The mysterious actress suing IMDb for revealing her "real age" and "real Asian name" has been revealed: Huong Hoang, stage name Junie Hoang, is a 40-year-old Vietnam-born Texan who says IMDb's ruthless privacy invasion has jeopardized her career as "Ghetto Girl Three" in Hoodrats 2: Hoodrat Warriors and "Sandy" in Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver.
IMDB is Finally Legal: We know where your mind probably went hearing that the Internet Movie Database turns 18 today. But despite the lovely note passed along by founder Col Needham, we're mostly just relieved we can finally throw it out of the house. So, IMDB, consider yourself emancipated — write if you get work, and don't forget to vote. [IMDB]
Free to Good Home: IMDb yesterday uncorked about 6,000 movie and TV titles available for free viewing via Hulu, including recent episodes of The Office, 24 and Battlestar Galactica; site officials also noted that new episodes of some series — 30 Rock among them — will be available in advance of their airdates this fall. Not so with the site's full-length features, however, which, beyond classics like The Night of the Hunter and Some Like it Hot, include Dude, Where's My Car?, Liar Liar and The Scorpion King, finally testing the critical consensus that their makers can't give these films away. We shall see! [IMDb via NYT]
Los Angeles-based Withoutabox, a membership site which allows independent filmmakers to submit their work to movie festivals, has been acquired by Amazon.com subsidiary IMDB, the company told customers in an email today. David Straus and Joe Neulight founded the company in 2000 and saw it become popular among film-school students and film-festival producers. A niche audience, to be sure: Compete.com puts the site's "people count" in December 2007 at 22,888. But we suspect that Amazon bought the site not for its eyeballs, but for content it can sell directly to its huge audience of shoppers, bypassing Hollywood. Straight from Withoutabox to Amazon Unbox, in other words. Anyone know how much Amazon paid?
Each Friday, NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller and 'Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. This week, we hear about the quietly-revamped movie pages: "Web sites need to be reference sources. So every actor, director, cinematographer, gaffer — and every film — has its own reference page, with encyclopedic and reliable data supplied by our terrific colleagues at Baseline Studio Systems. Thanks to Baseline, Our movie database now has over 900,000 people and 200,000 movie titles. Like IMDB, except that it's true. Want to know who mixed the sound for Titanic? No problem. Did Bosley Crowther like the 1962 version of Billy Budd? Easy to find out. Do you like trailers? You could lose yourself here for days. 'All in all,' says Ariel Kaminer, 'I really do think it stands as the best movie site in America — and that's a title with a LOT of competition.' Anybody want to argue?"
Hi, I am a young person who goes to major web sites! I am "in the know" about technology so I have several good ideas for these sites, and I will list them here. ATTENTION PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR THESE SITES: If you read my idea and you use it, you have to pay me for it with 1% of your company. My first idea will finally make Yahoo a popular web site.
We tried to resist, we really did. But much as we'd like to ignore this in the hopes that it'll go away, we can't help but heap scorn on it (even though that is exactly what it wants). Such is . . . our job. Anyway, meet Eric Schaeffer, a 5'8'' semi-failed screenwriter whose blog is the latest addition to the stable of the Rudius (ugh, we feel like we just said "Voldemort"!) blog empire of sickmaking, unfunny douchebaggery. He's looking for a woman to spend the rest of his life with, but he has some pretty stringent requirements:
We've always thought that the supposed stigma of an early career in porn hurting one's mainstream Hollywood prospects was a little overblown. If Austin Rogers can go from the hardcore Hungarian action of Fuck Factory to family fare like How to Eat Fried Worms, anyone can leave behind their regrettable rent money gigs and make a name in this industry.
