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Torrent-Only Movie Denied IMDb Listing
An anonymous reader writes "A film set to be released for free via BitTorrent has been denied a listing in the Internet Movie Database. The Tunnel is currently in production and despite pleas from the makers, IMDb won't allow it on their site. The creators of this horror movie believe that because they have shunned an official distributor and chosen a BitTorrent model instead, this has put them at a disadvantage with the Amazon-owned site."
I love IMDB for keeping track of movies I've seen but they have some really annoying policies around what gets included. How is this any different than the 60 or Funny Or Die movies in IMDB right now? http://www.imdb.com/company/co0215655/ I don't think any of those have gotten anything other than web streaming distribution.
A while back I thought I'd add a few obscure short Russian films that are included on a DVD set I have. Mostly fascinating propaganda from the 1950s or so. About half of the films are in IMDB. I spent a good hour or so using their ancient and difficult to use system entering all of the data that I could find which was relatively substantial. Go figure, they actually had a lot of production information in the credits for the main one I wanted to submit. So I put all the data in, got the e-mail that said OK we'll take a look! Waited. Waited. Got another automated e-mail saying well you don't have enough information. Please add more. So I tried to clean things up a bit. Waited.. Waited.. finally got an e-mail saying Well, sorry, none of our staff have looked at this yet, and don't expect them to. Resubmit with more information if you want us to maybe consider it. !!!
What do they want?? There's tons of movies in there that don't even have things like director and producer credits much less acting credits. After that I just don't see the point in trying to help.
I feel bad for these guys with this torrent movie. Can't imagine they'll get very far on their own with them.
Did "The Hunt for Gollum" and "Born of Hope" make it to the big theatres? They are on IMDB.
IMDB was much better before Amazon took over. When it was independent it was easy to submit updates and corrections, and while it was not a free-for-all like the Wikimedia (the Wikipedia) back end is, it was very easy to submit updates and watch for the managers (or "editors" in Wikipedia nomanclature) to accept the changes and publish them. That all changed quickly right after Amazon took over. I quit volunteering my time to improve the site, as did many other casual readers who simply wanted a better system for their own reference and entertainment. I still use IMDB to discover older movies and television series which might interest me, but I have no desire to try to submit corrections. The system has become far worse than trying to get updates and corrections submitted to the Open Directory Project (does dmoz even exist any more?).
I still volunteer my time on Wikipedia now and then - correcting grammar, spelling, and factual errors when I see them, remove vandalism, and I keep an eye on articles for a BBS and other projects I am involved in watching for vandalism from a few individuals who insist on grinding their axes. I hope no company ever tries to take over and monopolize Wikipedia the way Amazon did with IMDB.
They have to draw the line somewhere. The bittorrent angle is a red herring. If they don't establish some meaningful threshold, then they have a pretty big universe of material to apply resources to, considering that we've seen quite a revolutionary amount of video works of independent origin in the past few years.
You should check out http://www.themoviedb.org/
XBMC can download information directly from their database, which is how I was introduced to it. I believe this is what you are looking for.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
I have a short film that's listed on IMDb and I have a personal listing there because of having written/directed it, so I've dealt with IMDb. I can tell you that it's not easy to get on their. They don't communicate with people very well. And their rating system is frequently "gamed" by people to hurt films. So I'm not crazy about them and can sympathize that they're not easy to deal with. However, it's VERY clear that there are fairly simple criteria by which IMDb determines what is a legit film. You can distribution or you can get your film into legit festivals. If you choose to exist outside of that system, IMDb has no reason to believe you're a real filmmaker. They don't pass artistic judgement. They simply say that you have to meet certain criteria to be listed. If they didn't do that, how in the world would they determine what to list? As someone who's been around the indie film world for awhile now, I can tell you that there are THOUSANDS of wannabes who are trying to get listed in order to get some credibility. So I believe the producers of this film are whiners who need to simply shut up. Of course, they might very well KNOW that they have zero chance of getting listed on IMDb, so getting geeks riled up about something on torrent not getting respect might be their real PR strategy. Either way, they seem like amateurs at best.
We submitted our (The Amateur Monster Movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1717690/ ) zero budget film to be added IMDB a few times in the past while still doing principal photography. They denied it until we released our trailer and started getting more press coverage. We don't have any distribution deal (yet) or submitted it to any festivals.
I think if they just released a trailer and got more press (which Slashdot should fix) they will be added. I think it's a matter of them simply trying to avoid adding films that most likely will never be seen by anybody but the people involved in creating them.
Here is a link to our trailer in case your curious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aZquMQhAmo
I do tend to agree with your idea.
I may still visit IMDB to learn about a film, but I will never ever purchase a movie from Amazon or any other selling site mentioned therein.
I doubt if I would like The Tunnel, but I will purchase a copy simply to help them and to tweak Amazon.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ is way better then IMDB for movie reviews
ie. Their ratings aren't done by 14 year-olds on a scale from"sucks" to "awesome" (although they have included "user ratings" in the last few weeks, ack)
No sig today...
Sounds like the same crap that Wikipedia spouts about citations from news sources. I'm an expert in my field, and I know things because I've been doing it for 25 years - so when I make an edit, it gets undone because I don't have a puff piece written by a journalist to cite. It's as if they think the sum of human knowledge comes from the evening news, when it is quite clear most "news" is chum. IT moves to fast to disallow non-traditional sources to be used. It's ok though, the non-techies who don't "get" the modern world we live in are slowly dying off. This pleases me.