The TMDB Problem: One Moderator’s Bizarre Crusade to Erase Film History as it is Being Written
The purpose of this piece is to chronicle an ongoing problem faced by truly independent filmmakers—we are being obsessively harassed by a power-tripping moderator on a website you’ve probably never heard of, but which supplies the database for many websites you do know, all across the internet.
This problem, as of yet, has not been properly reported on, aside from angry tweets and the like by the filmmakers affected, such as myself. I am no journalist—I am a fellow filmmaker, myself—but I’m a good writer, so I guess I’ll be the one to finally explain the situation to the uninitiated.
You’ve heard of IMDb—everyone has. It’s the Internet Movie Database, where everyone goes to find basic information about pretty much any film that has ever been made. A site you may not have heard of though is TMDB—The Movie Database. One might assume that IMDb and TMDB hold the same purpose, and on the surface, that’s how it might seem—you want to know basic info about a movie, you go there, or if you run a website that requires a database of film information, you either import from IMDb (which costs an arm and a leg to do) or from TMDB (which is free to use for this purpose). Nothing ‘free’ is ever without a catch, though—look closely and you will discover that, in its current form, TMDB operates as an insidious campaign aimed at preventing people from discussing, or even knowing about, truly independent films—not just on its own site, but on many others which run off the TMDB database, such as Letterboxd.
‘Truly independent films’ mean films made entirely outside of the studio system, often at minuscule budgets, owned and distributed by their filmmakers. In truth, ‘truly independent films’ are what films are at their core—as Jean Cocteau once said, “film will only be an art form when its materials are as inexpensive as pen and paper”. We are closer to that reality than ever before, and the art form of cinema is only just now starting to become itself. You are reading these words during the most important period of film history—everything before now was mere prologue.
Truly independent filmmakers have been met, predictably so, with radio silence by the media—to publicize what we have accomplished would release a truth to the public that could greatly harm the industry. When people learn that you can make honest-to-god good movies with no money as opposed to just schlocky, ugly, z-grade crap, an artistic revolution will spread across the world serving as the final nails in the coffin of the corrupt and crumbling Hollywood machine.
If you think I might be speaking in too grandiose of terms here, consider a situation in which people were brainwashed to believe that it were impossible for them to put an ordinary pen to ordinary paper and have beauty come out, either through beautiful words or beautiful images—that artistic beauty required pen and paper so expensive that approval from gatekeepers was needed in order for the fingers of common man to be allowed to touch them. Under such circumstances, could we safely we say we even knew what literature, or illustration, was yet? Of course not—and yet, people assume that the first 100 years of film, and its gatekeepership, tell us everything we need to know about what film is and can be. To say that we live in an important time period now is an understatement—we are witnessing, with our alive, present eyes, the true emergence of an entire art form.
Not everyone understands the gravity and beauty of this—which brings us back to that website you’ve never heard of, TMDB, and a lone moderator has usurped control of it. In response to the growing number of truly independent films being made, that moderator, known only as ‘Lineker’ (after a famed English footballer), has taken it upon himself to come up with a demeaning term for the sort of films we make, a term which none of us use, and would never use: ‘amateur films’. This term is used by said moderator to lump our films in with home movies, vlogs, and various internet content ephemera. It doesn’t matter if you make a feature-length labor of love, beloved by critics and audiences alike—if you greenlit yourself, and you own your own film, you are considered an ‘amateur filmmaker’—and as such, said moderator will systematically hunt down and erase any mention of you or your films on the TMDB database, and ban any user who puts the information back up when it disappears, or even merely complains about TMDB’s policy to site support, which Lineker is in charge of as well. Don’t like what Lineker does? You can only complain to Lineker about it, so guess what, your IP address is logged and your account is deleted and you can never make another account again.
As an extreme, yet very real, example of this lunacy, it doesn’t matter if more than a half a million people have watched a feature-length film you made—as filmmaker Joel Haver learned with his hit film Pretend That You Love Me, which he released for free on YouTube. You are still considered ‘amateur’ by TMDB, because you own and made your own film. Any mention of Pretend That You Love Me, or of Joel Haver, is not allowed on TMDB. This then causes the periodic disappearance of said information from any websites that utilize the TMDB database. For the sin of refusing to give his film rights away to a distributor in exchange for a paltry sum, TMDB considers him not a ‘real’ filmmaker—a title apparently reserved for only those who sell their soul.
TMDB effectively belongs to Lineker—he is not technically the owner of the site, but anyone who might be above him is asleep at the wheel. This is his personal crusade—when your truly independent film is deleted from TMDB’s records (causing a ripple effect of it disappearing off Letterboxd) it is he who did that. When the TMDB site rules as to what constitutes a ‘film’ are rewritten periodically to more fit his personal opinions as to what constitutes a film or not, it is he who is doing that. All of this would not matter, would merely be a curiosity about one dumb website, were it not for TMDB’s power and influence due to how widespread its database is. A truly independent film of yours could have thousands of glowing reviews on Letterboxd—and all of those reviews, as well as any mention of your or your film, can disappear from their site overnight. To Letterboxd’s credit, when you notice the disappearance and report it to them, they work to restore it—sometimes quite slowly, but they do fix it. They know the problem with TMDB well, as this has happened to many truly independent filmmakers. But Letterboxd is stuck with the database, as it is the free one, and they can’t afford to create their own
To my knowledge, no other film database shares Lineker’s views about ‘amateur films’—this is wholly a TMDB problem, and really, a Lineker problem. IMDb has even gone out of its way to be as forward thinking about the art form of film as possible, allowing even YouTube shorts to have IMDb pages. IMDb didn’t become the gold standard by being stupid—they know which way the wind is blowing, and they know that much of what we take for granted as far as internet video content will be seen as bonafide art by future generations. TMDB, on the other hand, is so in the dark ages that even if your film is released on Amazon Prime Video, one of the largest streaming platforms in the world, that’s not enough for Lineker—if you retain the rights to your film, it’s not a ‘real film’.
It might be time for truly independent filmmakers to explore a legal case against TMDB. We are being singled out, our livelihoods as filmmakers harmed, due to one individual’s intense personal bias against us and the power he wields. In the mean time, if you are outraged about these goings on, I suggest you share the information far and wide and voice your concern as loudly as possible. Be respectful, but firm—make it clear that TMDB should not be run this way, and that truly independent filmmakers should not be treated this way by this or any database. We are paving the path forward for the entire art form, and future generations will look back on our contributions with awe and respect. So many in the present already do, and we are quite grateful for it.
Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed this, or any of the films I make, donate $2 per month to Kill The Lion Films, my film studio.