Film-mad kid becomes the star maker
You haven’t heard of Col Needham, but through his unique website, he wields an unusual power in the movie industry, writes
Kevin Maher.
When Col Needham was 13 his mother burst into his darkened bedroom in Denton, south Manchester. Horrified by the sight of what he was doing, she told him to stop it straight away, open the curtains, and get outside for some cleansing, purifying air.
Needham refused, and instead continued his painstaking task – diligently logging, into a primitive computer database, the available facts and figures on all the many movies he had seen (he was then a self-confessed ‘‘binge-watcher’’ and could often, on the family’s VHS player, watch six films in a day).
It was lucky, naturally, that Needham ignored his mother’s directive, because his teenage database would eventually, in the most unlikely of fairy tale scenarios, transform him into a multi-millionaire, change the way that movies work for ever, and bestow on him the much-coveted title of Most Powerful Brit in Hollywood.
Needham today, at 49, is the founder and chief executive of the Internet Movie Database, one of the world’s most recognisable and popular websites. He regularly hobnobs with the Tinseltown A-list (Spielberg is, famously, a huge fan and told Needham at an Oscars after-party in 2013 that he had even been using the IMDb on his phone during the ceremony).
Needham can be found on red carpets, on film festival awards juries, and at movie premieres. And, crucially, he has changed the course of many Hollywood careers, courtesy of his website’s ‘‘StarMeter’’ - a function that tracks the popularity, in real time, of Hollywood stars, allowing financiers and producers to gauge their potential pull-factor with audiences. The career of Twilight star Robert Pattinson, for instance, was essentially constructed via the IMDb StarMeter.
For now, though, Needham is doing what Needham does best – waxing lyrical about the power of cinema and, in this case, the ability of movies to change the lives of underprivileged children.
Needham speaks quickly and passionately, and punctuates his words with either giggles of disbelief (usually at his own fame) or hushed reverence (usually at the power of film).
As someone who was raised, with his younger brother, by a single mum (his parents divorced early - ‘‘I have no memory of my father’’) in workingclass Manchester, Needham would seem to be a textbook case of trusting in the transformative power of cinema.
Indeed, when discussing the Disney film Queen of Katwe (about a street urchin turned chess champion) he becomes positively evangelical, almost whispering: ‘‘It shows you that wherever you come from, no matter what your background, you can still be a champion!’’
He says he likes to use his own story as a template for the children he supports through the British film charity Into Film Festival, as an example of how important it is to believe in what you’re doing and to stay focused at all costs. In his case, he continued to nurture that primitive database right through to his college years, which were spent studying computer science at Leeds University.
He launched the database as a website in 1993 (‘‘It was one of the first 100 websites, ever’’), with the purpose of providing users with a handy tool for cross-referencing film titles with dates, stars, directors, editors, composers, production details, and behind-the-scenes trivia (‘‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, made in 1960, was the first feature film to show a flushing toilet on screen,’’ he says, reciting from memory, and warning me that ‘‘I can be a trivia-quoting juggernaut.’’).
The internet at that time, however, was a barely formed thing, and the website was supposed to be just a hobby for Needham, who was working for Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, married to his ‘‘high-school sweetheart’’, Karen, and with new twin girls. Then, in 1995, he got a phone call from The New York Times. ‘‘They said, ‘We want to do a piece on the IMDb. We all find it so useful, and everyone in the film industry is using it’.’’
Within three years the IMDb had been snapped up by Amazon, which kept the company based in Bristol and left Needham in charge as chief executive (indeed, he was promoted to vice-president of Amazon.com).
The IMDb has since only grown in popularity and power. The StarMeter, especially, has changed the way movies are cast. It is utterly simple and brutally effective, and collated by counting the amount of clicks a star’s IMDb profile page receives. Thus the top 25 on any given day is usually an eclectic selection of solid-gold stars in movies on release; TV stars in shows that have just been broadcast; and other less stellar names that have suddenly registered with a curious online audience.
Where the StarMeter becomes much more useful is further down the rankings. That’s where every producer wants to find the next Felicity Jones.’’ Needham gives the example of Pattinson, who was effectively discovered on the IMDb in 2007. ‘‘In the Rob Pattinson case, the producers were having trouble casting Twilight and so they told their staff, ‘Go on to the IMDb and search for someone who’s been in a Harry Potter movie.’ Rob, who had played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was around the top 10,000 rankings of the StarMeter. So they called him, and the rest is history.’’
But Needham says you can’t artificially accelerate a star’s progress up through the StarMeter via extra clicks or dubious software. ‘‘We have filters and we monitor for that.’’
The IMDb opened its own Los Angeles office in 2008. In the same year he was invited to his first Cannes Film Festival, to attend the opening night screening of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. ’’It was my first red carpet,’’ he says. ‘‘And one of my top five movie-going experiences.’’
The only blip, if there is one, is a long-running legal battle with the Screen Actors Guild, which wants the IMDb to remove dates of birth from its actor profile pages to help to avoid potential age discrimination. Otherwise, he says, the future is bright for the IMDb, with more content than ever to filter through its pages (a third of a million entries were added last year alone), and new platforms and even greater functionality to embed the IMDb into the online moviewatching experience.
In 1995, Col Needham got a phone call from The New York Times. Within three years the IMDb had been snapped up by Amazon.