EXPLANATION OF THE DATABASES ON THE LOONWIZARD PAGE (short version)
There are now about twenty-three thousand movies in my database. For some reason I can’t get it uploaded to the files section, even though it’s not over the size limit. Therefore, I’m posting links to it and the film artists database here.
This is being sent not only to the Whisperingmuse list but to other e-mail correspondents of mine who have shown an interest in movies. These others are cordially invited to join Whisperingmuse if they wish.
The movie database began with the question: Who are the greatest film stars of all time? The names Bogart, Wayne, Grant, Hepburn, Stewart, and a few others roll off the tongue immediately, but in what order? Where do Kirk Douglas, Bette Davis, Robert Mitchum, or Burt Lancaster fit in? Brando in the top five, or merely near the bottom of the top one hundred, or maybe not even that high? Where does one put such as Clint Eastwood or Burt Reynolds? What about superb comedic actors such as Peter Sellers? What about superstars of the dim film past such as Gish, Pickford, and Garbo, who are almost never seen today? Toshiro Mifune? Bela Lugosi? Fred Clark? I got to wondering if there were not some semi-objective means of ranking them, not just the biggest stars, but a substantial fraction of the minor stars, character actors, and perennial supporting players.
I realized early that, not only from the standpoint of the difficulties involved but also in consideration of attempting to be as objective as possible, no attempt should be made to assess the acting ability of the performers. The criteria would be the stature of each film, and the importance of the actor to the film, meaning usually but not always the size of the role. For example, Humphrey Bogart gets more credit for starring in Casablanca than Raul Julia gets for starring in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, and Bogart gets more credit for Casablanca than Claude Rains does for the same film. Whatever credit Arnold Schwarzenegger gets for Conan the Barbarian depends only upon the rating for that film, not upon any assessment of his acting in it. And that’s only reasonable. Could Dustin Hoffman have played that role?
Which leads to a somewhat superfluous digression on the question of “stars” versus “actors”. It is sometimes said that whereas the movie business used to have “stars”, today it has “actors“. One critic said that people didn’t go to the theater to see Garbo play a different role, they went to see Garbo play the same role in a different dress. Compare that to the bewildering variety of roles Meryl Streep has played. It would be pointless to say that Clark Gable wasn’t a particularly good actor. It would not even be a criticism, as it would be to say the same of, say, Brad Pitt. Bogart is often praised as a great actor, and it’s true that he excelled at every role I’ve seen him play, but then, except for The African Queen, he pretty much played the same role in all his films. (If I may be allowed a digression from this digression, some years ago I read an amusing novel entitled Celluloid Gangs, by Tom Tolnay, in which a live person encounters the ghosts of a number of deceased film actors which include Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. In the book Bogart announces his intention to play Hamlet in a new film version of Shakespeare’s play. The problem was that as a ghost he didn’t show up on film.) One difference I’ve noticed between yesterday’s “stars” and today’s “actors” is how few of the stars of the present day lend themselves to comedic imitation. John Wayne, Mae West, Bette Davis, Gable, Grant, Hepburn, Bogart, Robinson, Cagney, Stewart, Brando, all were frequent subjects of the impressionist’s art. Impressionists today have it rough. Who “does” Brad Pitt? Kevin Costner? Tom Cruise? Harrison Ford? George Clooney? Dustin Hoffman? One notable exception to this rule is Jack Nicholson. There’s Schwarzenegger, of course, but since he grew up in Austria he probably shouldn’t count. You could do William Shatner, but why bother?
But to return to the database. If you assign each movie a rating from one to ten, and assign each of the four principal cast members a rating of four, three, two, or one for their roles in that film, then multiply the film’s rating by the actor’s rating, you can assign a numeric rating for that actor in that film. For example: The film Casablanca gets a rating of ten, Bogart gets a four as the leading actor in that film, so Bogart’s score for Casablanca is forty, and Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Paul Henreid get thirty, twenty, and ten points respectively for the same film. (Yes, I know that officially Henreid gets third billing for Casablanca, but personally I regard both his role and his performance less interesting than Rains’s.) Similarly, Sean Astin gets thirty points for playing Samwise in The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, but only four points for his starring role in the execrable Rudy.
You could do this for writers, directors, and producers as well, one of each per film. And then there is “weirdness”. Some films are weird. Some are extremely weird, some are kind of weird, and some are hardly weird at all. So a weirdness rating for movies could be used to rank film artists in weirdness.
Hence the database. The first field is the movie title. I use the original official title, untranslated except for transcription into Roman characters for those not originally in that form. A Beautiful Mind is listed under BEAUTIFUL MIND, A, but Das Boot is listed under DAS BOOT, and A Kuruzslo, which is Hungarian and not about a thing called a kuruzslo, is listed under A KURUZSLO.
The YEAR field is the year of the film’s release, obviously.
QR stands for “quality rating”, a term I dislike intensely, even though I’ve been unable to come up with a better one. “Rating” would be better, except that that could lead to confusion with WR, “weirdness rating”. This is of course the film rating I described above, the numeric quantification of the idea that some movies are “better” than others, and that such may be used to obtain semi-objective ratings of film stars. The ratings are from one to ten, with most of the tens further subdivided from 101 to 110.
WR is “weirdness rating”, analogous to “quality rating”. What is “weirdness” in a movie? Well, what is “quality” in a movie? I define a movie’s “weirdness” as the sum total of those characteristics which tend to cause viewers to exclaim “This movie is &%#*ing weird!” The more often and the more vehement the exclamations the weirder the movie. “Quality” we shall save for another time.
STAR ONE through STAR FOUR are the top four stars of the film as described above, usually but not always in official credits order. I mentioned my rearrangement of Rains and Henreid in Casablanca. Officially I think Linda Blair gets something like tenth billing for The Exorcist, which is absurd. Sometimes the cast is billed in alphabetical order or order of appearance, in which case I have to guess at the top four cast members.
Then I also list the chief WRITER, chief DIRECTOR, and chief PRODUCER, as nearly as I can determine them.
Here is what the listing for Casablanca looks like:
CASABLANCA 1942 110 8 Bogart, Humphrey Bergman, Ingrid Rains, Claude Henreid, Paul Epstein, Julius J. Curtiz, Michael Wallis, Hal B.
Released in 1942, “quality rating” (yuck) of 110 (the highest subdivision of 10), weirdness rating of 8, principal stars, in order, Humphrey Bogart (who got the part because George Raft turned it down - answer to the trivia question “Who‘s George Raft?”), Ingrid Bergman (who couldn‘t wait to get this one over with so she could start filming For Whom the Bell Tolls), Claude Rains, and Paul Henreid, principal writer Julius J. Epstein, principal director Michael Curtiz (“Bring on the empty horses!”), principal producer Hal B. Wallis (a very knowledgeable, hands-on producer, underrated today because of having done Elvis movies late in his career).
The fields for the film artists database are the artist’s name, A for the film star rating determined as described above, AW for an actor’s weirdness rating, then the artist’s date of birth, then overall and weird ratings for writers, directors, and producers. The data for the artists’ ratings is currently being painstakingly entered by hand for one movie at a home, and so far only a fraction of the movies’ data has been so entered, leading in some cases to a noticeable selection bias. What is needed is a program or procedure to automatically transfer these data from the film database to the film artists database. Computer experts, are you listening?
Anyway, for the stars mentioned in paragraph three, current ratings are:
Humphrey Bogart: #13
John Wayne: #3
Cary Grant: #4
Katharine Hepburn: #31
James Stewart: #5
Kirk Douglas: #23
Bette Davis: #43
Robert Mitchum: #115
Burt Lancaster: #307
Marlon Brando: #290
Clint Eastwood: #181
Burt Reynolds: #34
Peter Sellers: #6
Lillian Gish: #293
Mary Pickford: #1,035
Greta Garbo: No data yet entered.
Toshiro Mifune: #898
Bela Lugosi: #19
Fred Clark: #1,809
I hope that I made sufficiently clear the ongoing nature of this project. The more data that are entered, the more realistic and meaningful the ratings will be.
