IMDb founder on how a 14-day Alien bender gave birth to an internet monster

The Age

16 hours ago

Col Needham greets me with a big smile and an outstretched hand and slides me his business card. 'Founder and executive chair of IMDb', it says on one side, and on the other, 'all of life's riddles are answered in the movies'.
The line comes from Grand Canyon, the 1991 ensemble drama from Big Chill writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, and is spoken in the film by Steve Martin as a bearded Hollywood producer.
'It's a movie quote about movie quotes,' says Needham, chuckling merrily. Of course it is.
Needham is in Australia for the first time, and over the past month he has snorkelled on the Great Barrier Reef, lived it up in Sydney and the Blue Mountains, and soaked up the sites of the Great Ocean Road.
But the real reason he's schlepped across the world from his home in Bristol, England, is to serve on the jury of the Melbourne International Film Festival, alongside Aftersun director Charlotte Wells, as chair, and American indie darling Alex Ross Perry, among others. On Saturday, they will reveal the winners of the Bright Horizons Prize for a first- or second-time director – at $140,000, it is one of the richest on the planet – and the Black Magic Design award for an Australian filmmaker, worth $40,000.
Judging those prizes requires him to see 13 feature films, but Needham arrived here with a hit list of 91 he intended to catch. 'I've now seen 52 of them,' he says. If he doesn't tick them all off, no problem. 'There's always a carry-forward column.'
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Columns, lists and movies are the essential ingredients of Needham's life. 'I've been tracking every movie that I've seen since the first of January, 1980,' he tells me.
The 58-year-old Mancunian began his working life as a computer engineer at Hewlett-Packard, and owes his career and his fortune to two other pieces of technology: VCRs and the internet. But it all started in his bedroom, as a 14-year-old, with a simple notebook and pen.
It was 1981, and his family had just leapt on the latest thing in home technology – a video cassette machine. A 25-minute walk away was a store that sold and rented the machines, and had a small stash of movies on VHS to demonstrate what this marvellous new device could do. And Needham was able to borrow them for two weeks at a time.
'My obsession began, really, with Ridley Scott's Alien,' he says. 'I watched it every single day for the two weeks that we had it – 14 times in 14 days.'
He was fascinated by credits, too, reading them to the end long before post-credit sequences became a staple. And he soon started spotting patterns.
'I'm not sure if I understood what a cinematographer was when I was 14, but I knew they were in the opening credits, and then and I'd start to notice that this director often works with this DoP, or this producer is often producing things by this writer.'
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As his viewing racked up, he began to lose track of what he'd seen. So he started jotting it down in a notebook, which he'd pop in his pocket as he headed off to the video store for his latest batch of three tapes.
(As an aside, Needham tells me that by 1982 or 1983, some entrepreneurial character had started doing the rounds of his neighbourhood with a stash of VHS tapes in his car. 'The doorbell would ring, 'Oh, hey, video man'. He'd pop the boot open, and you'd be like, 'Oh, yeah, heard of that one'. It was an entirely different kind of streaming.' )
The first inklings of IMDb would soon emerge, as he transferred his jottings to his home computer. 'It was a Sharp MZ80k,' he recalls. 'It was 48KB [of RAM], and a cassette hard drive.'
Needham spent his summer pausing and rewinding videotapes and typing credits into his database. He backdated his entries to January 1, 1980, though he admits some of those entries, which are still on IMDb today, might be a bit sketchy. 'I've been meaning to go back ...'
For years it was a solitary pursuit, but in 1985, he discovered online bulletin boards, where members could dial a number, get online, sign up for a mailing list, and message other members. 'You'd probably be mailing, like, 100 fellow movie fans,' he says. 'But that's when I discovered there were other people like me. I was not the only crazy one.'
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In the early days, it could take a couple of days for someone to respond. But by the late '80s, things were picking up pace. 'You might get a response the same day – shock, horror,' he jokes. He was sharing his database with anyone who was interested, and others shared their own lists: one kept tabs on actresses, but only those still alive; another tracked directors.
In September 1990, someone – their name is lost to the mists of time, so no credit there – suggested collating all those separate lists into a single database. 'And so, on October 17, 1990 the first version of IMDb was published onto the public internet,' he says.
It was 1993, though, before this hobby pursued by a few film nerds really crossed the Rubicon. Someone at Cardiff University emailed to say he'd downloaded the movie database software and thought it was amazing. 'And he said, 'have you heard of this World Wide Web thing, because I think it might be quite big'.'
It was the early days of the internet, so early that a site called What's New on the Web published a daily list of new sites, typically just a couple each day. And Needham was all over it. 'I'd done the web,' he says, laughing. 'I'd been to every website that existed.'
Fast forward to late 1997, and Needham received a call from someone at Amazon to say Jeff Bezos would be in England in January and would like to meet. 'We thought we were going to talk about an ad deal,' he says. 'But Jeff had other plans.'
On April 24, 1998, IMDb became an Amazon company, and Needham and everyone who'd been working on it swapped their shares in their start-up for cash and shares in Amazon.
'In retrospect, I should have taken all shares,' he says.
He's done all right, though. Needham now gets to indulge his nerdy passion as much as he likes, all over the world. He's done jury duty at around 20 festivals, he thinks, including alongside Taika Waititi at Sundance in 2015. 'This is not my first rodeo,' he says of MIFF.
His favourite film? Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which he estimates he has seen about 50 times. His most-watched? Not Alien, but its sequel, Aliens, which he has seen 63 times.
And the running tally? 'It's 16,446, plus the 13 jury films,' he says.
He'll add those to the total once the deliberations are complete. There's always a carry-forward column.