NEWSLETTER #15

September 1997

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Welcome to issue 15 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 16 is scheduled for November.

this issue edited by Jon Reeves

Contents

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

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

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

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

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 Césars 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:

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.

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,
national or local

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 (CésarN) 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

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

Titles:

1. -. The Game (1997)
2. 16. Men in Black (1997)
3. 177. L.A. Confidential (1997)
4. -. In & Out (1997)
5. 4. Star Wars (1977)
6. 1. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
7. 53. Contact (1997)
8. 10. Star Wars: Episode I (1999)
9. 9. Scream (1996)
10. -. The Full Monty (1997)
11. 186. "Star Trek: Voyager" (1995)
12. 2. The Fifth Element (1997)
13. 141. Face/Off (1997)
14. 12. Pulp Fiction (1994)
15. 153. Air Force One (1997)
16. 32. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
17. 5. Batman & Robin (1997)
18. 23. Alien: Resurrection (1997)
19. 3. Jerry Maguire (1996)
20. -. 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:

1. 12. Kim Basinger
2. -. Red Skelton
3. 1. Pamela Anderson
4. 3. Tom Cruise
5. 23. Shannon Tweed
6. 14. Demi Moore
7. 7. Brad Pitt
8. 4. Sharon Stone
9. 18. Mel Gibson
10. 13. Harrison Ford
11. 22. Traci Lords
12. 9. Teri Hatcher
13. 6. Sandra Bullock
14. 16. Michelle Pfeiffer
15. 45. Salma Hayek
16. 15. Alyssa Milano
17. 8. Petra Verkaik
18. -. Jeri Lynn Ryan
19. 31. Val Kilmer
20. 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

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

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

IMDb IN THE NEWS

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

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

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 users all over the world.

   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

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.

• 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!

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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.