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The Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database is secretive, annoying to the Hollywood people it tracks and the data can be wrong, says today's Wall Street Journal A-hed story. It quotes, among others, the actors Robert Lesser, Rosanna Arquette and Amy Weber, who says, "Why does everyone need to know my bra size?" She claims that IMDb lists a wrong birth year (1970) for her, but she won't divulge the correct one. "I'm not in my forties," Weber says. The story of how IMDb works is more than just disputes over age.
The inner workings of IMDb—including how it compiles information—remain mysterious. Mr. Needham declines to disclose how many employees he has, or how many people make up the editorial team responsible for making changes. The Seattle-based site, which is owned by Amazon.com Inc. and gets more than 110 million unique users per month, according to comScore Inc., lists no address or phone number and doesn't disclose revenues.
* Actually: A blogger in Seattle read the Wall Street Journal story and did what the paper's reporter couldn't or didn't do: found an address on the IMDb website and took a picture of the building.
