It settles screaming matches, decides friendly bets, and solves nagging questions. It's a globally recognized authority, yet it had humble beginnings. It's rarely wrong, always up to date and sometimes even ahead of the curve. In fact, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say it functions in its field like a god (God, with a capital G, even had his own credits page, albeit briefly), deciding when life is created or mutated or ended — which is why we bow and scrape to its all-knowing supremacy and celebrate its uniqueness. We need it, we love it and we applaud it. Heck, if it were a drug, we'd be hopelessly addicted to it.[Now that's a lede.] What is the Internet Movie Database?
But who are those guys?. L.A. Weekly's proudly batshit columnist [and fellow stroppy alum] Nikki Finke found out. It began, as no one the cinetrix knows would be surprised to learn, with starlets:
[I]t was babelicious actresses that led to Col Needham — a 37-year-old lifelong movie fanatic and computer wiz living in Britain who is fond of saying he was scared out of swimming pools after seeing Jaws in 1975, wowed by Star Wars in 1977, and terrified by Alien in 1979 — founding IMDB.
Nerd. The locals used to say of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory that nobody ever came in, and nobody ever came out. Apparently, film geeks' favorite resource IMDb is run much the same way.
[H]ow does IMDB work? It’s easy to imagine some airplane hangar in a dusty, out-of-the-way desert location, and inside is a sea of desktop computers manned by 20-something Oompa Loompas in T-shirts, jeans and Converse. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong.
Well, sorta. Read the whole sordid story here.
