In A Lonely Place
Turner Classic Movies, the classic movie network which still shows classic movies, is beta testing TCMDB.com, a movie database which hyperlinks stars and crew and titles. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s a limited IMDB. Tuner Classic’s dirty little secret is that it’s an outlet for the MGM library, the vast backlog of MGM films which has changed hands four or five times since Ted Turner bought the studio from Kirk Kerkorian in 1985. He sold the studio back almost immediately but kept the library, and a network was born.
So I logged on to look up one of my favorite MGM Classics, In A Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart as a screenwriter who may be a violent psychotic and Gloria Grahame as his increasingly worried girlfriend. The differences from IMDB, aside from the smaller pool of references, is a much nicer page design and a few oddball facts. For example, they give the length of the film in both minutes AND footage. Click on Bogart’s name and you can find out what killed him (throat cancer). What they don’t have for Bogie is a complete list of his movies. They list Milestones, which you can interperet as Movies He Made With MGM. Caine Mutiny? Sorry, that was Columbia, but thanks for asking.
So I guess you can say it’s a great research tool as long as you work at TCM. Or a fun way to find out how MGM contract stars died. There may be no reason to not have TCMdb, but there sure as hell isn’t any reason for it. We’ve proved that with geometric logic.
Post Postscript: Regarding yesterday’s post, I considered The Player and rejected it because depending on who you are it could go on the best or worst movies list. For worst movies, it seemed that a good standard would be almost everyone had to agree that these movies suck. SOB is kind of an exception because it’s not widely known, but I’d like to think that if more people saw it they’d hate it. Oddly, it got 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.com, but I think that’s a statisical mistake caused by a lack of reviews. I think. God knows I’ve been wrong before. Anyone want to volunteer to rent the DVD and report back?