How the Internet Movie Database Ruined My Life
by David Fairhurst
In the plumbing business, success is pretty easy to measure: If people are hiring you to fix their pipes and the pipes don’t leak anymore when you’re done, then you’re a successful plumber. But in the performing arts—where even “successful” practitioners are unemployed much of the time—the measure of “success” is not so cut-and-dried.
When people ask what I do for a living, I’m never quite sure how to answer. Acting is my career, but strictly speaking it’s not what I “do for a living.” Except for a few months in 2001, my income from acting has never been sufficient to pay my bills (and even then it was partly the result of creative accounting). So the “do for a living” question always requires me to hedge, to qualify, to explain the distinction between “what I do” and “what I do for a living.” But no matter how I phrase it, it always feels like making excuses for not being more objectively, conventionally “successful.”
Until I landed in the Internet Movie Database.
The IMDb, that massively authoritative online compendium of facts about films and television shows, has managed to become a source of recognition for actors searching for an objective measure of success. Once your name is listed in IMDb, you have tangible proof for all the world to see that you actually are a working actor and not just a waiter-slash-office-temp-slash-actor-wannabe.
So last fall, when I saw that I finally had my very own page in IMDb, it felt like validation at last. Then I had to go and ruin it.
Like many websites, IMDb has a subscription service, called IMDb Pro, offering additional features not available on its free site. Curious about what else this unofficial arbiter of show business worth had to say about me, I decided to order a free trial subscription. And that’s where I discovered STARmeter.
STARmeter is a service that provides dynamic popularity rankings for every single person in the IMDb based upon the millions of searches conducted daily by its users, offering a snapshot of who’s up and who’s down in the Hollywood hierarchy at any given moment. (In early November 2005, for example, "Jarhead" and "Brokeback Mountain" star Jake Gyllenhaal was ranked No. 1.)
And according to STARmeter, on Dec. 10, 2005, at 9:47 p.m., I was officially the 529,686th most popular person in show business.
At the time, I wasn’t sure if that deserved a Homer Simpsonesque “Whoo-hoo!” or “D’oh!”
On the one hand, I suppose I should be grateful I made the list at all, considering that my IMDb page contains just three measly credits—all TV guest appearances—the most recent being more than three years old. To make matters worse, none of my characters have names, just numbers. And if that weren’t humbling enough, all of them are No. 2. (My new career goal: to play a television character with an actual name—or at least to get a promotion from Lab Technician #2 to Lab Technician #1.)
But on the other hand, did I mention there are officially 529,685 people in the entertainment industry more popular than me? To put that figure in perspective: If the gods of show business were to shine on me today and my popularity were suddenly to surge by half a million places, that would still leave me looking up at almost 30,000 people!
Loath as we may be to admit it, a sort of involuntary rivalry often develops among actors who’ve known each other a long time, so that any happiness one may feel at a friend’s success is tainted, if ever so slightly, by envy—or as Gore Vidal once wrote, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” (Vidal’s STARmeter rank, incidentally, is 6,202.) In the pre-wired era, those feelings were evoked only occasionally, by an unexpected glimpse of a name in a TV show’s credits, for example. But thanks to the Internet, the truly masochistic can now indulge their feelings of inadequacy 24 hours a day by Googling their rivals—or now, by STARmetering them. So naturally, feeling dissatisfied with my own STARmeter rank, I had to look up those of my grad school classmates.
Thanks to her appearance in a Spike Lee movie, Yvette Brooks just edged me out as the 445,539th most popular person in show business. Andres Faucher (385,478), Nitsa Benchetrit (355,920), and Marshall York (328,324) did a bit better, while Meghan McGrath (284,608), Bart Mallard (218,565), and Al Bernstein (155,978) confirmed their spots in the popular crowd. Closing in on the 100,000 mark was Kimberly Yates, whose cultlike following in Japan put her at 111,584, with Jack Howard at 101,174 and Kamal Marayati sitting pretty at 26,156. And topping the list of my grad school comrades: Bradley Cooper, whose roles in "Alias," "Kitchen Confidential," and "Wedding Crashers" make him the 449th most popular person in show business.
Though a few of the actors I went to school with are not yet listed, among those who are, I’m definitely in the bottom tier, clinging by my fingertips to the fringes of the industry. Of course, in a Hollywood version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the very act of looking up these STARmeter rankings changes them. For example, the day after compiling the figures above, I looked up my own name again and found that, incredibly, my popularity had surged from 529,686 all the way up to 312,630. Whoo-hoo! Watch your back, Jake Gyllenhaal!
And that’s when I became obsessed with artificially boosting my STARmeter rank. I resolved to manipulate the figures by looking up my own name over and over and over again. Every single day, I would type in “David Fairhurst” and watch the little popularity graph on my page slowly approach the realm of faux stardom. At the very least, I hoped to make it onto STARmeter’s list of “Most Popular Actors With Less Than 5 Roles,” right alongside noted thespian Paris Hilton, fooling the whole movie industry into thinking I was an unknown but up-and-coming actor to watch. Or maybe just Paris Hilton’s latest fiancé. But in either case, perhaps I could manufacture some real career-enhancing buzz for myself.
So I spent the next day looking up my own name on IMDb roughly nine gazillion times. But after a while, the whole mission began to feel a little too needy and pathetic, even for an admittedly career-obsessed actor like me. And asking friends and relatives to do it for me—well, that would just be embarrassing.
So for now I’ve decided to leave my STARmeter rank alone and let natural showbiz selection take its course. (Okay, I admit it: The other day I found myself at Yahoo! again creating a new fake email address so I could order another free trial subscription to IMDb Pro—just to check how my popularity was doing, you understand.)
But if you’d like to find out what my current rank is, by all means feel free to look me up. And tell your friends and relatives to do it, too. Every day. As many times as possible.