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Col Needham greets me with a big smile and an outstretched hand and slides me his business card. \u201cFounder and executive chair of IMDb\u201d, it says on one side, and on the other, \u201cAll of life\u2019s riddles are answered in the movies\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a movie quote about movie quotes,\u201d says Needham, chuckling merrily. Of course, it is.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the real reason he\u2019s 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 \u2013 at $140,000, it is one of the richest on the planet \u2013 and the Black Magic Design award for an Australian filmmaker, worth $77,500.<\/p>\n
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Needham at the opening night of MIFF on August 7.Credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n
Judging those prizes requires him to see 13 feature films, but Needham arrived here with a hit list of 91 he intended to catch. \u201cI\u2019ve now seen 52 of them,\u201d he says. If he doesn\u2019t tick them all off, no problem. \u201cThere\u2019s always a carry-forward column.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Columns, lists and movies are the essential ingredients of Needham\u2019s life. \u201cI\u2019ve been tracking every movie that I\u2019ve seen since the first of January, 1980,\u201d he tells me.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It was 1981, and his family had just leapt on the latest thing in home technology \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy obsession began, really, with Ridley Scott\u2019s Alien,\u201d he says. \u201cI watched it every single day for the two weeks that we had it \u2013 14 times in 14 days.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure if I understood what a cinematographer was when I was 14, but I knew they were in the opening credits, and then I\u2019d start to notice that this director often works with this DoP, or this producer is often producing things by this writer.\u201d<\/p>\n
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As his viewing racked up, he began to lose track of what he\u2019d seen. So he started jotting it down in a notebook, which he\u2019d pop in his pocket as he headed off to the video store for his latest batch of three tapes.<\/p>\n
(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. \u201cThe doorbell would ring, \u2018Oh, hey, video man\u2019. He\u2019d pop the boot open, and you\u2019d be like, \u2018Oh, yeah, heard of that one\u2019. It was an entirely different kind of streaming.\u201d )<\/p>\n
The first inklings of IMDb would soon emerge, as he transferred his jottings to his home computer. \u201cIt was a Sharp MZ80k,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt was 48KB [of RAM], and a cassette hard drive.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI\u2019ve been meaning to go back …\u201d<\/p>\n
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Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien, the film that started it all.Credit: Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\n
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. \u201cYou\u2019d probably be mailing, like, 100 fellow movie fans,\u201d he says. \u201cBut that\u2019s when I discovered there were other people like me. I was not the only crazy one.\u201d<\/p>\n
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In the early days, it could take a couple of days for someone to respond. But by the late \u201980s, things were picking up pace. \u201cYou might get a response the same day \u2013 shock, horror,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In September 1990, someone \u2013 their name is lost to the mists of time, so no credit there \u2013 suggested collating all those separate lists into a single database. And on October 17, 1990, the first version of IMDb was published onto the public internet.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d downloaded the movie database software and thought it was amazing. \u201cAnd he said: \u2018Have you heard of this World Wide Web thing because I think it might be quite big\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the early days of the internet, so early that a site called What\u2019s New on the Web published a daily list of new sites, typically just a couple each day. And Needham was all over it. \u201cI\u2019d done the web,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cI\u2019d been to every website that existed.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWe thought we were going to talk about an ad deal,\u201d he says. \u201cBut Jeff had other plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
On April 24, 1998, IMDb became an Amazon company, and Needham and everyone who\u2019d been working on it swapped their shares in their start-up for cash and shares in Amazon.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn retrospect, I should have taken all shares,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s done all right, though. Needham now gets to indulge his nerdy passion as much as he likes, all over the world. He\u2019s done jury duty for about 20 festivals, he thinks, including alongside Taika Waititi at Sundance in 2015. \u201cThis is not my first rodeo,\u201d he says of MIFF.<\/p>\n
His favourite film? Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
And the running tally? \u201cIt\u2019s 16,446, plus the 13 jury films.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019ll add those to the total once the deliberations are complete. There\u2019s always a carry-forward column.<\/p>\n
The Melbourne International Film Festival competition winners will be announced on Saturday. Details at miff.com.au<\/p>\n