The Story Of The IMDb

Disappointment awaits anyone who arrives expecting a vast open-plan office staffed by hundreds, surrounded by banks of whirring, purring servers clicking and humming their arcane binary language.

This isn’t the pampered playboy mansion of a dotcom millionaire. The unassuming, casually attired Needham won’t be drawn on the size of his bank balance following IMDb’s link-up with Amazon.

“I’m not about that, I’m just about the site,” he says, prodding his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose.

But the bubbly enthusiasm and cat-who-got-the-cream grin suggest there’s a happy accountant somewhere...

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“Essentially, everyone was agreeing to publish film information in a format that was compatible with my software,” Needham explains in his broad Mancunian accent.

“Although I was running it, there was nothing formal. It was like an open democracy of film fans.”

By the summer of 1990, this democracy had collated 10,000 movie titles.

Today, it’s hard to understand why this was so exciting. Back then, though, this much information on movies had never been collected in one place outside of an unwieldy movie encyclopaedia.

Yet unlike Halliwell’s or Leonard Maltin’s Movie And Video Guide – which were always out of date and limited by space – IMDb was a film fan’s dream come true: a constantly updated, instantly searchable, ever-growing movie mecca.

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Interview By Jamie Russell