off auto swapping:
Example: Berger, Pamela (I) versus Berger, Paméla (II)

The Roman numerals are permanent in this case and are also used throughout the database not just for input purposes.

If you are familiar with the way HTML encodes ISO Latin 1 characters you can use this encoding too in your mailings to the mail server. The relevant mappings are:

Æ –> Æ	Á –> Á	Â –> Â	À –> À
Å –> Å	Ã –> Ã	Ä –> Ä	Ç –> Ç
Ð –> Ð	É –> É	Ê –> Ê	È –> È
Ë –> Ë	Í –> Í	Î –> Î	Ì –> Ì
Ï –> Ï	Ñ –> Ñ	Ó –> Ó	Ô –> Ô
Ò –> Ò	Ø –> Ø	Õ –> Õ	Ö –> Ö
&Thorn; –> Þ	Ú –> Ú	Û –> Û	Ù –> Ù
Ü –> Ü	Ý –> Ý	á –> á	â –> â
æ –> æ	à –> à	å –> å	ã –> ã
ä –> ä	ç –> ç	é –> é	ê –> ê
è –> è	ð –> ð	ë –> ë	í –> í
î –> î	ì –> ì	ï –> ï	ñ –> ñ
ó –> ó	ô –> ô	ò –> ò	ø –> ø
õ –> õ	ö –> ö	ß –> ß	þ –> þ
ú –> ú	û –> û	ù –> ù	ü –> ü
ý –> ý	ÿ –> ÿ

Example:
NAME
Béart, Emmanuelle

If your mailer does support the ISO Latin 1 character set make sure that all data you are mailing in is not direct 8 bit ISO Latin 1 but MIME compatible encoded ISO Latin 1 data using the Quoted-Printable encoding that uses only ASCII characters. This is necessary because not all mail systems between your computer and ours that transport your mail can handle raw 8 bit characters. Some simply ignore the special ISO Latin 1 characters and remove them from your additions so names and titles get mutilated. While we often can and will recognize and correct these amputated versions they must be avoided at all costs. So please configure your mailer properly or ask your system administrator, if you can not do it yourself.

Be aware of excessive/missing use of ISO Latin 1 in certain culturally biased sources. For example, French sources might use Marlène Dietrich because Marlene is spelled Marlène if it is a French first name. But since Marlene Dietrich is German and not French and she made her career in Germany and USA for the most part which both spell her first name as Marlene the ISO version is not correct here and has to be avoided. Likewise be aware of English and other sources that often ignore the need for ISO and spell everything using ASCII which is again not correct and has to be avoided. This is very widespread! A generally reliable source from country x spells correctly for data from its own culture and language but fails to do so for data outside this area (and competence). So it’s safest to use Spanish sources for Spanish data, French sources for French data, Italian sources for Italian data etc.

While ISO Latin 1 covers most of the languages spoken in important film nations it does not provide all necessary characters for languages such as Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Turkish and others. In addition, languages using radically different character sets such as Hindi, Greek, Arabian, Hebrew or pictogram based languages such as Japanese and Chinese are not directly representable. The situation concerning IMDb is as follows for the time being:

Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovene… that have as native character set ISO Latin 2:

Data must be transliterated to ISO Latin 1. The mappings are straightforward. If an accented character is missing in ISO Latin 1 use the non accented version. Examples: Svêrák, Jan –> Sverák, Jan (the ê should have the ^ upside down, a character not in ISO Latin 1) and not Svêrák, Jan
Kies’lowski, Krzysztof –> Kieslowski, Krzysztof (the s should have a ‘ on top of it, a character not in ISO Latin 1)

There is one exception so far: the characters u” and o” (the ” should be on top of the u and o) as used in Hungarian are mapped to ü and ö!
Examples:
Mihályi, Gyo”zo” —> Mihályi, Gyözö
Szu”cs, Gábor –> Szücs, Gábor

(If you are knowledgeable about any of these ISO Latin 2 languages and feel strongly that the mappings should be different please let me know so we can discuss it.)

There is also the possibility to mail in ISO Latin 2 data itself! If you want to mail us the correct ISO Latin 2 version of a name or title now in ISO Latin 1 use the new server keywords
ISO2NAME and
ISO2TITLE

The trick here is to encode everything as ISO Latin 1 but using for the right side the characters that are binary identical to the correct ones for ISO Latin 2! So the left side looks correct and the right side looks funny if you use a ISO Latin 1 font and vice versa if you use a ISO Latin 2 font. The data will not be used directly in the database since both character sets can not be mixed together with current web and mail software. It will be used later when this is possible. (See UNICODE below.) The data collected so far will though be browsable on our WWW servers so you can avoid mailing in data we already have.

Galician, Maltese, Turkish and other languages with native character set ISO Latin 3:

Data must be transliterated to ISO Latin 1. The mappings are straightforward. If an accented character is missing in ISO Latin 1 use the non accented version. There is no server support for direct ISO Latin 3 data for the time being.

Languages with native character set ISO Latin 4: same as ISO Latin 3 (transliterate to Latin 1).
Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian with native character set ISO Latin 5 (Cyrillic): same as ISO Latin 2.

The new server keywords are
ISO5NAME and
ISO5TITLE

Russian:

Data must be transliterated to ISO Latin 1. So far no unique system has been enforced but English transliteration standards have been used mostly. There is also the possibility to mail in Cyrillic data itself! If you want to mail us the correct Cyrillic version of a name or title now in ISO Latin 1 use the new server keywords
RUSSIANNAME and
RUSSIANTITLE These are expecting data in the KOI8-R character set, and not ISO Latin 5! Again the trick here is to encode everything as ISO Latin 1 but using for the right side the characters that are binary identical to the correct ones for KOI8-R. Example:
RUSSIANNAME
Tarkovsky, Andrei|ôaÒËÏ×ÓËÉÊ, áÎÄÒÅÊ|
RUSSIANTITLE
Chapayev (1996)|þÁÐÁÅ× (1996)|

The right side here looks quite strange, but compiling the data is easy if you know Russian and use a KOI8-R font while working on the right side and a ISO Latin 1 font for the left side.

Arabic (ISO Latin 6): same as ISO Latin 3 (transliterate to Latin 1).
Modern Greek (ISO Latin 7): same as ISO Latin 2.

The new server keywords are
ISO7NAME and
ISO7TITLE

Hebrew (ISO Latin 8): same as ISO Latin 3 (transliterate to Latin 1).
Japanese:

Data must be transliterated to ISO Latin 1. So far no unique system has been enforced but the official transliteration scheme we are aiming at is modified Hepburn romanization. Circumflexes for long vowels are accepted since macrons are not available. Capitalization is lower case except for the first letter of the first word and proper names in titles.

Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese):

Data must be transliterated to ISO Latin 1. So far no unique system has been enforced. Input by knowledgeable users is most welcome so we can look at defining a strict policy. If interested, mail me.

Indian languages and all others not yet discussed: same as ISO Latin 3 (transliterate to Latin 1).

Ideally all data should be presented using its native character sets/ pictograms. Technically this is not possible though with current widespread software for web access, e-mail and operating systems in general.

In the future there will be a new huge standardized 16 bit character set called Unicode. It will offer the capability to freely combine Japanese Kanji with ISO 1 text and Hindi, for example. We will use it as it becomes widely available and supported by the industry.

I hope you enjoy the new more accurate ISO 1 data we offer now and also use the new possibilities for data addition with ISO 2/5/7 and KOI8-R.

GENERAL ALTERNATIVE TITLES ARE COMING

by Michel Hafner

Until now only alternative titles in the languages of the co-producing countries were accepted. This policy was reasonable because

a firm basis of primary titles had to be compiled first before a flood of alternative titles in various languages can be added without creating chaos.
the old ASCII character set had to be replaced with the new ISO Latin 1 set so collecting large amounts of titles can be done using their native character set or a better approximation to it than ASCII.

The prerequisites for general alternative titles are now given and since demand for these is big we will introduce them within the next few weeks. The new server keyword and format will be announced in time. Until then the old policy is valid, so please do not start to mail in Swahili titles for US movies right now!

If you have large collections of such titles (at least several hundred) that you would like to donate please mail me so we can optimize the transfer.

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total pages for the week ending April 19.

Titles:

1. Star Wars (1977)
270. Saint, The (1997)
8. Romeo + Juliet (1996)
12. Batman & Robin (1997)
3. Jerry Maguire (1996)
4. English Patient, The (1996)
179. Liar Liar (1997)
-. Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
79. Devil’s Own, The (1997)
10. Scream (1996)
18. Lost World: Jurassic Park, The (1997)
-. Chasing Amy (1997)
7. Star Wars: Episode I (1999)
20. Pulp Fiction (1994)
-. Anaconda (1997)
16. Empire Strikes Back, The (1980)
234. Fifth Element, The (1997)
5. Fargo (1996)
15. Independence Day (1996)
22. Return of the Jedi (1983)

The Star Wars juggernaut rolls on, but it’s losing some steam as the films fade from the US screens; the whole series is only 2.5x the number 2 film now. Chasing Amy has dragged Clerks up from #154 to #32 and Mallrats from nowhere to #104. Titanic is at #21, up from #95; it should make the top 20 next time. Huh factor: #22 “Alles Glück dieser Erde” (1993); #49 Dis (1995); #56 “And Everything Nice” (1949). As always, if anyone can explain the sudden popularity of these obscure titles, I’m interested. [Note: since the mailing, I've learned that Dis was high on the "worst movies" list.]

People:

The first tie, between Shue and Hatcher (and only one reference behind Ford). That won’t last; Hatcher becoming the new Bond girl will raise her score, and Shue should drop as The Saint leaves screens. Otherwise, the usual suspects shuffle around, and Kilmer, Shue, Cusack, and Adams enter the top 20 on the strength of popular new releases. Lots of “halo effect” from Chasing Amy; even Jay (Jason Mewes) scores at #94. #38 Petra Verkaik seems to be the new pinup of the month, with her two titles at #41 and #101. Huh factor: #46 Ricardo Franco (I).

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US in March and April sorted by number of votes (to April 16):

0000001113	4064	8.3 Return of the Jedi (1983)
0000000115	591	8.6 Private Parts (1997)
1000000112	501	6.5 Crash (1996)
0000000123	352	8.3 Liar Liar (1997)
0000001113	325	8.1 Saint, The (1997)
0000011111	277	7.0 Devil’s Own, The (1997)
0.0.000124	213	8.8 Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
0.0.000133	105	8.5 Love and Other Catastrophes (1996)
0000000125	93	8.5 Selena (1997)
0….00017	91	9.6 Chasing Amy (1997)

Movies opening in the US in March and April sorted by average votes (to April 16):

0….00017	91	9.6 Chasing Amy (1997)
0.0.000124	213	8.8 Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
0000000115	591	8.6 Private Parts (1997)
0.0.000133	105	8.5 Love and Other Catastrophes (1996)
0000000125	93	8.5 Selena (1997)
0000001113	4064	8.3 Return of the Jedi (1983)
0000000123	352	8.3 Liar Liar (1997)
0..0001113	56	8.1 Jerusalem (1996)
0000001113	325	8.1 Saint, The (1997)
000.001203	63	7.6 Inventing the Abbotts (1997)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

Boston Globe. Curiocity. Tribune-Review (Pittsburgh area). TV-Movie (Germany). Web Week, twice. Internet Oggi (Italy). US News & World Report. NTT telephone directory. MSNBC. LA Times. Kansas City Star. Vanity Fair (not by name, alas). Discovery Channel. Yahoo! Internet Life (one of Lucy Lawless’ favorite sites).

Watch for articles in: CNR Magazine (Spain)

We’ve also won several new awards. See selections from the gallery here.

Point/Lycos top movie site. UK Online Cool Site.

Our readers in the UK should vote for us in the UK Web Awards (and don’t forget to use our UK mirror site).

Our good friend Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate has its awards:

PC Magazine site of the day.

And it was mentioned in:

Courier-Mail (Brisbane Australia). US Magazine. Late Show News.

SOFTWARE CHANGES

by Col Needham

Traffic continues to increase across all our sites so we’ve recently doubled our hardware capacity at the main US site, housed at Exec-PC in Wisconsin.

We’ve made it much easier to locate the permanent URLs for bookmarking / linking to IMDb pages. A button labelled “Link to this page” appears at the bottom of most pages and will provide the direct URL. For more details please see our linking guide. Remember that linking to the IMDb from your own pages helps build awareness of the IMDb and is very much encouraged.

The navigation menu at the bottom of each of our pages has been enhanced to include a menu of useful and interesting destinations to help people navigate the site easily. Simply select your destination and hit the “Go” button (if you hit the button without making a selection, the system takes you to a random page from the list).

The posters section has been enhanced to include links to posters stored on other sites in addition to those stored locally. For example see the poster for The Saint (1997).

If you’re in the mood for browsing titles at random or looking for a good movie to go out and see/rent, try our random title selector (use your browser’s RELOAD function to jump to another random title).

The recent/upcoming movie releases section has been expanded to view the upcoming movies as far into the future as we cover so start booking those tickets for Christmas releases now!

A new version of the local UNIX interface to the database has been released with support for the ISO-Latin-1 character set change and for the distributors and crew completion lists.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

This is a regular section giving information about the current size and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 50,000 and 75,000 additions every week from users all over the world.

Big month for milestones, with all of the main statistics crossing a threshold:

   Number of filmography entries: 1,538,799
   Number of people covered:        423,633
   Number of movies covered:        104,149

   Size of the database (Mb):           135

Recent milestones:

500 alternate version entries
2,000 miscellaneous company entries
4,000 literature list entries
5,000 business list entries
25,000 biographies
40,000 composer entries
45,000 cinematographer entries
100,000 movies
100,000 country entries
400,000 people
600,000 actor entries
1,500,000 filmography entries

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

This is a regular section listing some enhancements we’re currently looking at. Please bear in mind that some of these may take quite a while to come to fruition or even fail to materialize because the original volunteer decides not to proceed.

a separate list of films in production, with their current status.
outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display on the main title page.
a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever, launched a star.
a locally installable MS-Windows interface to the database is under final testing for those of you who want to reduce your phone bills!
enhanced awards section for the database covering more international festivals, national film institutes etc.
general support for alternate titles in languages other than English and the language of the producing country(s).
a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

Academy Awards and Oscar are registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. UNIX and X Window System are registered trademarks of The Open Group. The WASHED-UPdate is a trademark of Greg Bulmash. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

No Comments

Newsletter #12

Posted by admin in Newsletter on January 3rd, 1997

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Welcome to issue 12 of the IMDb newsletter. The newsletter is intended to
keep database users and contributors informed of the latest developments
from the management team. Comments and suggestions are welcome and should
be directed to newsletter@imdb.com. Issue 13 is scheduled for mid-April.

To subscribe to the newsletter, fill out the survey

and check the appropriate box. To unsubscribe, send a blank
message to newsletter-unsubscribe@imdb.com.

Short subjects:

Those Roman numerals in names

IMDb locks viewer in

IMDb does Oscar II

Feature:

A Goof-Spotter’s Handbook (Part II)

Trailers:

Supporting the IMDb

More pictures?

Posters

Plots needed

Genres needed

Hot searches

Hot movies

IMDb in the news

Software changes

New server keyword: TITLELOCK

New server hardware in the UK

Database statistics

Future developments

THOSE ROMAN NUMERALS IN NAMES

by Michel Hafner

Now and then we get mail asking what the Roman numerals in names mean
or we get corrections trying to remove them. So it’s probably time to
describe in a bit more detail why we have names with Roman numerals and
what it all means.

There are two types of Roman numerals appearing in our names. Here’s an
example of the first type:

Ahern II, Lloyd

Lloyd Ahern II is a cinematographer that has the same name as his father
Lloyd Ahern except for the “II” used to distinguish between them. The
Roman numeral is directly and officially part of the name and not in
any parentheses. It is used in actual credits of movies and in other
information sources that have data on this man.

The reason is simply to make clear that you are talking about the son
and not the father. The two are likely to be mixed up since they are both
cinematographers. Although someone familiar with their biographical data
might conclude from the context if the father or the son was involved in
a particular movie, it’s nonetheless convenient to have the Roman numeral
to remove ambiguity.

The second type of Roman numeral appearing in names is very similar,
although there is a crucial difference. Again the Roman numeral is
added to distinguish between two or more different people that share
a name but are not identical. But this time the number is not part of
the official name of a person as used in credits or other information
sources. It’s a number added by IMDb and it’s always within parentheses.

The need for these numbers arose naturally as the database grew over
time and more and more name clashes occurred with the consequence that
credits belonging to one person were also showing up for all others with
the same name. Generally, the more common a name is the more likely
there will be mix-ups and the more Roman numerals have to be added. As
an example look up John Taylor for which we already store 15 (!) variants
not counting cases with initials.

There are no strict rules as to which person gets which number although
we try to give more important or famous people lower numbers (and
big stars none at all for the time being) and also people that came
chronologically before other people. Also, if a person has been billed
with different names, one of them being more distinctive than the others
(due to an added initial, for example), we tend to use the unique name
that needs no Roman numeral as the primary name and add the name with
the Roman numeral as an alternative name.

The need for Roman numerals follows from the basic database design.
The names and titles themselves are the keys into the data and must be
unique, hence the need for Roman numerals. Other solutions are possible,
but we feel that the current solution is the best for the time being and
hope this view is also shared by our users.

IMDb LOCKS VIEWER IN

by Giancarlo Cairella

A couple of months ago I went to see Chain Reaction. As I always do, I
checked the entry in the IMDb and read in the Crazy Credits section
that after the end titles there’s an additional scene (showing an
underground explosion).

After the movie was over I sat through the end credits to see this scene
and waited for what seemed an eternity (at least 5 minutes of the film’s
running time are taken by the closing titles). By the time the explosion
did indeed appear, I was the only guy left in the theater (it was 1 A.M.).

I got up and tried to leave, but first I had to go to the restroom. When
I came out the lights went out and by the time I got to the door I
discovered that the theater had been sealed up for the night with me inside!

I managed to get to the front entrance in the dark and after 10-15
minutes a night watchman saw me through the glass doors and rescued me.

Conclusion: better check the IMDb after you’ve seen the movie,
especially if you plan to go to the late show

IMDb DOES OSCAR II

by Jon Reeves

The Oscar nominations are in; we had the complete list up, with links,
in slightly over an hour. Look for a revised format for the Oscar data
soon that should make it easier to read longer entries like the effects.
We’ve been working to fill in the blanks on some of the more obscure
nominees.

And as with last year, we are planning real-time updates during the actual
ceremony on March 24. Last year, we got many of the updates done before the
winner reached the podium.

A GOOF-SPOTTER’S HANDBOOK (PART II)

by Murray Chapman

Continuing our discussion of goofs from last issue.

Miscellaneous Misconceptions

Here, I’ll briefly debunk some of the commonly submitted “goofs”:

In Star Wars, upon returning from destroying the Death
Star, Luke yells “Carrie!” instead of “Leia!” The jury is still out
on this one. I have mail pending with the maintainers of the Star Wars
FAQ on whether this is actually the case or not. I will await their decision;
I haven’t the time to investigate it thoroughly enough to satisfy SW fans!

In The Wizard of Oz, it’s possible to see a crew member hanging
himself in the background. Not true. For a full explanation, see:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/movies/wizard_of_oz.html

In 3 Men and a Baby, it’s possible to see the ghost of a boy
in the background. Not true. For a full explanation, see:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/movies/3_men_and_a_baby_ghost.html

Everyone in sword-and-sandal epics should have bad teeth. Not true; tooth
decay is a symptom of modern day society’s sugar consumption. In countries
such as India, where the majority of people can’t afford sugar, teeth are
clean and white. Certainly, they should not have sunglasses, tan marks from
their wristwatches, band-aids, but good teeth is fine.

In Independence Day, Levinson says that he has identified
a pattern in the aliens’ transmissions, and announces that he thinks that
it is a countdown. He displays on his laptop a timer which will is counting
down in hours/minutes/seconds. Many people submit that this is a goof,
because there is no way that the aliens would be using human time
measurements. Not true: they could. But in any event, there’s no indication
in the film that the hours/minutes/seconds are directly encoded into the
radio signals, it’s probable that Levinson has merely constructed his timer
so that it counts down in units that we are familiar with.

What? There are exceptions?

It is indicative of the complex and varied nature of film that what
may at first seem to be a bona fide goof may not actually be one!
In A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick deliberately had cups and
plates jump around, as to provide a subconscious sense of confusion to
the viewer. It is rumored that Last Action Hero (1993) had hundreds of
intentional continuity errors, in keeping with its “journey into filmland”
basis. Such deliberate aberrations in the reality that a film seeks to
create should not be regarded as “goofs”; they are a technique unique to
cinema in which a filmmaker can express their ideas.

One film that that is a goof manager’s nightmare is Total Recall (1990).
Most of the film concerns a man’s attempts to determine whether he is merely
suffering a programmed hallucination, or whether what he is experiencing is
“reality” as he has always known it. Given this, if we find an inconsistency
in the film, we are unsure how to classify it. There are two options:

(a) It was a genuine, unintentional mistake by the filmmakers, and
thus an aberration in the reality the film is trying to create.

(b) It was a deliberate inconsistency by the filmmakers to indicate that the
character is not experiencing “reality” as they traditionally know it.

From the IMDb’s point of view, (a) is a goof, whereas (b) isn’t. As most
films don’t involve multiple/alternative realities, (a) is a safe bet most
of the time. Unfortunately with Total Recall (1990), this is not the
case, and thus we must make a conservative decision and give the filmmakers
credit for using this device.

Time travel also creates a lot of headaches. The IMDb will not catalog
goofs which involve time travel, as to do so would make assumptions about a
fictitious technology that by its very nature involves paradoxes.

The same can be said for many high-tech goof submissions. It is stated in
Independence Day (1996) that the alien mothership has a mass a quarter
that of the moon, and yet no mention is made of massive tidal changes.
Labeling this a goof would require us to make assumptions about alien
technology. The aliens know more than we do; they can move a ship that big
across the galaxy. If you are happy with your view of physics accommodating
a fast moving machine of such a mass, then it doesn’t take much more disbelief
to allow for negation of gravitational effects.

How do goofs happen?

The budget of the film was $45 million! Why don’t they take some care when
making it?

Well, it’s not that easy! The more money you have typically means the more
people involved, and the more complex your production is. A complex production
leaves lots of room for unnoticed mistakes. Let’s examine the process of
creating a film to try and identify how mistakes get made:

The Script. In most films, a script is fairly complete and static once filming
begins (notable exceptions: Apocalypse Now (1979), Blue in the Face (1995)).
Before it reaches this stage, however, it must have gone through numerous
revisions and changes. Each revision of the script has the possibility of
introducing inconsistencies. The script may be poorly written, resulting
in huge PLOT holes.

Pre-production. Often, early drafts of the script are given to the various
departments involved in pre-production for a film. Sets have to be built
and costumes have to be made before filming can begin. Mistakes can be
introduced because of miscommunication that can’t be blamed on one party:

In the novel of Gone with the Wind (1939), Scarlett is described
wearing the “green sprigged dress” in the opening scenes with the Tarleton
twins. In the movie she wears a white dress with a red sash. Later during
the barbecue at the Wilkes where she actually does wear the green dress,
Scarlett says to the Tarleton twins, “but I wore this old thing because I
thought you liked it,” referring to the novel, not earlier in the movie.

The dress had been changed by the costume department, but none of them had
thought to contact the script department on the off chance that this raised
problems later in the script. (Note that this is not a goof, because the
Tarleton twins might have seen Scarlett’s dress in a scene not in the movie)

Location: If you’ve ever seen a film that involved a car chase that was
filmed in a city that you know, you’re probably aware that filmmakers
play fast and loose with geography. If there are significant landmarks
visible, and we are sure what city they are supposed to be in, we can
hit them with GEOG errors. Hong Faan Kui (1995) (Rumble in the Bronx)
was especially guilty of this: set in the Bronx, it featured the snowy
white peaks surrounding Vancouver, Canada.

Shooting order: Films are rarely shot in the order that they play in the
final film (exception: Death and the Maiden (1994)). Of more importance
is scheduling the resources (actors, locations, props, etc) to make efficient
use of them. To this end, a character may be required to show injuries that
they haven’t received yet – the costume and makeup departments must make
special note of how the items will end up looking, and when the earlier shots
are filmed, introduce the differences as required.

Multiple Takes: Conversation scenes are typically shot with three camera
positions: once looking over each person’s shoulder at the other person,
and once showing both people in the same shot. If the scene is filmed three
times from each position, that results in nine pieces of footage from which
an editor will extract the best performances.

In each of these nine takes, the actors involved must ensure that their
actions are as similar as possible. They must rub their faces at the same
point in the conversation, they must drink the same amount out of the glass
at the same time, and return it to the same point on the table, remembering
whether or not to take their hand off the glass.

If the characters are in a scene are outdoors, the filmmakers have less
control over background items. Ordinary civilians in the background
might move. In The Fugitive (1993), Richard Kimble runs through the
St Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago. Unfortunately, the same clock is visible
in the background in a number of different shots, showing times that indicate
gaps in supposedly continuous scenes.

Camera crew/equipment: Filmmakers usually take great pains to ensure that
their presence is not noted in the film: sets are specially constructed to
allow camera movements, and shots are composed to not include items that
shouldn’t be there. Nevertheless, mistakes are often made: shadows and
reflections are difficult to predict.

Safety: Obviously, you can’t do things like blowing people up, or shooting
them in the head. To this end, special effects are used: hidden wires,
trick props, squibs, etc. Sometimes, the mechanisms become visible. FAKE
goofs are born.

Boom Mikes: Boom mikes are a special case. A boom mike is a large microphone
held over the top of the scene being filmed. Undesirable visible in the final
product, they are vital to catch dialogue and/or sound effects for later
processing.

A little-known fact is that boom mikes are actually captured on film most
of the time. The camera’s viewfinder actually shows (and records on film)
a greater area of the scene than will appear in the final product. Markings
are etched in the viewfinder to indicate to the camera operator the extents of
the “viewable” film (called the “live” area). An area beyond that (called the
“safe” area) is also marked; it is in this area that the camera operator
directs the boom operator to place the boom microphone.

When the film is developed, processed and printed, the film beyond the safe
area is cropped, but often not the safe area itself. It is up to the
projectionist to correctly align the camera and the blinders so that only the
“live” area is visible. As films have different aspect ratios, this adjustment
needs to be made for every film.

A boom mike that appears in the final product may or may not be the fault
of the filmmakers; quite often it is. In The Night of the Iguana (1964),
Richard Burton‘s character is actually hit on the head by the boom mike -
hardly something you can blame on incorrect adjustment of the projector!

There are many reports of boom mikes in Ransom (1996), but also reports
from various people (myself included) that they couldn’t see boom mikes
where others had reported them; we are forced to conclude that in this case,
there were several projectionists at fault.

Shooting time: Shooting a particular scene make take hundreds of times longer
than the actual scene takes when viewed on film. An extreme example of this
is Tsui Kun II (1994) (Drunken Master II), where the final fight scene
plays out in seven minutes of screen time, but required three months to
shoot. Inevitably, real life intrudes: it is impossible to wear the same
costume and the same makeup the entire time that it takes to film the scene.
(Exception: while filming Carrie (1976), Sissy Spacek slept for
several nights with fake pig blood on her, so that it would appear the same
in all shots).

Imagine the problems facing the makers of Speed (1994/I): the bulk
of the film plays out in real time, and both Jack and the bus he is on must
both gradually become more and more scuffed up as the film progresses. Couple
this with the fact that scenes were probably not shot in chronological order,
and you begin to appreciate the difficulty of the task of reapplying makeup
every day of a shoot that may last for weeks. On top of this, 10 different
buses were used depending on the action required.

Second Unit Shots: there is often more than one camera crew working on a film
at the one time. The director typically delegates relatively unimportant
shots to the “second unit,” which films them independently. The second unit
typically does shots that do not require lead actors’ faces; they may film
closeups, stills, scenery, or even hands moving to pick up objects. Hands are
usually the same, especially if they wear gloves; any old hand will do for
most shots. Miscommunication between units can result in gross continuity
errors: In
A Nightmare in Elm Street (1984), Nancy is wearing a
shortsleeved nightgown when she checks her watch, but the closeup shows a
wrist with the end of a long blue sleeve on it.

Editing: During editing, the nine pieces of footage that we described earlier
are cut and spliced together to make a single (hopefully continuous) scene.
The editor has to balance numerous factors: the flow of the conversation,
the correct camera angle for the correct moment, the best takes of
a particular line, and gross continuity errors. Poorly edited dialogue
is more noticeable that the level of water in someone’s glass bobbing up
and down. In any event, at the editing stage it is often too late to go
back and re-shoot a scene, so continuity sacrifices have to be made.

In arranging the shots of a film during editing, it is sometimes necessary
to flip a shot left-for-right, so that characters are looking the right
direction, or so that action flows naturally and is indicative of “absolute”
motion. If a shot is flipped thus, tattoos, earrings, and clothes will
appear different.

Sound Synchronization Goofs: For most films, dialogue is re-recorded later at
a studio, without the background noise that plagues location shooting. In
attempting to match characters’ dialogue with their lip movements, mistakes
can be made.

Also, the re-recording stage production is also a common place to change
lines of dialogue. Blade Runner (1982) has an example: when Deckard
visits Hassan the snake dealer, their lip movements and body language
don’t match their dialogue.

Post completion requirements: Censorship, studio pressure, and preview
audience reaction can all cause a film to be re-edited. In the case of the
first two, quite often this is done in a hurry and without the original
filmmakers’ involvement/permission, hence inconsistencies and/or technical
problems may be introduced.

Many people hate Harrison Ford‘s voice-overs in the original version
of Blade Runner (1982) – Ford himself being one of them. He was under
contractual obligation to do them when the studio didn’t understand the film,
and by some accounts, deliberately did a less than perfect job.

Artistic License

Finally, in recognition that movies are sometimes just damn good
entertainment, I’ll list a few of the things that usually don’t happen
in real life, but seem to always happen in movies. For an exhaustive
and extremely entertaining list of Film Cliches, see
Giancarlo’s Movie Cliches list.

As these are all too common, the IMDb doesn’t catalog these individual goofs:

Cars rarely blow up when they crash, regardless of how much fuel they have
in them.

People usually go into shock when shot, and they suffer long-term effects
after concussion.

Computers don’t explode in a shower of sparks when they malfunction, nor
do they beep whenever you press a key. In general, picking holes in computer
systems in movies is extremely easy.

People exposed to the vacuum of space don’t explode.

People shot with handguns don’t fly backwards.

In Summary

Hopefully this article has given you a deeper insight into the world
of goofs and how they are cataloged in the IMDb. It’s not a simple,
well defined problem, but with a few guidelines and a bit of thought,
the problem can be split up and some solutions implemented.

As with any area of the IMDb, we’re open to suggestions and welcome any
feedback. If you have any questions and/or comments, mail them to me.

SUPPORTING THE IMDb

by Col Needham

A common question we get on our user survey is “How can I help the IMDb?”

The first way is to help coverage of the database continue to expand
by sending in new information whenever you notice any omissions. This
is best achieved via the button at the bottom of each title and name
page. The database has been built largely from these data contributions
which are then validated, collated and edited by our team of section
editors before being placed online. The occasional mistakes do sometimes
slip through, so also watch for opportunities to send corrections too!

The second way is to visit our sponsors’ sites by clicking the advertising
banners at the top of our pages whenever you see something which
interests you. The ad banners are paying for the IMDb servers, staff
and overall free access to the best movie site on the web. Our ability
to sell banners depends on the response rates received by our sponsors,
both in terms of the number of our users visiting their sites, and most
importantly, buying the sponsor’s products and services. For example,
purchasing videos, books or other products advertised on the IMDb by
clicking the banners instead of buying them elsewhere helps ensure
the future growth of the database. The sponsored banners are clearly
labeled with the text underneath and a “click” icon on the right hand side
(those lacking the text and icon are internal IMDb promotional banners
used to highlight other interesting areas within the site). Similarly
the IMDb earns a commission on any items purchased via our “buy” links.

The third way is to make sure as many people know about the IMDb
as possible, so don’t be shy in telling your friends and co-workers
about the site, or just mention us in USENET news articles. Everyone
is welcome to link to the database from their own pages, either via
a simple link to our home page or direct links to the pages for your
favorite movies and people. For information and help please see:
http://us.imdb.com/how_to_link.

Finally, if your company is looking to advertise to a large number of
online users (and at the same time support the IMDb) please let your
marketing people know about the database.

MORE PICTURES?

by Jon Reeves

One common request we get is for more pictures in the database, especially
a picture on each actor or movie page. There’s a number of reasons we
haven’t done this yet.

First, we have a strong respect for current intellectual property
(copyright) laws; many of the random pictures floating around the net
have been scanned in from magazines and other questionable sources.
(We’re also very fond of the part of the law that says facts cannot be
copyrighted per se.)

This leads to the second approach: license pictures. This would
be expensive, and IMDb has operated on a pay-as-you-go philosophy.
Unlike some web sites, there’s no multinational conglomerate behind us,
and there’s no company trying to float an IPO to cover multi-million
dollar losses; we’re also not just a loss leader for a CD-ROM. As ad
revenue permits, this is certainly one use of the income we will consider,
but our funds are limited and adding more pictures (and accommodating
the bandwidth they consume) may not be the best use of them. Also, many
people like our current low bandwidth format, so even if this happens, it
may be via links.

We do link to thousands of pictures, and to official and unofficial sites
that contain thousands more. Also, we’ve recently made arrangements to
add thousands of posters behind a new icon.

POSTERS SECTION

by Col Needham

In conjunction with The Nostalgia Factory we recently launched a movie
posters section. It provides images of posters for both classic and recent
movies alike from across the world with nearly 400 covered to date and
more added each week.

Look for this icon:

PLOTS NEEDED

by Col Tinto

As we get close to 20,000 movies covered by plot summaries, we still
need your help!

Quite a few new movies listed below don’t have summaries yet, as well
as some older but still reasonable films. So if you’ve seen any of the
films listed below, please submit a summary for it using the normal
submissions process.

Due South (1994) (TV)

Man of the House (1995)

Hamlet (1996)

Cabin Boy (1994)

Sgt. Bilko (1996)

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996)

Extreme Measures (1996)

The Preacher’s Wife (1996)

The Amityville Horror (1979)

Cry Freedom (1987)

The Scarlet Letter (1995)

The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

Every Which Way But Loose (1978)

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987)

Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993)

Lord of the Flies (1990)

Rescue from Gilligan’s Island (1978) (TV)

Over the Top (1987)

Smokey and the Bandit II (1980)

GENRES NEEDED

by Col Tinto

Our genre coverage gets better every week, with around 1000 lines submitted
for 3 or 400 films, but there seem to be a few glaring omissions…

Listed below are a few movies we need a genre and keywords for.

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)

Antonia (1995)

The Brothers McMullen (1995)

Star Trek: The Next Generation – All Good Things… (1994) (TV)

Restoration (1995)

Made in Heaven (1987)

Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)

Kansas City (1996)

Wuthering Heights (1992)

The Pallbearer (1996)

Dogfight (1991)

Trees Lounge (1996)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Emissary (1993) (TV)

The Substitute (1996)

Emergency (1971) (TV)

My Family (1995)

Five Corners (1987)

Rambo (1987)

Dead Man Walking (1987)

Zulu Dawn (1979)

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending February 15.

Titles:

3. Star Wars (1977)

23. Shine (1996)

4. Jerry Maguire (1996)

11. The English Patient (1996)

15. Fargo (1996)

6. Evita (1996)

26. Star Wars: Episode I (1999)

12. William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)

9. Striptease (1996)

8. Scream (1996)

2. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

38. Batman & Robin (1997)

-. Sling Blade (1996)

-. Absolute Power (1997)

7. Independence Day (1996)

64. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

21. The Rock (1996)

25. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

14. Braveheart (1995)

20. Pulp Fiction (1994)

As at the box office, Star Wars is an overpowering force, with almost a 2x
lead on the runner up (3x, if you add in all the sequels). Several titles
helped greatly by their Oscar nominations. Last month’s #1, Michael (1996) ,
dropped like a rock to #52. Huh factor: #116
“Faith Baldwin Romance Theatre” (1951), #133 Annadata (1952) .

People:

1. Tom Cruise

2. Pamela Anderson

5. Sharon Stone

3. Demi Moore

4. Kim Basinger

6. Teri Hatcher

48. Salma Hayek

15. Harrison Ford

9. Mel Gibson

7. Sandra Bullock

11. Leonardo DiCaprio

18. Ralph Fiennes

8. Bo Derek

17. Alyssa Milano

21. Arnold Schwarzenegger

35. Jamie Lee Curtis

10. Michelle Pfeiffer

89. Traci Lords

22. Renee Zellweger

24. Drew Barrymore

Tom Cruise solidifies his lead on Pammy; last month, he was only about 25%
ahead, this month it’s almost 100%. Two new pin-ups this month; Salma Hayek
on the strength of #33 title Fools Rush In (1997), #37
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and #78 Desperado (1995);
Traci Lords on general reputation.
Huh factor: Elinor Field at #33.
Hot newcomer: Ewan McGregor at #24.

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US in January and February sorted by number of votes
(to February 20):

0000000116	8634	9.0	Star Wars (1977)
0000001114	4064	8.5	The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
0000011111	220	6.6	The Relic (1997)
0000000125	197	8.8	Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
..0.000017	194	9.3	Hamlet (1996)
0000010123	170	8.3	Police Story 4: First Strike (1996)
0000001212	163	7.5	Dante’s Peak (1997)
0000001121	151	7.1	Fierce Creatures (1997)
0000000114	127	8.0	In Love and War (1996)
0..0.00016	118	9.3	Lost Highway (1996)

Movies opening in the US in January and February sorted by average votes
(to February 20):

..0.000017	194	9.3	Hamlet (1996)
0..0.00016	118	9.3	Lost Highway (1996)
0000000116	8634	9.0	Star Wars (1977)
0000000125	197	8.8	Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
0.0.000124	66	8.8	Le Huitieme jour (1996)
0000001114	4064	8.5	The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
0000010123	170	8.3	Police Story 4: First Strike (1996)
0000000114	127	8.0	In Love and War (1996)
0000001212	163	7.5	Dante’s Peak (1997)
0000001112	85	7.3	Absolute Power (1997)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

Connect Time.
The Jerusalem Post.
The Net (twice).
Alta Voltagem (Portugal TV).
Web Week.

PC Magazine.
Yahoo! Internet Life.
Net Talk Live (Dallas TV).
C|Net (Ben Burtt interview).
Cinema (Germany).
epd Film (Germany).
Washington Post.
Film Comment.

Geneva Tribune.

Coming (or already?):
Computer Connection.
Curiocity (coming March 20).

We’ve also won several new awards. See selections from
the gallery here.

Your Personal Net Top 100.
NetGuide Platinum Award (5 star rating).
The Net Best of the Web and Top 100.
Top Dog Site of the Day (no archives!).
Funky Site of the Day.

WebGuide Best of Internet.
PC Magazine Top 100.
Chatelaine Connects Editors Choice.
Toxboe Award.
Jayde Gold Diamond.
Phonebooke.com Site of the Day.

360 Award.

And we’re particularly proud of our double win (both Judges’ Selection
and People’s Voice) in yesterday’s Webby Awards. Thanks for all your votes.
(You like us! You really like us!) Look for coverage on PBS, The
Discovery Channel, C|Net, and in many computer magazines.

Our good friend Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate was mentioned in:

Jerusalem Post.
Boston Globe.
US Magazine.
Netsurfer Digest.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

SOFTWARE CHANGES

by Col Needham and Rob Hartill

On the WWW software front, a major internal reorganization has
been completed. Using the latest Apache HTTP server and Doug
MacEachern’s mod_perl, significant improvements have been made in
response times. During the reorganization, a number of new features
were also added (e.g., the linking of laserdisc data).

Mod_perl embeds a Perl5 interpreter into the Apache server. This allows
us to replace old CGI scripts with Perl code that can be pre-”compiled”
and ready to run without forking processes to handle each request. This
is only one part of mod_perl‘s capabilities; we replaced our CGI months
ago; the recent changes have been to make use of mod_perl‘s hooks into
the Apache API. This lets us gain far greater control over the server’s
behavior from the comfort of a Perl programming environment.

A new feature search is available at the bottom of the site index page
and at other useful places in the database. This enables you to quickly
locate particular features (not names and titles) in the database.
For example, use it if you can’t remember where something like the
newsletter archives are kept on the site.

Try it now:

The browsable sections have been extended to include pages for the new
posters section.

The extended search page now supports the option to easily specify
a range of years in a search using a “-” character. For example, if
you’re looking for all US movies released between 1980 and 1985 try:

Year: 1980-1985
Country of Origin: USA

The bottom area of the main search page has also been redesigned to provide
a better arrangement of the various other searches and options. The help for
this page has been enhanced too — click the help link next to the gold
ticket at the top of the search page or read it directly at:

http://us.imdb.com/Help/search

Internally we’ve made further enhancements to the additions interface both
with extra checking at data entry time and improved feedback from the
mail-server. For those people having difficulty with the new system, don’t
forget the alternative template based system, for details send an e-mail
message with the subject “HELP UPDATE” to mail-server@imdb.com. Finally,
new checking and processing tools are used internally by the section editors
to help validate the information before they add it to the database.

On the local software front, Steffen Siebert’s Alternative Movie Database
package (AMD) provides both a graphical and command line interface to the
IMDb for OS/2 and is available from the usual IMDb FTP sites.

NEW SERVER KEYWORD: TITLELOCK

by Michel Hafner

There has been a new keyword installed at the mail server: TITLELOCK.

With TITLELOCK you can lock a title so its spelling can no longer be
changed by incoming corrections or deletions. This is meant for titles
whose correct spelling is likely to be “corrected” and replaced by an
incorrect version.

This could be because most sources have it wrong, because the intricacies
of transliterations from foreign languages are beyond most submitters and
countless variants are fighting for supremacy or for any other reason
that makes incorrect “corrections” likely. It’s also for cases where
these corrections have actually taken place and should be stopped once
and for all. Attempts to correct locked titles will be reported to me
so I can evaluate the situation thoroughly before deciding to apply the
correction or reject it. Explanations as to why a locked title needs
correction after all can be mailed in with a COMMENT-TITLE.

Remember that the “correct” title is always the one that appears on
the screen, regardless of what newspaper articles, advertisements,
or reference books use.

Titles should NOT be locked indiscriminately!

NEW SERVER HARDWARE IN THE UK

by Rob Hartill

At the time of going to press, we’d just finished switching on a new server
in the UK. The old hardware had been under heavy load for several months
and was groaning under the strain. The new hardware should be 2-3 times
faster than the old. Strangely, many North American users still use the
UK mirror and many UK users use the North American mirrors.

European users are reminded that there are two mirrors of the
database in Europe, one in the UK (uk.imdb.com) and one in Italy
(italy.imdb.com). Italian speakers should also note that the Italian
titles of many movies are searchable and on display. All servers
are updated at the same time.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 45,000 and 75,000 additions
every week from users all over the world. (The astute reader will
notice that those numbers are much larger than they were last issue.)

Number of filmography entries: 1,439,506
Number of people covered: 401,091
Number of movies covered: 99,498

Size of the database (Mb): 125

Recent milestones:

25,000 release dates

30,000 sound mix entries

65,000 language entries

90,000 theatrical movies

95,000 country entries

100,000 primary titles (includes TV series)

150,000 titles (including akas)

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

full support for accented characters (ISO 8859-1) without losing
people that can’t type them. Implementation in progress.

a separate list of films in production, with their current status.

outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display
on the main title page.

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

a locally installable MS-Windows interface to the database is
under final testing for those of you who want to reduce your
phone bills!

enhanced awards section for the database covering more
international festivals, national film institutes etc.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the producing country(s).

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

No Comments

Newsletter #11

Posted by admin in Newsletter on January 3rd, 1997

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Welcome to issue 11 of the IMDb newsletter. The newsletter is intended to
keep database users and contributors informed of the latest developments
from the management team. Comments and suggestions are welcome and should
be directed to newsletter@imdb.com. Issue 12 is scheduled for mid-February.

To subscribe to the newsletter, fill out the survey

and check the appropriate box. To unsubscribe, send a blank
message to newsletter-unsubscribe@imdb.com.

Short subjects:

1996 additions summary

Awards season

Features:

Getting it right the first time (Part II)

IMDb and Asian films

A Goof-Spotter’s Handbook (Part I)

Trailers:

New additions interface

Writers list improvements

Plot summaries wanted

Hot searches

Hot movies

1996 top movies

IMDb in the news

Software changes

Database statistics

Future developments

1996 ADDITIONS SUMMARY

by Col Needham

We had another record year for additions to the database. In the final
update of 1996 we passed the 90,000 movies mark — up over 25,000 during
1996. During the year the number of filmography entries crossed 1,000,000 and
now stands at over 1,300,000 with approximately 450,000 additions. In 1996,
30,349 people (6,650 in 1995) submitted a total of 1,858,457 lines of data
(1,144,000 in 1995), averaging 35,740 lines/week (22,000 in 1995). All this
is even more amazing when you consider that there are fewer “holes” in our
coverage for people to fill. Over the year we’ve seen a good increase in
areas outside of the mainstream modern US releases so coverage of older
movies, “foreign” movies and obscure cult movies is in much better shape.

Another major improvement in the year is the turnaround time for processing
additions — almost all sections are updated weekly now, with the last
remaining few moving towards meeting the target

Many thanks to everyone who has added/updated information over the past 12
months. Without your help we would never keep up to date. Thanks.

AWARDS SEASON

by Jon Reeves

With the end of the year, the awards season has begun again. The Golden
Globe nominations have been announced and are included in the database
(look for “GGN”); the awards will be presented 19 January and will be
incorporated in the database soon after that.

We’re also going out on a limb with a
preliminary Academy Award guess page;
our goal is to list all the
nominees by picking about 30 likely suspects in each category (though the
technical categories are often inscrutable, particularly costumes).
We’ll replace our guesses with
the real thing
when the announcement comes on 11 February and we plan real-time updates
of that page again during the ceremony on 24 March.

Finally, the National Film Registry has chosen 25 more films; look for
titles with (NFR).

Our long-range plans include more search capabilities on awards,
though this probably won’t be ready until after this year’s awards season.

GETTING IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME (Part II)

by Rod Crawford

Here’s more tips on improving the accuracy of IMDb data, both by getting
new submissions right and fine-tuning what’s already there. This refers
mainly to the older films I specialize in, but should be relevant to most
others.

In the July newsletter, I complained that an inappropriate cast order
number could be changed, but not deleted (if they’re not in the credits,
they have no credits order). As Col Needham reported in the October issue,
that’s been fixed. Now, all cast not listed in on-screen credits must

have (uncredited) in the attributes field. Since thousands of bit player
credits were added to the database before this policy came into effect,
there’s lots of work to do! Especially with older films, the uncredited
players may far outnumber the credited ones; for an extreme example, see
North West Mounted Police (1940). Books and reviews are the main
source of such bit player data, but do not trust such sources to tell
you which players are credited! If you have access to a copy of a film
with credits intact, you should seize the opportunity to check it against
the IMDb page and, as appropriate, add the (uncredited) attribute to those
who aren’t in the credits (use end credits, if any, which usually list
more cast than front credits). If you add cast data without checking it
against the film’s credits, leave the cast order field blank, as the
order in your source is probably wrong. Don’t worry if you don’t have
access to bit player data; the most important thing is to get all credited
actors and actresses listed in the right order…

The Composers database is primarily for composers of a film’s score
(original instrumental music). The commonest error past contributors have
made is submitting the name of the orchestra conductor as composer. This
person is usually credited as ‘Musical Director’ or ‘Musical Conductor’
or some variant, and belongs in the Miscellaneous database. On older
films, the actual composer often is not credited. Reasons for this could
include: studio politics; the music was composed by several people; it
consists mainly of tunes from popular songs; it has been lifted bodily
from a previous film. In some cases, maybe the musical director really
did compose the music; but unless the credits say so, you can’t assume
it. And of course, to know who is and is not credited for what, you
must actually watch the movie and check the credits. If you do have
inside information that someone not credited as such did compose a film’s
score (or a major part of it), you must add the attribute (uncredited).
Otherwise, the next contributor who sees the film will note the absence
of the name you submitted and assume you made a mistake. Correct examples:



    COMPO

    Salter, Hans J.|Captain Lightfoot (1955)|(uncredited)

    Amfitheatrof, Daniele|Place in the Sun, A (1951)|(uncredited)

    MISC

    Amfitheatrof, Daniele|Place in the Sun, A (1951)|(musical director)

Song composers can be listed in the Composers database, preferably with
the attribute (song) or (songs), but only with songs composed especially
for that film (or for a stage musical on which the film is based). This
is more important with award-winning or nominated songs, for which see the
list of standard abbreviations in the submission guide. But, lyricists do
not belong in the Composers database! Submitting lyricists as composers
is another common error. Very often, film credits do not distinguish
between song composers and lyricists. This information can be looked up in
several standard reference books, some of them specific to films. If
you’re not sure which is the composer, it’s better to leave both out of
Composers until you know. One other type of credit found in the Composers
database is classical composers (like Tchaikovsky) whose themes were used
in the score.

Related problems occur in the Soundtracks database, which lists songs
performed in films or heard (vocally) in the background or title music,
with composers, lyricists, performers, and notes on Best Song
awards/nominations. The Soundtracks submission guide quite rightly tells
us to take sound track data only from the movie itself, and not from
sound track records/CDs whose contents often do not match the actual film.
But this does not mean that songs that are in the movie but not in the
film’s credits cannot be included. In older films, the credits usually
list only songs written for that film, and not always those. As in all
other sections of the database, you can only know for sure what songs are
in a movie by watching it. Once you know this, you can obtain data on
songs not in the credits from various musical reference sources.
(Familiarity with the popular music of that film’s era helps.) Don’t
guess; if you don’t have the data available, leave it to someone who does.
If possible, it’s nice to distinguish the composers from the lyricists and
also to indicate whether the on-screen performer had their singing voice
dubbed by someone else. This information is rarely in older films’
credits, but can be found out by persistent researchers. If you don’t have
the facilities, but do have the basic “Written by” and “Performed by”
data, and it’s not already in, go ahead and submit it; the rest can be
added later. Here’s an example of a complete song entry (the names with
single quotes and (qv) are formatted for hot-linking; if you want to do this,
you must use the form of the name used in the relevant cast/crew database):



    SOUND

    # Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1953)

    – “I’m a Ruler of a South Sea Island”

      Written by ‘Harold Arlen‘ (qv)

      Lyrics by ‘Ralph Blane‘ (qv)

      Performed by ‘William Lundigan‘ (qv) and ‘David Wayne‘ (qv)

      Lundigan’s voice dubbed by Bill Lee

Types of errors common to other sections of the IMDb will be zapped in
future articles. I shall return!

IMDb AND ASIAN FILMS

by Murray Chapman

With the recent “Hollywood invasion” of Asian filmmakers, led by the
likes of Jackie Chan and John Woo, the IMDb has has come under fire for
our admittedly poorer than average coverage of Asian films. The purpose
of this article is to give some background to the situation and explain
some of the complexities in cataloging this area of film.

Some background

Most people think that Hollywood is the world’s largest film industry. In
terms of revenue dollars generated, they are right. But in terms of number
of films made per year and number of people who watch these films, Hollywood
can’t hold a candle to the cinematic behemoths of India and Hong Kong.

The Asian cinema market is huge, and low production costs means that films
can be made quickly and cheaply. The result is an extremely large number
of films from a large number of studios, many of which survive only in the
credits on their films.

The Problems

(a) The IMDb itself

Historically, the IMDb was constructed as a list of Hollywood films,
and has grown from there. For years, the database could only support
information in ASCII format. We are in the process of changing to the
ISO Latin-1 character set, which allows us to more accurately represent
non-English titles. This does not help for Asian films, but nevertheless
is an important step towards an international flavor.

Despite having 18 managers in five continents, nobody at the IMDb speaks
or reads any Asian languages fluently!

(b) Asian “Alphabets”

The problem of representing Asian text digitally is not limited to the
IMDb; researchers the world over are looking at ways of providing ordering
and search techniques that integrate the Asian pictograms with Latin text.

The Unicode character set is a long term solution, but software for
handling it is not yet widely available. Chinese text today uses “Big 5″,
but this is not standardized.

The IMDb policy is to take film information as it appears in the credits.
For Asian films, this is often a mixture of Asian characters and English
text. As the IMDb cannot represent the Asian characters directly, these
sections must be transliterated into Latin-1. As with most of the
database, we rely heavily on our users for this information.

For a regular Hollywood film, this is not a problem: look at the credits
and press the right keys on the keyboard. For Asian films, we are at
the mercy of whoever did the transliteration.

I must stress at this point that this is not something that we are blaming
users for; it’s a problem that even accredited translators struggle with.
A good example is the Asian folk hero, whose name translated into English
means “Naughty Panther”. In the English subtitles for
Drunken Master II (1994),
his name reads “Wong Fei-hung”. In
Once Upon a Time In China (1991), the same character is called “Huang Fei-hong”.

(d) Actors names

Asian actors tend to have many names. Many Asians choose an “extremely”
English name to be known as in English-speaking countries.

Here’s a good example: born as Chan Kong-Sang (Chan from Hong Kong), this
actor joined the Peking Opera at an early age, where his stage name was
Chan Yeun-lung (Main Dragon Chan). Upon the death of Bruce Lee (who was
known as “The Dragon”), he was renamed Sing Lung (To Become the Dragon)
for several low budget martial-arts films. Today, he’s known universally
as Jackie Chan.

Note that as well as having multiple names, each of these names can be
transliterated differently into English. Jackie Chan’s bodyguard’s name
(Ken Lo) has be translated thus: Ken Lo Wai-Kwong, Ken Lo Wai Gwong, or
Lu2 Hui4 Guang1 (in Big 5).

An Asian movie has at least three names: the Asian name, the English
name, and the Asian name directly translated to English. For instance:

English: Rumble in the Bronx

Asian: Hong Faan Kui, Hong2 Fan1 Qu1

Literal: Savage District, Red Savage Territory, etc

…and this is for famous and widely-available films. The situation
is even more complex for little-known films.

I was a victim of the translation problem this year. The only cinema
here in Brisbane (Australia) that shows Asian films advertised a new film:
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars“. Checking the IMDb and the Hong Kong Movie
Database, I confirmed that this was another Jackie Chan film. Woo hoo!

A few friends and I turned up expecting to see Jackie, Samo Hung, and
Biao Yuen kicking butt as per usual. Instead, we saw a very bizarre film
involving gods driving around on clouds, a gambling competition, and a
kung-fu massage girl. Extremely confused, I did a bit more research and
found out that we were treated to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star“.
The cinema or the distributor had got the title of the film wrong, and
as (bad) luck would have it, there was another film with that name.

It’s even scarier when you realize that the problem is not limited to
subtitlers or exhibitors: I rented a video which said “Jackie Chan’s
Police Story” on the cover. The title of the film came up as “Police
Story”, but from the copyright date, actors, and plot, it was obvious
that I was actually watching “Police Story II“.

Last year Jackie Chan was in Australia filming a movie, which,
according to official press releases, had the following titles:

Police Story 4: First Strike (1996)

… aka Police Story 4 (1996)(1996)

… aka Police Story 4: Piece of Cake (1996)(1996)

… aka Police Story 4: Story of the CIA (1996)(1996)

… aka Story of the CIA (1996)(1996)

and on top of this, will soon be released in the United States as
Jackie Chan’s First Strike (1997) with no reference to Police Story.

Summary

Hopefully this will go some way towards explaining the difficulties we have
here at the IMDb when cataloging Asian films. We are aware of the problem,
but have limited resources to throw at this large problem. At present, we
debug the multiple names/titles as best we can, and (as always) rely on the
generosity and patience of our users.

If there is anyone out there who has some solutions, data, or ideas, please
don’t hesitate to contact us via imdb-team@imdb.com.

A GOOF-SPOTTER’S HANDBOOK

by Murray Chapman

Spotting goofs in films can either be an annoyance or a joy; I suppose it
depends on the film and how intrusive the goof is. This article provides
some explanation of goofs and how they fit into the IMDb, and then provides
some tips for the budding goof-spotter.

Goofs and the IMDb

As the manager of the goofs section, I quite frequently get submissions from
people that don’t satisfy the criteria of “goofs.” It has become apparent to
me of late that over the years of managing the list, my definition of a goof
has become more refined, and perhaps I owe it to the loyal users of the IMDb
to explain things in great detail.

Movies attempt to create an alternative reality. Great care is often taken
to ensure the continuity and uniformity of this artificial environment.
There are, of course, some film genres where entertainment and/or internal
consistency aren’t as important, or are even deliberately avoided. In
general, however, films attempt to present a seamless environment.

Despite this, people do things in films that they wouldn’t normally do;
things happen in films that wouldn’t normally happen. That’s entertainment;
a break from normal life We go to films to watch something different.

Sometimes, however, it becomes apparent that this alternative reality is
self-contradictory, or that the mechanisms used to create this reality are
revealed. These are mistakes made by the filmmakers, and are cataloged in
the IMDb as goofs. The IMDb has 10 categories of goofs:

CONT: A continuity error; a minor technical inconsistency which is of little
importance to the plot.

PLOT: Plot holes. Errors in narrative structure as opposed to technical
detail.

FACT: Concept in the film contradicts science or known facts. Science
fiction, mysticism, good/bad luck excepted.

DATE: Anachronisms; objects/concepts which hadn’t existed at the time the
film was set.

FAKE: Mistakes which reveal how the film makers physically composed a scene
of the film.

BOOM: Boom mike visible in an interesting or unusual way. A special and
common case of CREW below.

CREW: Filmmaker’s crew or equipment visible in shot.

SYNC: Audio/visual tracks don’t match exactly.

GEOG: Errors in geography of specific places.

MISC: Anything else

Each of the above errors is capable of blowing a hole in the internal
consistency of a film’s reality.

The FAIR notation is also used to explain situations that are commonly (but
incorrectly) regarded as goofs.

Mistakes by Characters

It is important to draw the distinction between mistakes made by characters
and mistakes made by the filmmakers. Characters in films are allowed to make
mistakes, just as we in “real life” often do. Film characters make poor
decisions (such as going camping in skimpy clothing in the dead of night
in an area known to be haunted by the ghost of an axe murderer), but this
is not a “goof” per se.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) contains two such character mistakes which are
often submitted as goofs, but are actually mistakes by characters:

(a) In the first scene, Nice Guy Eddie leaves the diner without taking
his mobile phone with him. This is not a mistake by the filmmakers,
as there is no inconsistency. Eddie made a mistake that thousands
of people make in real life.

It’s entirely possible that this was unintentional on the part
of Chris Penn, the actor who played Eddie, but nevertheless we
can’t classify this as a goof. Even though he uses the phone
later in the film, the “flashback” nature of the narrative makes
it almost certain that he has returned (in a scene not included
in the story) to pick it up. Maybe he had two mobile phones.
Had there been a scene of the guys just outside the diner where
Eddie used his phone, that would certainly be a goof, as it
violates the film’s own consistency.

(b) When Mr White and Mr Pink are in the bathroom, Mr White attempts
to light his cigarette, but it doesn’t light. Again, this happens
in real life. But then he continues to smoke it. Goof, right?
Wrong. The characters in question were just talking about quitting
smoking, and it is well known that smoking is very much a habit.
Putting an unlit cigarette in your mouth and going through
the motions of smoking it is a common way of trying to quit.
Even if he wasn’t using this technique to quit, it is reasonable
to assume that he was too distracted by the other events of the
moment to notice/care that his cigarette wasn’t alight.

Another one from Robocop (1987):

When Clarence gets out of his new car, the rear view mirror falls off.
Intentional? It doesn’t really matter. This happens in real life.
Also, we know from previous scenes in the film that in the RoboCop
world, technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and – well, the
car is named the “6000SUX.”

And from The Terminator (1984):

When asked the date by Reese, cop answers, “Twelfth, May, Thursday.”
In 1984, May 12 was a Saturday. The cop in question had a gun shoved
in his face by a madman, and so he could be forgiven for getting the
date wrong. Again, a mistake by a character.

Humans aren’t the only ones who suffer from stupidity:

Independence Day (1996) features aliens who, on the surface of it,
are so stupid that they attempt to coordinate their attack on Earth by
bouncing the signals around the planet using geosynchronous satellites
when synchronized clocks would have done the job with a lot less bother.
But the aliens must have had a good reason for doing it. Does it
matter? Not really. The aliens were dumb, but that doesn’t make the
film’s reality inconsistent. It just makes the aliens inconsistent.

This leads us into another type of submission that fits into the
“character mistake” category: “that would never happen” or “this person
would never do that.” Further examples are:

In Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), Casey disarms a gunman and
throws him off the train. A stupid move, as all of the gunman’s comrades
saw the body fly off, but they didn’t know where Casey was. Would a
trained Navy SEAL do that?

In watching the film, we have direct first hand evidence that the event
did occur. Perhaps it was unexpected. Maybe a character acted in an
unexpected and/or stupid way. So be it! That’s what happened, and it’s
no good claiming that it shouldn’t have happened. Credibility can be
stretched, but it’s up to an individual (not the IMDb) to determine how far.

Independence Day (1996) is also guilty of stretching the limits of
credibility: an entire alien invasion force is disabled by uploading a
computer virus from a Macintosh into the alien mothership’s computer, despite
the admittance of characters in the film that they don’t know much about the
alien space craft. Unlikely? Yes. But could it have happened? Well, in
the reality created by the film, it did happen, so by definition, it must
have been possible.

Special Effects

I’m extremely reluctant to catalog goofs that basically say “That special
effect looks bad.” I am firmly of the opinion that people’s expectations
regarding special effects have risen dramatically over the years. When
Star Wars (1977) hit the cinemas, people were blown away by what was
state-of-the-art. In a few months, “Star Wars Special Edition” will be
released to showcase 20 years of improving special effects.

Should we now register goofs in the 1977 release of Star Wars? I believe
that would be unfair – they did the best job that they could. Saying “that
didn’t look real” to something that isn’t technically possible (say -
the blowing up of a moon-sized space station) isn’t fair.

Having said this, extremely shoddy work might be mentioned. Most memorable
is Edward D. Wood Jr.‘s efforts at a damaged flying saucer: a paper plate
set on fire and dangled in front of the camera on a fishing line.

Sequels

Sequels pose a difficult problem. What if there are films which claim
to inhabit the same constructed universe, but contain inconsistencies?

Examples:

James Bond has undergone six huge bouts of cosmetic surgery. M’s surgery
was even more radical, and Miss Moneypenny keeps getting younger.
Same for Batman.

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Kahn claims he remembers
Chekov, saying “I never forget a face.” Yet, Chekov was not yet a
member of the crew during the episode (“Space Seed”) where Khan meets
the Enterprise and crew.

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Exorcist III, The (1990) have the
same characters doing different things at the same times.

In Highlander (1986), Connor MacLeod claims to be born in Scotland.
In Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), he claims to be from the
planet Zeist.

How many times has Freddy/Jason/Michael Myers come back from
absolute death?

It pays to split films up into two groups: “strict” sequels, and “episodic”
sequels. “Strict” sequels have a continuous plot, and should be viewed in
a particular order. “Episodic” films are where each film in the sequence
has a plot which is nicely resolved. These films can generally be watched
in any order. Examples:

Strict sequels: The Star Wars films, the Back to the Future films, the
Godfather films,

Episodic sequels: The Police Academy litter, the James Bond films, the Die
Hards, the Treks, the Elm Streets, the Halloweens, the Batmans, the Evil
Deads (including Army of Darkness), the American Ninjas, the Delta Forces,
and usually any other films with different actors playing the one role.

Episodic sequels introduce characters, attributes, and plot elements as they
are required, with little or no thought as to possible consequences for
possible sequels. I’ll accept continuity errors across “strict” sequels,
but not “episodic” sequels.

Canon

The distinction between “strict” and “episodic” sequels is a specific
example of the problem of canon: what is “official” information.

The “Star” films (Wars and Trek) generate a lot of non- and semi-official
associated material: concordances, timelines, fan fiction, authorized novels,
etc. It is often claimed that a particular Star Trek movie contained a goof
because (for example) they made reference to the 33rd floor, when the
blueprints as published in the Star Trek Enterprise User’s Guide only show
32 floors.

For the purposes of cataloging goofs, only what can be discerned from
watching “canon” films (including “strict” sequels) will be considered
when determining goofs.

Book adaptations

Many movies are based on books. In bringing the story to the screen, quite
often changes have to be made. These changes can be made for a number of
reasons:

1. Length/Detail: books can be long. Very long. Most films are less than
two hours long. Enter the mini-series.

2. Unfilmable parts. Books are a textual medium whereas film is pictorial:
you can describe the massacre of one million people, but it’s hard to film
it. Likewise, you can have a character go the entire length of a book
without revealing what they look like. Try this on film, and it’s either
boring or suspicious.

3. Artistic License: the story is so well known that the screenwriters make
changes to maintain the interest (e.g., Disney cartoons based on fairy
tales) Also, the filmmakers may want to present a different slant/ending
than than that which appeared in the book. Watch The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1996), and then read the book.

To paraphrase a presenter at one of the recent Academy Awards ceremonies: “It
is hotly debated which is more meritorious: to be able to write directly for
the screen, or to adapt an existing work for filming.”

My feeling is that ultimately, a film stands on its own merits. There is
skill in modifying a story for the screen, and we should not call a film
on an error unless it is inconsistent with itself.

In Part 2

Coming up in the next issue: some common non-goofs, when a goof isn’t a
goof, and why goofs happen.

As with any area of the IMDb, we’re open to suggestions and welcome any
feedback. If you have any questions and/or comments, mail them to me
at goofs@imdb.com.

NEW ADDITIONS INTERFACE

by Mark Harding

Regular submitters to IMDb are sure to have noticed some subtle, and
maybe some not so subtle, changes in the way submissions are handled by
the E-mail interface. At best, you won’t have noticed any changes at
all; at worst, and hopefully only at first, you would have found many
of the submissions that were normally accepted unexpectedly returned
with all sorts of strange “complaints” attached!

As mentioned elsewhere in this newsletter, 1996 was a record year all
around for submissions to IMDb. Virtually every section of the database
received more additions than in 1995, which, in turn, made 1996 a record
year for the amount of work by the IMDb section managers.

During the middle of 1996 we looked into the whole additions system and
discovered many areas where some simple feedback would result in data
coming through to the managers that was cleaner. It was also more likely
to be correct as, unlike the manager guessing at a submitter’s intentions,
the submitter knew exactly what they wanted to say but didn’t always know
how to say it. This ultimately benefits everyone that uses the database.

From the study report, a design was drawn up and, during the last
four months of 1996, implemented. The new system aims to provide a
system already familiar to users but with the added benefit of expert
knowledge of the type of data submitted. Preliminary tests are carried
out and misformatted data is returned to the submitter for correction
or clarification with pointers to help or suggested corrections.

We appreciate that the initial changes may come as a shock, especially
the extra effort it may take to make some submissions, but we feel that
the results are well worth it and hope that you agree.

The system is still relatively “young” and will be developed over the
coming months so if you have any suggestions please feel free to E-mail
me on the above address.

WRITERS LIST IMPROVEMENTS

by Jon Reeves

The order and punctuation used on writers credits is very meaningful,
but until recently we had no way to represent this in the database. We
have recently added sequence numbers to the writers list, like those in
the cast lists but more complex, to represent this information.

Writers can work in teams, in which case they are joined with “&”, or
they can work on successive drafts of a script, in which case they are
joined with “and”. The ordering of the writers is in diminishing effect
on the final script. Finally, there are various attributes attached to
the writers, like “(story)” or “(novel)” or the names of segments.

To represent all this, we use a three part sequence number. The first
part is the group number; all writers with a common attribute have the
same group number (usually, this means “(story)” or “(novel)” is 1 and
screenplay — no attribute — is 2). Next comes the rewrite number, and
finally the team ordering.

What this means is that writers with different attributes will appear
separated by a blank line; writers with different rewrite numbers will
be separate by “and”; and writers with the same group/rewrite number are
separated by “&”.

To take an example, the credits for Chairman of the Board (1997) currently
read “Story by Turi Meyer & Al Septien; screenplay by Turi Meyer & Al
Septien and Alex Zamm“. This shows up in the database as:



	Meyer, Turi|Chairman of the Board (1997)|(story)|1,1,1

	Septien, Al|Chairman of the Board (1997)|(story)|1,1,2

	Meyer, Turi|Chairman of the Board (1997)||2,1,1

	Septien, Al|Chairman of the Board (1997)||2,1,2

	Zamm, Alex|Chairman of the Board (1997)||2,2,1

More good examples are Down Periscope (1996) and If These Walls Could Talk
(1996) (TV), which is a complex segment example.

If you use the sequence number format, then you shouldn’t use “also”
in an attribute; instead, separate it into two credit groups as shown
above. Unsequenced credits can continue to use “(also …”; these will
eventually be converted automatically to the new form.

If you don’t understand this, then please don’t use sequence numbers in your
submission; I can help with any difficult cases, but I’d rather not have
sequence numbers than have incorrect ones.

PLOT SUMMARIES WANTED

by Col Tinto

The usual batch of “most voted without summary” movies are provided
below, so if you’ve seen it, summarize it! Send summaries to
adds@imdb.com; read the plot summary submission guide for details.

The plot summary list is far from complete, but it’s getting there.

For this reason, we’re starting to focus more on quality than quantity.
From now on the rejection rate will be higher, as low quality plots, or
those with many errors that would take a while to fix will be instantly
rejected – you have been warned…

Also, if you spot any plots you feel are of inferior quality, let me
know – or better still, send me a new one!

William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)

Wall Street (1987)

Empire (1995) aka Empire Records (1995)

Highlander III: The Sorcerer (1994)

Man of the House (1995)

Jabberwocky (1977)

Cabin Boy (1994)

Look Who’s Talking Too (1990)

Three Musketeers, The (1974)

Running on Empty (1988)

Father of the Bride Part II (1995)

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996)

Summer School (1987)

Sgt. Bilko (1996)

Amityville Horror, The (1979)

101 Dalmatians (1996)

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Encounter at Farpoint (1987) (TV)

Matilda (1996)

Cry Freedom (1987)

Coneheads (1993)

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending December 28.

Titles:

-. Michael (1996)

1. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

4. Star Wars (1977)

199. Jerry Maguire (1996)

77. Mars Attacks! (1996)

127. Evita (1996)

5. Independence Day (1996)

-. Scream (1996)

8. Striptease (1996)

-. Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996)

-. The English Patient (1996)

3. William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)

10. “Baywatch” (1989)

7. Braveheart (1995)

18. Fargo (1996)

13. Mission: Impossible (1996)

2. Ransom (1996)

-. One Fine Day (1996)

261. Daylight (1996)

11. Pulp Fiction (1994)

In seasonal titles, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) was number 33; my
favorite, A Christmas Story (1983), was number 57. Advance Star Wars
interest continues strong, with Episodes I, II, and III at number 26,
87, and 220; Jedi is at 42, and Empire at 64. Jurassic Park IIalso has
buzz at number 25, but none of the upcoming disaster movies make the cut.
The new releases came from nowhere this time. You’re not going to let
that happen again; other 1997 titles in the top 150 include Batman and
Robin, Alien 4, Eyes Wide Shut, Speed 2, Titanic, Devil’s Own, Crusade,
AFO, L.A. Confidential, and Conspiracy Theory. No major “huh?” factor
on either list, but it’s nice to see Casablanca at 72.

People:

5. Tom Cruise

1. Pamela Anderson

6. Demi Moore

4. Kim Basinger

2. Sharon Stone

3. Teri Hatcher

8. Sandra Bullock

9. Bo Derek

7. Mel Gibson

18. Michelle Pfeiffer

10. Leonardo DiCaprio

13. Jenny McCarthy

14. Helen Hunt

22. Winona Ryder

19. Harrison Ford

16. Brad Pitt

11. Alyssa Milano

-. Ralph Fiennes

70. John Travolta

20. Jennifer Connelly

This is the first month a man finished higher than third place, clearly on
the strength of Jerry Maguire (costars Renee Zellweger and Kelly Preston

were 22 and 26). As usual, the list mostly consists of leads in current
releases, pin-ups, and Star Trek folks, plus perennials like Sean Connery,
Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Bacon. Cary Grant is surprisingly high at 42
(his daughter Jennifer is in The Evening Star, but she doesn’t chart).

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US in December sorted by number of votes (to January 1):

.0..00.017	59	9.3	Marvin’s Room (1996)
.0.00.0007	36	9.1	Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
0000000125	493	8.8	Jerry Maguire (1996)
0…00.115	51	8.8	People vs. Larry Flynt, The (1996)
0.00000124	175	8.6	Scream (1996)
000.000016	68	8.3	In Love and War (1996)
1..0000005	71	8.1	Evita (1996)
0000001014	187	8.0	Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996)
0000000122	121	7.6	Michael (1996)
00.0010113	97	7.6	Preacher’s Wife, The (1996)

Movies opening in the US in December sorted by average votes (to January 1):

0000000125	493	8.8	Jerry Maguire (1996)
1000000112	449	7.1	Mars Attacks! (1996)
0000001014	187	8.0	Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996)
0.00000124	175	8.6	Scream (1996)
0000000122	121	7.6	Michael (1996)
1000001113	102	7.5	One Fine Day (1996)
00.0010113	97	7.6	Preacher’s Wife, The (1996)
1..0000005	71	8.1	Evita (1996)
000.000016	68	8.3	In Love and War (1996)
.0..00.017	59	9.3	Marvin’s Room (1996)

TOP MOVIES OF 1996 ACCORDING TO OUR USER POLL

by Col Needham

1996 was the best year yet in the 7 year history of our movie poll. At
the start of the year we had collected just over 500,000 votes from 40,000
voters in 6 years. By the end of the year, the number of votes had doubled
and the number of participants up over 500% to 210,000. There are 12,000
movies in the database which have the required 5 or more votes to be listed.

Top Movies of 1996 (100+ Votes)

00.0000017	421	9.5	Beautiful Thing (1996)
0….00026	227	9.5	Shine (1996)
0000000016	727	9.3	English Patient, The (1996)
0.00000017	264	9.3	Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996)
0000000125	579	9.1	Lone Star (1996)
0.0.000025	128	9.1	Swingers (1996)
00.0000134	305	9.0	Secrets & Lies (1996)
0000000124	237	8.8	Big Night (1996)
0000000124	298	8.8	Bound (1996)
0000000125	493	8.8	Jerry Maguire (1996)
0000000125	1931	8.8	Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
000.000007	207	8.8	Terminator 2: 3-D (1996)
0000000115	577	8.8	That Thing You Do! (1996)
0000000016	783	8.8	William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)
0000000124	227	8.6	Breaking the Waves (1996)
0000000124	385	8.6	Emma (1996)
0000000124	1636	8.6	Fargo (1996)
0.00000124	194	8.6	Michael Collins (1996)
0.00000124	175	8.6	Scream (1996)
00.0001123	103	8.5	Bottle Rocket (1996)

Bottom Movies of 1996 (20+ Votes)

2100000002	267	5.5	Crow: City of Angels, The (1996)
1000101001	43	5.5	Dear God (1996)
3…0101.2	25	5.5	Solo (1996)
30000..003	54	5.5	Stupids, The (1996)
1010011001	42	5.5	Thin Line Between Love and Hate, A (1996)
0001220100	49	5.4	Celtic Pride (1996)
31000.0002	36	4.1	Adrenalin: Fear The Rush (1996)
4010010..1	43	3.7	Kazaam (1996)
3111000000	77	3.5	Mr. Wrong (1996)
51000.0001	95	2.9	Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996)

Top Movies of 1996 by Number of Votes

0000000113	4297	7.6	Independence Day (1996)
0000001112	2313	7.6	Twister (1996)
0000000123	1978	8.3	Rock, The (1996)
0000001112	1944	7.1	Mission: Impossible (1996)
0000000125	1931	8.8	Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
0000000124	1636	8.6	Fargo (1996)
0000000113	1380	7.8	From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
0000000124	1049	8.3	Time to Kill, A (1996)
0000001212	869	7.4	Eraser (1996)
0000000016	783	8.8	William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)
0000001123	781	8.1	Phenomenon (1996)
0000001222	779	7.6	Birdcage, The (1996)
0000001111	773	6.5	Broken Arrow (1996)
0000001123	770	8.3	Ransom (1996)
0000000016	727	9.3	English Patient, The (1996)
1000000003	609	6.3	Striptease (1996)
0000001211	587	7.5	Executive Decision (1996)
0000001112	579	7.6	Dragonheart (1996)
0000000125	579	9.1	Lone Star (1996)
0000000115	577	8.8	That Thing You Do! (1996)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

Tages-Anzeiger,
SonntagsZeitung (both Switzerland).
NetUser.
Z95 radio (Vancouver).
Deseret News (Utah).
KIRO-FM (Seattle).
Yahoo! Internet Life (top movie site of 1996).
Chicago Sun-Times.

HomePC Magazine.
Variety.
“Tales from the Crypt” (1989).
.net Guide.
LA Daily News.
Internet Underground (three places).

And look for us in upcoming issues of
Connect Time,
Computer Connection and Curiocity.

We’ve also won several new awards. See
selections from the gallery here.

GII awards (semi-finalist).
Shakaar Society Top 5.
NetUser 5 Star.
Excite-Seeing tour stop.
Site o’ the Nite (The Site).
HomePC 500 best web sites.
.net Guide hot site.
AOL Best of the Web 1996.
Internet Underground Top Ten (#1).
Creme de la Creme Award.

Our good friend Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate has some new awards of its own:

Cruel Site of the Day.
Cherry Coke’s The Wall.
Mr. Media’s Webcrawlin’.

And look for a feature article by Greg in January’s

Internet Underground.

SOFTWARE CHANGES

by Col Needham

We’ve added a new browsable area to the database such that people interested
in specific sections can browse all titles with data in those sections. The
ones covered so far are alternate versions, business, crazy credits,
goofs, laserdiscs, literature, locations, plot summaries, quotes, ratings,
recommendations, soundtracks, technical and trivia. An
index is available.

Other sections will be covered in the near future. We also added a
specific menu of year searches

for convenience, even though they can be searched in the
general search.

In parallel to the new additions processing system, the overhaul of the
web additions interface was completed. We now have a much cleaner set of
forms and more validation performed directly on the server before the data
is mailed to the collection service. This reduces processing time and helps
improve the accuracy of the database.

International support continues to expand with Italian and French
translations of the the home page, the search page, the complex search
page, the site tour and the index now online. Speakers of either of those
languages just need to set their browser’s language options to prefer
French/Italian over English. We also added localized basic search pages
for Spain, Sweden and Iceland.

Christine Ng donated her list of movie related mailing lists to the IMDb.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 30,000 and 45,000 additions
every week from users all over the world.

Number of filmography entries: 1,328,902
Number of people covered: 374,506
Number of movies covered: 90,251

Size of the database (Mb): 114

Recent milestones:

100 miscellaneous companies

Crazy credits for 300 movies

3000 soundtracks

3000 distributors

4000 titles in business info list

15,000 certificate entries

20,000 biographies

40,000 cinematographer entries

40,000 language entries

60,000 color info entries

75,000 country entries

90,000 movies

250,000 actress entries

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

a separate list of films in production, with their current status.

outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display
on the main title page.

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

full support for accented characters (ISO 8859-1) without losing
people that can’t type them. Implementation in progress.

a locally installable MS-Windows interface to the database is
under final testing for those of you who want to reduce your
phone bills!

enhanced awards section for the database covering more
international festivals, national film institutes etc.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the original country.

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

No Comments

Newsletter #10

Posted by admin in Newsletter on November 15th, 1996

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Welcome to issue 10 of the IMDb newsletter. The newsletter is intended to
keep database users and contributors informed of the latest developments
from the management team. Comments and suggestions are welcome and should
be directed to newsletter@imdb.com. Issue 11 is scheduled for January.

To subscribe to the newsletter, fill out the survey
and check the appropriate box. To unsubscribe, drop a note to
newsletter@imdb.com.

The WASHED-UPdate

Link-It service

IMDb recommendations

Browsable sections

italy.imdb.com

Miscellaneous company list launched

Attributes on aka titles

Writers list improvements

Salary tracking

Video sales trial successful

Plot summaries wanted

Hot searches

Hot movies

IMDb on the road

IMDb in the news

Software changes

Database statistics

Future developments

THE WASHED UPDATE

by Greg Bulmash

For those of you who don’t already know, The WASHED-UPdate(tm) is a
column about the good, the bad, and the silly places our fave celebs
of yesteryear have seen their careers go in recent years. Each column
runs exclusively on IMDb for one week before appearing anywhere else
on the web.

Jon and Col could probably give you more pertinent stats on the stats
than I can, but they are looking good and we are working on ways to
integrate it into the IMDb better.

Future developments:

The “Has-Been Hunter Index” with links to the IMDb filmographies and
archival WASHED-UPdate(tm) columns of celebs who have been profiled so
far should be up and running by the end of the month. This will be
hosted at the WASHED-UPdate(tm) Archives on my site.

More press for IMDb and The WASHED-UPdate(tm) should be hitting U.S.
newsstand shelves in January when my article “Hunting The Elusive
Has-Been” appears in Internet Underground (a Ziff-Davis publication).

And that’s all the news having to do with the unholy alliance between
TWU and IMDb.

LINK-IT SERVICE

by Mark Harding

The IMDb is always a popular site to link to from other web sites and
to assist people wishing to do this we’ve set up a new service we call
Link-it!. This service allows people to send their HTML pages to an e-mail
address at our site, link-it@imdb.com, for processing. Link-it! inserts
the correct HTML markup for links automatically and when finished
returns the document to the original sender.

In order to simplify the process, and to avoid linking unnecessarily,
the HTML document needs to contain some extra markups. This simply
consists of wrapping and names or titles to be linked in [], e.g.



    A film by [Woody Allen] … or

    Starred in [Batman (1989)]

which allows the Link-it! software to concentrate on only those areas
required. If a match cannot be made a list of potential matches is
returned in the HTML as comments.

IMDb RECOMMENDATIONS

by Col Needham

We’ve recently added a new recommendations section to the database,
available wherever you see the “recommend” icon, for example see Bringing
Up Baby (1938).

The IMDb recommendations pages contain suggestions for other movies to
watch which are similar to the movie whose page you are looking at. This
could be in a number of ways such as genre, themes explored, shared cast
or perhaps an obscure offbeat connection. The idea is to provide a useful
viewing guide for our users. The selections are made by the IMDb editors
themselves and we’ll probably open it up to a select few contributors
who have an expertise in particular fields at a later date.

In addition to the manually selected list of recommendations, wherever
possible, we try to provide links to other lists based on the results
of our extensive user poll.

For other examples see:

Vertigo (1958)

Se7en (1995)

Wrong Trousers, The (1993)

Double Indemnity (1944)

Casablanca (1942)

The recommendations list is managed by Rob Hartill.

BROWSABLE SECTIONS

by Col Needham

A frequent request via our user survey is for browsable areas within the
database, such that people interested in a particular section can easily
find all the information; for example, browsing all the trivia or goofs.

We’ve just launched a new section specific area
with an A-Z index available for alternate versions, business information,
crazy credits, goofs, laserdiscs, literature, locations, plot summaries,
soundtracks, technical and trivia. Further areas will be added over the
coming weeks and we’ll also expand each one to include other interesting
features related to each section.

ITALY.IMDB.COM

by Col Needham

In October we launched a new mirror site in Italy, available (not
surprisingly) at http://italy.imdb.com/

This should be a useful and faster alternative for many of our European
users. Italian aka titles are shown (when available) on all searches at
this site.

The server is housed at the Italian ISP Like It whose technical
manager is IMDb team member Giancarlo Cairella. If it proves to be a
success we will look at further mirror sites next year.

MISCELLANEOUS COMPANY LIST LAUNCHED

by Mark Harding

In our quest to cover all possible information related to movies we’ve
added a new list that covers all those companies that provide what
we deem miscellaneous support to the production of a movie. These are
the caterers, the animal handlers, the equipment suppliers, etc. For an
example, see Down Periscope (1996) and click on the “Companies” icon.

For details on submitting information please see the on-line submission
guide.

ATTRIBUTES ON AKA TITLES

by Michel Hafner

There has been a change in policy for the alternative title list. It has
now a field for attributes to give more information about the nature of
the alternative title if it’s not clear from the context. Examples of
useful attributes are:

(UK title)

(US title)

(re-issue title)

(rerun title)

(video title)

(working title)

The year added to alternative titles is now the year this title came
into use, which can be different from the year of the primary title
which is the year of first public screening of a film. If this year
for alternative titles is not known the year of the primary title is used.

The new policy is valid for all alternative titles, including the new
Italian alternative titles and all others that will soon be officially
collected and available when we open up the database for alternative
titles in many additional languages.

WRITERS LIST IMPROVEMENTS

by Jon Reeves

Writing credits are among the most carefully controlled in the industry,
with strict rules over name ordering, use of “and” vs. “&”, and an
arbitration process. Until now, the credits in the IMDb have not reflected
the full complexity, partly because the software was not up to the task.
Several writers have justifiably complained about this.

The changes have now been made in the software for all platforms, and
you’ll see them reflected in more of the database shortly. For now,
take a look at the recent TV movie If These Walls Could Talk (1996) (TV)
for a particularly complex case.

Details on submitting writer order information will be in the next issue.

SALARY TRACKING

by Mark Harding

A new field that tracks the salaries paid to movie stars was recently
added to the Biography database. It records the name of the movie and
the salary paid for their involvement – this could be anything from
acting to directing to screenplay work etc. The tag for the salary
field is SA:, e.g., in Demi Moore‘s biography you’ll find the line



    SA: * _Striptease (1996)_ (qv) -> $12,500,000

For more information see the Biographies submission guide.

VIDEO SALES TRIAL SUCCESSFUL

by Mark Harding

The IMDb Video Sales Trial has now ended with all parties agreeing that
it’s been a huge success. Our statistics show us that you agree too! We
are now preparing the second stage of the service in which we hope to
increase both the number of partners in the service and the number of
titles covered. We’re also particularly interested in Partners that
offer less mainstream material. As well as covering videos we hope to
extend the service to other movie related material such as posters,
books etc, so if you know of any good sites out there please let us know!

PLOT SUMMARIES WANTED

by Col Tinto

The usual batch of “most voted without summary” movies are provided
below, so if you’ve seen it, summarize it!

The plot summary list is far from complete, but it’s getting there.

For this reason, we’re starting to focus more on quality than quantity.
From now on, the rejection rate will be higher, as low quality plots, or
those with many errors that would take a while to fix will be instantly
rejected – you have been warned…

Also, if you spot any plots you feel are of inferior quality, let me
know – or better still, send me a new one!

A River Runs Through It (1992)

Highlander III: The Sorcerer (1994)

Happy Gilmore (1996)

Escape from L.A. (1996)

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Empire (1995)

Nixon (1995)

Wyatt Earp (1994)

The Crow: City of Angels (1996)

Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie (1980)

Man of the House (1995)

Jabberwocky (1977)

Kingpin (1996)

Bugsy Malone (1976)

Stealing Beauty (1996)

Cabin Boy (1994)

Look Who’s Talking Too (1990)

The Three Musketeers (1974)

Friday (1995)

Beautiful Girls (1996)

HOT SEARCHES

by Jon Reeves

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending November 9.

Titles:

3. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

72. Ransom (1996)

134. William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)

4. Star Wars (1977)

1. Independence Day (1996)

41. Sleepers (1996)

10. Braveheart (1995)

5. Striptease (1996)

33. Basic Instinct (1992)

74. “Baywatch” (1989)

14. Pulp Fiction (1994)

8. Trainspotting (1995)

9. Mission: Impossible (1996)

7. Twister (1996)

152. “Babylon 5″ (1993)

17. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

18. Jurassic Park (1993)

34. Fargo (1996)

102. Toy Story (1995)

57. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

This month shows a wave of interest in future releases (
Star Wars: Episode I (1999),
Batman and Robin (1997), and

Alien: Resurrection (1997)
weren’t far back) and a strong showing by TV series (the first time with
one in the top 20, let alone 2). The “huh?” factor this month: number 33,
Wilhelm von Kobell (1966); number 60,
A Star Overnight (1919).

People:

5. Pamela Anderson

22. Sharon Stone

1. Teri Hatcher

12. Kim Basinger

3. Tom Cruise

4. Demi Moore

10. Mel Gibson

6. Sandra Bullock

7. Bo Derek

134. Leonardo DiCaprio

11. Alyssa Milano

8. Shannon Tweed

2. Jenny McCarthy

14. Helen Hunt

– Claire Danes

15. Brad Pitt

20. Arnold Schwarzenegger

18. Michelle Pfeiffer

38. Harrison Ford

23. Jennifer Connelly

With the house ad not running, Groucho Marx drops right off the list.
Kim Basinger places remarkably high, considering she hasn’t had a
movie in 2 years. Excluding Groucho, this month’s list averages about 2
years younger (largely due to Romeo & Juliet
displacing Sean Connery),
at around 34. The “huh?” factor: #71

Gretchen Ardell; #75
Gretchen Becker.

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US in October/November sorted by number of votes
(to November 8):

0000000115	393	8.8	That Thing You Do! (1996)
0000000114	298	8.5	Ghost and the Darkness, The (1996)
0000001123	259	8.3	Long Kiss Goodnight, The (1996)
0….00017	188	9.5	Beautiful Thing (1996)
0000000124	168	8.8	Bound (1996)
00.0000113	159	8.3	Sleepers (1996)
00..000026	120	9.1	William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)
0…..0026	101	9.5	Shine (1996)
0..0..0008	86	9.3	Ransom (1996)
0000010211	81	7.0	Chamber, The (1996)

Movies opening in the US in October/November sorted by average votes
(to November 8):

0….00017	188	9.5	Beautiful Thing (1996)
0…..0026	101	9.5	Shine (1996)
0..0..0008	86	9.3	Ransom (1996)
00..000026	120	9.1	William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)
0000000124	168	8.8	Bound (1996)
00…00134	69	8.8	Breaking the Waves (1996)
0000000115	393	8.8	That Thing You Do! (1996)
0000000114	298	8.5	Ghost and the Darkness, The (1996)
0….00123	41	8.3	Jude (1996)
0000001123	259	8.3	Long Kiss Goodnight, The (1996)

IMDb ON THE ROAD

by Joachim Polzer

The IMDb will be present at the European Film Forum which will take
place on November 19th at the German city of Karlsruhe. The IMDb will
demonstrate online their capabilities in the convention section of this
congress event. The motto of the “Forum Kino Karlsruhe” is: “The future
of the cinema – The cinema of the future” which seems the right place
for IMDb demonstrations. IMDb team member Andre Bernhardt will be at the
booth personally for questions and suggestions. “Forum Kino Karlsruhe” is
organized by the EIKK (European Institute of Cinema Karlsruhe); admission
for the conference and convention section of “Forum Kino Karlsruhe”
is free. Hours: 12 noon until 6:30 P.M. Location: Konzerthaus Karlsruhe.

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

Brisbane Internet Games; Brisbane Courier-Mail.

ComputerCredible Magazine.
Facts Magazine (Switzerland).
The New York Times.
The Toronto Star.
Internet User Magazine (Italy).
The Discovery Channel.

We’ve also won several new awards. See
selections from the gallery here.

The Silkie Award.
Cool Site of the Hour.
Internet Now! Sight of the Week.
University TopLinks.

Our good friend Greg Bulmash’s WASHED-UPdate has some new awards of its own:

Cool Site of the Hour.
Too Cool award.
Short Attention Span Site of the week.
Sublime Site of the Week.

Surf Central pick.

OTHER SOFTWARE CHANGES

by Col Needham

Traffic continues to climb so in October we added another couple of
servers at our US site to help keep response times down to a minimum.

In order to showcase many of the interesting features of the database,
we’ve added a “feature of the day” link to the home page

and search
page. The link is updated at midnight each day and highlights an
area that you may have missed, or have yet to discover, or just plain
forgotten about. At the moment 50 different features are included and
more will be added as the database expands.

As mentioned in the last newsletter, we’ve added the first batch of
translated pages to the site. German versions of the home page,
the search page, the complex search page, the site tour
and the index are now automatically served if your browser is configured to
prefer German over English. Italian translations are almost ready.

On the data collection side, the name based additions interface has been
completely redesigned to be easier to use. Major improvements on the title
based interface too, plus more validation checks have been added to both.

A new version (3.3) of the locally installable UNIX interface to
the database is now available from our FTP sites. Long overdue, this
version supports the laserdisc, business information and special effects
companies sections. Other new features include support for the writers
credit ordering and AKA attributes. It also displays the URL of the
equivalent page in the web interface for all name/title searches. This
version is running on the IMDb mail-server interface (send a message
with the subject “HELP” to mail-server@imdb.com for details).

The interface for the X Window System, xregal, is now at version 1.3,
with support for the features added in version 3.3 of the UNIX interface,
name completion, better formatting for the trivia and cast lists, more
configuration options, and some bug fixes. It is also available from
the FTP sites.

A new version of imoviedb, the interactive shell for the UNIX interface
which includes name and title completion has also been released.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 30,000 and 45,000 additions
every week from users all over the world.

Number of filmography entries: 1,250,697
Number of people covered: 353,618
Number of movies covered: 87,784

Size of the database (Mb): 106

Recent milestones:

20,000 release date entries

30,000 running times

75,000 writers entries

350,000 people covered

1,250,000 filmography entries

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

a “crew completion” list, similar to the cast completion list.

a separate list of films in production, with their current status.

outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display
on the main title page.

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

a complete rewrite of the additions interface is now in beta test
and may even be in service by the time you read this.

full support for accented characters (ISO 8859-1) without losing
people that can’t type them. Implementation in progress.

a locally installable MS-Windows interface to the database is
still under development.

enhanced awards section for the database covering more
international festivals, national film institutes etc.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the original country.

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

No Comments

Newsletter #9

Posted by admin in Newsletter on October 3rd, 1996

NEWSLETTER #9

October 1996

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Welcome to issue 9 of the IMDb newsletter. The newsletter is intended to
keep database users and contributors informed of the latest developments
from the management team. Comments and suggestions are welcome and should
be directed to newsletter@imdb.com. Issue 10 is scheduled for mid-November.

Apologies for the delay in putting out this issue; vacation schedules and
outside activities got in the way (see, we do have lives!).

I could also say we were busy celebrating our third anniversary as a
web site, except we didn’t realize it until after the fact. Yes, IMDb
was one of the first 500 web sites (though not at our current location),
and it’s been around longer than most CD-ROM movie references. If you
want to celebrate, October 17 will be the sixth anniversary of the
database, originally as a set of UNIX shell scripts.

To subscribe to the newsletter, fill out the survey
and check the appropriate box.

Fuzzy search

Effects company list launched

Update cycle change

Plot summaries wanted

New Additions Guide

Hot searches

Hot movies

IMDb in the news

Web server changes

Xregal updates

Database statistics

Future developments

FUZZY SEARCHING

by Michel Hafner

The WWW version of our database access software now offers a fuzzy
search for name and titles that goes far beyond the old substring
and exact search options (which nevertheless remain useful and the
default search types). The CPU intensive regular expression search
is an additional option. The four basic search types are best (not)
used in the following cases:

SUBSTRING search is the appropriate type of search if you:

want all names/titles that have a certain substring and don’t mind
getting huge lists (which is likely if the substring is sufficiently
common or short). It should not be used with too common and/or short
substrings unless you really need all these names/titles that match.

are fairly positive about the spelling of a substring contained in
a title or name you are looking for and this substring is sufficiently
long or uncommon enough to reduce the output to a list of moderate
size. Usual first names such as ‘Peter’ and ‘John’ and articles such
as ‘The’, for example, are not suitable since they match thousands of
names/titles. Also, spelling errors will invariably lead to results
that do not contain what you are actually looking for.

Substring search is the default search type and very useful if you pay
attention to picking suitable substrings.

EXACT search is the appropriate type of search if you:

know exactly how a name/title is spelled in IMDb (which is, hopefully, the
correct spelling) and that it will uniquely indentify the name/title
you have in mind. In all other cases you will get a failure message
or a result you likely didn’t intend to get.

FUZZY search is the appropriate type of search if you:

Basically know how the name/title is spelled, but are unsure about
details such as

an initial (e.g., is it “Darryl Zanuck” or “Darryl F. Zanuck”? (in this
example an appropriate substring works equally well))

an article (e.g., is it “The Seven Samurai” or “Seven Samurai”? (in this
example an appropriate substring works equally well))

a year date (e.g., is it “Carmen (1981)” or “Carmen (1982)”? ((in this
example an appropriate substring works equally well))

a roman number, a label such as (TV) or (mini) or stuff such as “…”.
(again a substring might work equally well)

one or two letters in the name/title (e.g., is it “Emanuele Beart” or
“Emmanuelle Beart” or “Emanuelle Beart”? Is it “Mission Impossible?” or
“Mission: Impossible” or “Mission – Impossible!”?)

a firstname variation (e.g., is it “Larry Fishburne” or “Laurence
Fishburne” or “Lawrence Fishburne”?)

a common short word such as “and” or “in” or “for”

a title such as Sir, Dame or Lady, AND ESPECIALLY

combinations of the above which substring search can’t handle directly
(e.g., you usually have to try several substring searches to get what
you want)

Fuzzy search is a very useful search method if the above cases
apply. But keep in mind that fuzzy search is not a more tolerant
substring search! If it generally were, it would produce even
bigger output than substring search for common/small substrings,
which it doesn’t. To separate the good matches from the bad matches
(e.g., the many matches substring search will give you anyway) it
outputs only names/titles whose length is more or less the same as
the length of your search string (there are exceptions to this rule
if the matched substring is very likely to be relevant despite its
length difference to the search string).

So a fuzzy search for title ‘Tim’ will give you for example

Tim (1979)

Time (1986)

but not

Across The Sea of Time (1995)

Adventures of Timmy the Tooth: Malibu Timmy, The (1995) (V)

REGULAR EXPRESSION search is the appropriate type of search if you:

cannot formulate your search with a substring and the criteria for fuzzy
search don’t apply either. Since it needs more computing time than
the other options on average and features a more complex syntax it’s
to be used with moderation. Don’t use it if one of the other three
options is equally suited to solve your search problem.

If you encounter unexpected or incorrect behaviour of fuzzy search,
you can drop me a line and report the problem.

EFFECTS COMPANY LIST LAUNCHED

by Rob Hartill

How did Forrest Gump shake the hand of JFK? It was just an illusion
of course, and in this case it was created by the good folks of ILM.
You might think that ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) do the effects
for all of Hollywood’s blockbusters these days; well not quite, there
are many other “Special Effects Companies” out there doing a great
job and to acknowledge their ever growing contribution to today’s movies
the IMDb now records their credits.

See the extended search form for
a good starting place to search or browse this new section.

[We've also added Norwegian and Italian title aka lists at the FTP sites.]

UPDATE CYCLE CHANGE

by Col Needham

The database continues to grow at an amazing rate despite the fact
that we now have complete information for thousands of movies and
people. I’m pleased to say that contributors are finding new areas to
research and expand the database (particularly silent movies and non-US
releases). However, new data has to be processed and validated and this
takes an increasing amount of time as the database grows.

Previously additions were distributed to the database editors on Friday
for processing over the weekend ready for the site update late on
Sunday. This has now been moved to Thursday in order to allow more time
and has worked out very well. It means that the best case processing
time moves from 2 days to 3 days (and worst from 9 to 10 days) but it
means we can still keep on top of everything in weekly cycles.

As a side effect of this, the deadline for the template additions
interface has been moved from Thursday to Wednesday to allow time for
the templates to be processed.

Please keep the new information pouring in and help the database to grow.

PLOT SUMMARIES WANTED

by Col Tinto

As ever, we need your summaries! Starting to scrape the bottom of the
‘most voted for’ movies list now, but here are another 20 popular movies
which as yet don’t have summaries.

Night Shift (1982)

Johnny Dangerously (1984)

Doctor Detroit (1983)

Taps (1981)

Hairspray (1988)

Force 10 from Navarone (1978)

Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987)

River Runs Through It, A (1992)

Jabberwocky (1977)

Highlander III: The Sorcerer (1994)

Postman Always Rings Twice, The (1981)

Fly II, The (1989)

Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989)

Fly, The (1958)

House of the Spirits, The (1993)

Flamingo Kid, The (1984)

Grease 2 (1982)

Hackers (1995)

Action Jackson (1988)

Caddyshack II (1988)

NEW ADDITIONS GUIDE

by Col Needham

A new version of the complete database additions guide was published at
the end of August. A copy is available by sending e-mail to the IMDb
mail-server at with the subject: HELP ADD FULL
or alternatively via FTP:

ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/info/imdb/tools/additions-guide.gz

or any of the other IMDb ftp sites.

There are several changes, but most notably a new policy on uncredited
appearances. All uncredited appearances must now be tagged with the
attribute (uncredited) whether it be a cameo from a major star in a
recent movie to a bit player in older movies where ususually only the
principal cast are credited. Use of this attribute will automatically
trigger the removal of the cast order number, thus fixing the problem
highlighted by Rod Crawford in the previous newsletter.

HOT SEARCHES

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on total
pages for the week ending September 28.

Titles:

1. Independence Day (1996)

– 2 Days in the Valley (1996)

3. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

10. Star Wars (1977)

2. Striptease (1996)

5. The Rock (1996)

7. Twister (1996)

– Trainspotting (1995)

4. Mission: Impossible (1996)

11. Braveheart (1995)

8. Heaven’s Prisoners (1996)

– The First Wives Club (1996)

– Last Man Standing (1996/I)

12. Pulp Fiction (1994)

– Naniwa Ereji (1936)

– …och alla dessa kvinnor (1944)

20. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

15. Jurassic Park (1993)

18. The Cool Surface (1994)

– A Time to Kill (1996)

ID4
continues strong, though without the commanding lead it had last month.
Star Wars
climbs from number 10. Besides the usual new releases, surprising showings by
Naniwa Ereji
(aka Osaka Trilogy) and
a 1944 Swedish title.

People:

3. Teri Hatcher

5. Jenny McCarthy

4. Tom Cruise

2. Demi Moore

1. Pamela Anderson

11. Sandra Bullock

12. Bo Derek

8. Shannon Tweed

– Alison Armitage

10. Mel Gibson

18. Alyssa Milano

7. Kim Basinger

– Elizabeth Berkley

13. Helen Hunt

15. Brad Pitt

6. Groucho Marx

– Heather Locklear

– Michelle Pfeiffer

– Sean Connery

20. Arnold Schwarzenegger

Margaret Colin
drops off the top 150 completely (how quickly they forget);
Jeff Goldblum
plummets to #102. And
Will Smith
may have helped him save the world, but he’s already down to #39.
Kevin Costner,
Sharon Stone,
and

Jennifer Connelly
just missed the cut this month.
Michelle Pfeiffer‘s
latest movie opens in a couple weeks; should raise her standing even more.
At least
Sean Connery
gives hope to us balding males. Number 1
Hatcher
was visited about 5 times as often as
Arnold.
Joan Bud

(who?) was #30.

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US in August/September sorted by number of
votes (to September 26th):

1000000102	220	6.5	Escape from L.A. (1996)
0.00000125	202	8.8	Emma (1996)
1100010101	199	5.5	Island of Dr. Moreau, The (1996)
0000001212	196	7.6	Tin Cup (1996)
2000000003	173	5.8	Crow: City of Angels, The (1996)
0010011111	125	6.4	Chain Reaction (1996)
0000011101	111	6.8	Jack (1996)
0000000113	81	7.5	Matilda (1996)
0000001112	73	6.9	Fan, The (1996)
00.0.01123	70	8.0	Freeway (1996)

Movies opening in the US in August/September sorted by average
votes (to September 26th):

0.00000125	202	8.8	Emma (1996)
0.0…1123	58	8.6	Fly Away Home (1996)
0.0..01024	39	8.5	Basquiat (1996)
..00100014	34	8.1	Alaska (1996)
0000000122	61	8.1	Spitfire Grill, The (1996)
00.0.01123	70	8.0	Freeway (1996)
0..0001113	39	7.9	First Kid (1996)
0000001212	196	7.6	Tin Cup (1996)
0000000113	81	7.5	Matilda (1996)
0.000.11.4	38	7.5	Maximum Risk (1996)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

The Net (US).
Newsday.
Yahoo! Internet Life (September *and* October).
Boston Globe.

Utne Reader.
Sight and Sound.
KFBK Radio, Sacramento.
P.O.V. Magazine.
I-way 500 (best Leisure site).
WebSight (months ago; we just found out).
BBC Radio 1.
Library Journal.

We’re particularly proud of the review in Yahoo! Internet Life (Sept.),
where the two best known US movie reviewers, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel,
both gave us a thumbs up.

We’ve also won several new awards. See selections from the gallery here.

NetBest Awards (finalist).
Awesome Universal t@p 500 WebSites.
Access to the World Cool Link of the Week.

Computer Currents Interactive Link of the Week.
Komputer Klinic Kool Site.
(WFMM) Cool Site o’ the Day.
USA Today Hot Site.
P.O.V. Top 100 (#53).
I-way 500 (best Leisure site).

Top Shopping Site: All Internet Shopping Directory.

And a web-related mention of note: the hot100 list
shows us as the eighth hottest site on the whole net.

WEB SERVER CHANGES

by Rob Hartill

Since the last newsletter, a lot of coffee has been consumed and in
between the trips to the kettle some new code has been added. Elsewhere
in this newsletter you can read about Michel Hafner’s new fuzzy matching
code (written in C you know!, how did he slip that by my perl-only filter?).
Other changes include much more online checking of web based submission
to try to clean more of the data we receive before it even leaves your
web browser. All the extra checks and warnings might frustrate at first,
but we hope they remind you how best to submit clean data that can be
added sooner… all those warnings used to be fixed by us manually

The old style quiz has been put to rest and replaced with a new quiz.
At the moment it comes in two varieties: (1) a name guessing, based on a
hangman like game and (2) a multiple choice quick quiz (in the same style
as the old quiz) with questions that will be designed to tease and
educate. If you have some devious
questions that you’d like to add to the quiz, send them to me please.

The main search form now allows
searching of ‘business’, ‘goofs’, ‘technical’ and ‘trivia’ under the
‘word search’ section, so now you can search for your favourite type
of goof or studio filming locations, etc.

Behind the scenes, our servers became HTTP/1.1 compliant thanks to our
developers version of Apache 1.2 and
our Perl became fuel injected thanks
to Doug MacEachern’s “mod_perl_fast” Apache plug-in module that embeds
a Perl interpreter into our Apache server.

Look out for translated versions of key pages in the very near future.
Using Apache’s language negotiation feature we’ll soon be serving up
some pages in French, German and Italian (to begin with). For user with
browsers capable of specifying a preferred language (e.g. Netscape 3
for Win/Mac [not for Unix! sigh]) the new pages will magically appear
if you prefer a language other than English and if we have a translation
available. Everyone else will continue to see English.

XREGAL UPDATES

by Lachlan Wetherall

Since the last newsletter, versions 1.1 and 1.2 of xregal have
been released. Xregal is an X11 hypertext interface for the Internet Movie
Database when it is installed locally on a Unix host. Apart from a
number of bug fixes the main features added from version 1.0 to 1.2 are:

The display now looks a lot nicer, with centered titles, automatically
wrapped paragraphs, hanging indents, bulleted lists, and italicized
subheadings.

There are many more options for changing the appearance and behaviour of
xregal through command line parameters and/or X reseources.

Text can be selected with mouse button 1, in order to paste data to other
X applications.

It is now possible to save an ASCII version of the displayed data to a file.

There is a new ‘search for character name’ menu option.

For a full list of changes, consult the ChangeLog file.
Version 1.2 of xregal requires the moviedb3.2g package to be installed
first. Both xregal and movidedb3.2g are available from the usual IMDB
ftp sites:

ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/info/imdb/tools

ftp://ftp.digital.com.au/pub/imdb/tools

The latest development version of xregal is always available from the
xregal home page.

If you have any suggestions on improvements for xregal,
drop me an e-mail.
Bug reports are especially welcomed and acted on speedily.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 30,000 and 40,000 additions
every week from users all over the world.

Number of filmography entries: 1,194,654
Number of people covered: 337,775
Number of movies covered: 84,196

Size of the database (Mb): 97

Recent milestones:

Over 1,000,000 lines of additions (all categories) for the year

Over 500,000 actor entries

Over 1000 titles with MPAA ratings reasons

Over 2000 mini-biographies

Over 3000 titles on the business-info list

Over 15,000 plot summaries

Over 25,000 running time entries

Over 35,000 language entries

Genres for over 41,000 movies

Over 80,000 movies

Over 100,000 titles (including aka’s and TV series)

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

Washed Update: Greg Bulmash’s column on forgotten stars from
the ’70s will soon be available first on the IMDb web site.

a list of other companies; currently, except for production and
special effects companies, the database records only the names of
individual people.

outline list: a “one line” plot summary, short enough to display
on the main title page.

a “crew completion” list, similar to the cast completion list.

a list of “influential scenes”… the scenes that launched a thousand
spoofs, became the director’s trademark, changed cinema forever,
launched a star.

a separate list of films in production, with their current status.

a complete rewrite of the additions interface. The survey results
suggest that many people struggle with the clumsy interface currently
in place. Taking the comments from the survey and our own ideas we
are completely rewriting the additions interface. This is a *major*
undertaking and will take some time to complete. We’re confident
the results will be worth the wait!!

full support for accented characters (ISO 8859-1) without losing
people that can’t type them. Implementation in progress.

proper handling of writer credit order.

a locally installable MS-Windows interface to the database is
under final testing for those of you who want to reduce your
phone bills!

enhanced awards section for the database covering more
international festivals, national film institutes etc.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the original country.

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

Academy Awards and Oscar are registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences.

License our content.

<!– snare –>

No Comments

Newsletter #8

Posted by admin in Newsletter on July 15th, 1996

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Welcome to issue 8 of the IMDb newsletter. The newsletter is intended to
keep database users and contributors informed of the latest developments
from the management team. Comments and suggestions are welcome and should
be directed to newsletter@imdb.com. Issue 9 is scheduled for September.

See the further information section at the end of this file for more
information about The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Survey update

Video sales links added

Language list launched

Business info added

Changes for the technical section

xregal: an X Windows local interface

Getting it right the first time

Hot searches

Hot movies

IMDb in the news

Web server changes

Our web software

Database statistics

Future developments

SURVEY UPDATE

by Col Needham

Here’s a quick update on the IMDb user survey which has been running
for a couple of months now. The replies are continuing to flood in at
quite a rate but we are generally keeping up with questions and issues
raised. If you’re still expecting a reply from an early survey please
mail me directly for a response.

Again I’ll cover some general results first (mainly where there are
significant changes since last month):

14% use the database every day; 30% weekly; 38% completed the survey
on their first visit.

79% have been using the database for less than a year and 71 people
said they’d been using it right from the start back in 1990

70% use the Netscape browser and 6% use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer;
68% use a PC and 14% use a Mac.

The free form answers have continued in much the same way with some common
complaints and suggestions but also plenty of original ideas which we’ll
be looking at over the next few months.

We’ve addressed several of these already:

our new site design retains the browser independence and the small
sized graphics whilst simultaneously looking better

the video sales trial helps people locate copies of some
of the movies in the database

we’ve improved our collection of links to home pages, image archives
and official sites to make more pictures available via the IMDb

the localised searches for
France,
Italy, and
Portugal make the database easier
to use by people in those countries as well as adding quick access
to their local movie release dates

VIDEO SALES LINKS ADDED

by Col Needham and Mark Harding

The second most requested new feature for the site was the addition of
video sales links so we’ve just launched a new area to cover this. For
the next three months, as an experiment, we’re working with several
online video and merchandising stores on the web. The idea is to provide
purchasing links for titles in the database which take users directly
to pages where the movies and other goods can be purchased. The idea
is to provide convenient access to a wide choice of video suppliers
for everything from the latest video blockbuster to that obscure 1930s
flick you’ve been seeking for half your life.

We currently have two stores in the trial –
Videoflicks and
CDworld with
others coming online soon. Please let us know what you think of this new
service as it will help us decide how to support this in the long term
(or not). If you have a favourite store which provides a good service
and isn’t part of the trial, please pass this newsletter on to them.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! In the near future we hope
to extend this service further to include other movie merchandise
such as posters, scripts, stills and other memorabilia.

LANGUAGE LIST LAUNCHED

by Mark Harding

Another much requested list is now live on the IMDb servers, the
LANGUAGE LIST. This section records the languages spoken during the
movie in the original release. It is not intended to record
languages a movie may have been dubbed in.

Because many countries use a diverse range of languages there are
bound to be some errors in the data. Any help to clean up this section
is much appreciated.

For details on submitting new entries, or correcting existing entries
please read the
LANGUAGE submissions guide.

BUSINESS INFO ADDED

by Giancarlo Cairella

The BUSINESS section contains information about the business/commercial
side of the movie industry. The section includes information such as
production dates, studio locations, film budgets, box office revenues
(total and opening weekend), number of movie tickets sold in a
specific country, distributor rentals revenues, copyright information and
other financial/statistical data.

All amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise specified and are to be
considered estimates, not official or definitive data. All box office
grosses do not include video rentals or sales, television rights and other
non-theatrical revenues. Since some movies may still be in general
release, all data is subject to change.

The fields available for submitting information are:

Movie Title (Year)

Movie Budget [Country]

Box Office Gross (Territory) [Date]

Opening Weekend Box Office Take (Territory) [Date] [Screens]

Rentals

Admissions (Territory)

Production Dates (Start-End)

Studio where movie was filmed (Country)

See the
business submissions guide for a full explanation of these fields.

CHANGES FOR THE TECHNICAL SECTION

by Peter W. Simeon

At the end of June, I took over the management of the technical data
from Joachim Polzer. This will improve the quality of both the technical
section and the literature section. Joachim now has more time to manage
the literature data and I can make use of some synergies between the
technical section and the laserdisc list.

In addition to fixing some bugs and adding lots of new data, I have made
some changes in the technical data. The process field was always a little
confusing, because there were processes like Cinerama or CinemaScope,
but also camera model information like Arriflex 16SR. I decided to
split this into two fields: The new CAM field will contain camera and
lens information and the PCS field will be used for cinematic processes
only. For example, you can now submit Super 35 for the PCS field and
Panavision Cameras and Lenses for the CAM field. There is a new keyword
CAMERA for submitting data for the CAM field via the keyword interface.

I tried to clean up all entries with Panavision as a process. As you may
know, Panavision can indicate many things like a Panavision camera or the
use of a Panavision anamorphic lens. For most entries, I could identify
the process and added the attributes (spherical) or (anamorphic). If you
add new data, please try to always use these attributes to clarify what
you wanted to add. Also make sure to submit data for prints, negative
and aspect ratio, if possible. For all movies newer than 1952, I now use
(spherical) or (anamorphic) as process name, if the name of the process
is unknown. Please also use this convention in the future.

XREGAL: AN X WINDOWS LOCAL INTERFACE

by Lachlan Wetherall

Xregal is an X11 interface to the Internet Movie Database when it is
installed locally on a Unix system.

Xregal makes use of Col Needham’s movie database package. It is essential
that you set up his package and ensure that it is working first before
trying to set up xregal. Xregal was written to interface with version 3.2f
of Col’s package although it should work with earlier 3.2 versions also.
Both the moviedb package and xregal are available from
all IMDb FTP sites.

Why xregal? The name is in appreciation of the Regal Cinema in Birmingham
Gardens, near where I live. The Regal is the only local suburban cinema
in Newcastle, Australia that survived the video age and continues to operate.
I lived next door to it for a couple of years and saw many fine movies there.

Using xregal is very simple. You can either search for a person’s name or
a movie title. Case is insignificant in searches. Names can be specified
either in the form “Firstname Lastname” or “Lastname, Firstname”. Titles
that begin with ‘The’ or ‘A’ can be specified in either form also; e.g.,
“The Firm” and “Firm, The” are acceptable.

Searching on a movie title will automatically search for TV programs
of the same name. If you know the title refers to a TV program you can
speed the search by enclosing the name in ” quotes. Where there are
multiple movies with the same name, a particular movie can be identified
by appending the year enclosed in parentheses to the search term; e.g.,
“Sabrina (1995)”.

Any text that is underlined is a hyperlink. Clicking on the hyperlink will
initiate a search on the hyperlink text.

Xregal is designed to be usable even on a monochrome screen. If you want
a fancy color scheme, you can adjust colors using X resources.

My thanks to:

All who have contributed to the Internet Movie Database in any way.

Bert Bos for writing wbuild which makes widget writing
so easy. I also have used a modified version of Bert’s label widget
from the Free Widget Foundation.

Paul Kendall who wrote the ArticleText widget in the
Free Widget Foundation collection from which I borrowed many ideas in the
writing of the LinkText widget.

Xregal is copyright 1996 by
Lachlan Wetherall; it’s free for personal use.
Please see the README file in the package for further conditions.

[Ed. note: yes, moviedb 3.2f was recently released; mostly bug fixes,
capacity updates, and support for new lists.]

GETTING IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME (Part I)

by Rod Crawford

As regular users are well aware, the IMDb does contain errors. With 30,000
lines received per week, we can’t reasonably expect the database team
to catch all errors on first entry. Most errors can be corrected later,
but some are more difficult than others. For instance, it’s really easy
to fix a defective character name, but presently impossible to remove
an inappropriate cast order number. As long as we’re going to all this
trouble (without even getting paid) to add data, a little extra effort to
get it as accurate as possible can’t hurt. In the course of submitting
data and corrections on over 600 films, I’ve seen how things go wrong
and can offer a few suggestions on improving accuracy.

On older films where the screen credits may be incomplete or
missing, it’s possible to add cast and character names from print
sources. However, data from the film itself must be given priority.
Aside from name credits, print sources shouldn’t be relied on.
Particularly for cast order data! Books and reviews list the cast in a
different order from the screen credits in a large proportion of cases,
maybe even a majority. It’s safer to enter names from such sources with
the order field blank, to be filled in later by someone who has the
actual film available. Moreover, some books and occasional reviews list
bit players who are not credited on screen. It’s good to include these
credits in the database, but since they’re not in the credits they have
no credits order. The order in which they’re listed in the book means
nothing! When there’s a long list of uncredited names with spurious
“order” numbers, trying to correct the order of credited players
is a real pain. For a typical example, see
The Big Clock (1948).
Of the 58 actors now listed, 26 are credited on screen (not in this
order except for the first 10). The others should have been listed
without order data (this puts them in an alphabetical list). As is,
it’s almost uncorrectable. Remember, if someone isn’t credited on screen,
they should have the attribute (uncredited).

It’s unsafe to make sweeping assumptions unless you really know what
you’re talking about. Example: anyone might be tempted to assume that
all films preceding
The Jazz Singer (1927)
were silent. Not so! De Forest Phonofilm started making talking shorts
in 1923, joined by Vitaphone in 1926. Such assumptions have brought
many errors into the database.

Before writing a plot description, watch the movie! Resist the
temptation to paraphrase all the plot descriptions in a book on “The Films
of Joe Blow.” Chances are, the book’s author hasn’t seen them all either;
doing this virtually guarantees plot errors. What’s more, without watching
the film it’s hard to tell what plot events are supposed to be surprises
and avoid unintentional spoilers. Other tips on plot writing: a summary
shouldn’t just list several plot events in order; it should summarize! Not
the entire plot, just enough to stop short of spoilers. Good tricks for
spoiler-avoidance include the ellipsis (example: They little suspect the
creature has stowed away aboard their ship…), the question (Can Superman
save Metropolis from destruction?) and intentional vagueness. It’s okay to
suggest the flavor of a movie, but not to say that it’s good or bad (after
all, someone out there undoubtedly hates your favorite, and vice versa).
And please, take a few minutes to proofread, or even have a nit-picking
friend do so. You want to make a good impression on other film fans, don’t
you?

As pointed out in the last newsletter issue, there’s a lot of variation
and duplication among names of actors and crew. If you want to save
others a lot of correction work, it really helps to look up unfamiliar
names in the database before submitting them in new data. Thus, you’d
find out that there are 3 actors named Bill Williams
(I)

(II)
(III)
(in addition to 4 Billys
(I)
(II)
(III)
(IV),
3 Williams
(I)

(II)
(III), a
Willy and a
Willie!) plus a
cinematographer and an
editor. This knowledge
gives you a better chance of listing the
right one! (The filmographies will give clues). Or, you may find no
actress named Freddie Washington, but a substring search reveals one
(with similar credits) named
Fredi; thus catching a
mistake in your source before it gets online. It’s best to search on the
last name, or an unusual first name, or parts of both
(“Ford, J“;
“rue, Ge“).

Many other such tips are possible, but will be saved for a future
article. Parting words: the IMDb describes what is actually in the films;
the most reliable source is therefore the films themselves, which must
take precedence over something in a book or newspaper, or even something
“everybody knows”…

HOT SEARCHES

Here’s the most popular searches people have done lately, based on
total pages for the week ending July 13.

Titles:

Also strong were other Star Trek related titles, the various Batman movies
(notably
Batman and Robin (1997)), and
Trainspotting
(with an unusually high interest in the
URL page).
Independence Day‘s
lead here was almost as commanding as at the boxoffice: over 3.5 times as
many visits as Striptease.

People:

ID4‘s
Margaret Colin and
Jeff Goldblum just missed the cut.
Groucho, of
course, gets a boost from our house ad;
Marilyn Monroe and
Cary Grant also
did surprisingly well (though not as well as
game-inspiring

Kevin Bacon).
Much closer race for number 2 here; we’ll see if
Demi‘s popularity
lasts longer than her movie.

HOT MOVIES

by Col Needham

Movies opening in the US in June/July sorted by number of votes (to 4th July)

Distribution	Votes	Rank	Title
0000000026	338	9.3	Trainspotting (1995)
0000001123	318	8.3	Rock, The (1996)
0000011113	139	7.6	Eraser (1996)
0000000116	117	8.8	Independence Day (1996)
1000000104	98	7.3	Striptease (1996)
00.0000125	89	8.8	Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1996)
0000102012	77	6.9	Phantom, The (1996)
0000000223	75	8.1	Visiteurs, Les (1993)
00..0.0006	37	8.5	Courage Under Fire (1996)
000.001113	35	7.3	Stealing Beauty (1996)

Movies opening in the US in June/July sorted by average votes (to 4th July)

Distribution	Votes	Rank	Title
0000000026	338	9.3	Trainspotting (1995)
……0124	27	9.1	Lone Star (1996)
0000000116	117	8.8	Independence Day (1996)
00.0000125	89	8.8	Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1996)
0…1…07	19	8.8	Time to Kill, A (1996)
0..0.00115	31	8.5	Phenomenon (1996)
00..0.0006	37	8.5	Courage Under Fire (1996)
0000001123	318	8.3	Rock, The (1996)
0000000223	75	8.1	Visiteurs, Les (1993)
0..0.00222	34	8.1	Nutty Professor, The (1996)

IMDb IN THE NEWS

by Jon Reeves

Just a few of the traditional media outlets that have mentioned us lately:

Detroit News.
Zoom movie magazine (Switzerland).
Rettig on Reference.
CNN.

Computer Life (UK), June.
The New York Times.

We’ve also won several new awards. See
the whole gallery here.

AmeriSites Select Sites.
Launch Pad to the World’s Best Web Sites.
Magellan featured site.

Yell for the UK best: final round.
Medaille d’Or for Web Site Excellence.
Hot 100.
PC Magazine top 100.
Steve Sokoloski Site of the Week.

And team member Jon Reeves gave a
talk to the
New Hampshire Internet Special Interest Group

recently about the database.

WEB SERVER CHANGES

by Rob Hartill

Over the past few days and weeks many of the html pages have
seen a facelift. Most noticeable are the new graphics and icons
which have been created for us by
AmeriSites Website Development. If
you like what you see, check them out.

Another recent change is a more compact search form. This replaces the
old search page that spanned many screens and probably confused a lot of
people. The new search form collects all the most common search options
into one small form. All the old searching methods are still supported,
either via this compact form or from pages leading off of the search page.

A few of the database pages have been improved from a presentation point
of view with the use of tables. These pages include: main movie listings
(cast crew etc),
top 250,
bottom 100,
on this day in history, and
recent releases.
More use of tables will be made as and where appropriate.
Many people still use browsers that can’t handle tables. We have
old-style pages for those people (e.g. users of older Mosaics and
Lynx). Our servers can be configured to serve table-free pages if you
tell us how the browser identifies itself (User-Agent HTTP header).

OUR WEB SOFTWARE

by Jon Reeves

People have asked about the software we use to run the web site. Some of
the information is already on the site (our operating system is
FreeBSD and our web server is
Apache, both with various performance
tweaks). As for the other software details:

Our database system is a home brew combination of C programs and Perl
scripts (and we’re quite happy with it, thank you). The web code is not
publicly available, though you’re welcome to use the public interface
code available from
our FTP sites for personal non-commercial use.

And for the text pages: nobody in the team has felt the need for a special
HTML text editor; we use vi and emacs.

DATABASE STATISTICS

by Jon Reeves

This is a regular section giving information about the current size
and growth of the IMDb. We receive between 30,000 and 40,000 additions
every week from users all over the world.

Number of filmography entries: 1,079,337
Number of people covered: 308,537
Number of movies covered: 77,603

Size of the database (Mb): 86

Recent milestones:

Trivia for over 1500 films

Over 15,000 plot summaries

Over 15,000 complete cast lists

Over 25,000 sound mix entries

Over 30,000 cinematographer entries

Over 30,000 composer entries

Color entries for over 50,000 films

Over 75,000 film titles

Over 300,000 people

Over 450,000 actor entries

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

a complete rewrite of the additions interface. The survey results
suggest that many people struggle with the clumsy interface currently
in place. Taking the comments from the survey and our own ideas we
are completely rewriting the additions interface. This is a major
undertaking and will take some time to complete. We’re confident
the results will be worth the wait!!

full support for accented characters (ISO 8859-1) without losing
people that can’t type them. Implementation in progress.

proper handling of writer credit order.

a locally installable MS-Windows interface to the database is
under final testing for those of you who want to reduce your
phone bills!

enhanced awards section for the database covering more
international festivals, national film institutes etc.

general support for alternate titles in languages other than
English and the language of the original country.

a movie recommendation service that will use your vote records to
suggest other movies you might enjoy. Initially available via an
E-mail interface. Time to check you’re up-to-date with your voting!

Academy Awards and Oscar are registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences.

No Comments

Archive for category Newsletter

IMDb: All the Latest

Meta

Archive for category Newsletter

Contents

Contents

TV Listings

Trailers

Movie Schedules

Video Purchase and Rental

Posters

Contents

Accessing the Glossary

Feedback and Submissions

What Is It?

Current WWW Support and Availability

How to Submit

Future

Odds and Ends

Structure of the lists and new awards

Names already in the awards lists

Awards information already in the IMDb

Style sheets

On this business day

Top 250

Restricting title searches to movies or TV

By-rating filmographies

Combined filmographies/biographies

Fuzzy name search

Calendars

What’s playing features

New browsable sections

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE TRIVIA LIST IS SUBJECTIVE

TRIVIA MUST AFFECT THE PRODUCTION

…AND THAT’S ALL?

NEWSLETTER #13

mid-April 1997

Contents

INTRODUCTION

ISO Latin 1/2/3… and IMDb

Contents

Miscellaneous Misconceptions

What? There are exceptions?

How do goofs happen?

Artistic License

In Summary

Contents

Some background

The Problems

Summary

Goofs and the IMDb

Mistakes by Characters

Special Effects

Sequels

Canon

Book adaptations

In Part 2