Classic Film : IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive experience

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It is to move them to a more modern platform.

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You are absolutely correct!

However, upgrading the platform also means upgrading the staff. They may have some folks who have been hanging around without keeping their skill sets up to date. I've seen this same situation in several IT shops over the years.

jj

And if need be just wipe all the comments & start anew.

Shutting down the message boards is a sure way to raise the I.Q. around here

At the end of last year the Food and Drink board had a troll that was out to destroy a certain innocent poster and when it got the poster to delete his account, the troll continued to try to destroy the Food & Drink board. This troll was from the Soapbox board and boasted on that board its plan to destroy Food & Drink. F&D is one of the most benign boards on IMBD and most of the posters are very friendly. Administration waited weeks before doing anything about that troll. By shutting down the message boards, IMBD is just giving up and letting the trolls win. Perhaps if they would charge a small fee to post on the message boards,many of the trolls would disappear. I've really enjoyed IMBD but it has gone downhill in the last 3 years. What a shame.

I will never let you part, for you are always in my heart: MJ
turn to page 394: Snape (nasty woman)

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Perhaps if they would charge a small fee to post on the message boards, many of the trolls would disappear.

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Hear, Hear.


CC:https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/28/b3/81/28b3814d7598e079965170c781cf7dc8.jpg

Or, in the case of Wallfish or neemak, go bankrupt.


"Security - release the badgers."

So IMDb's usual, lazy solution is just to cowardly dismantling the message boards!
I believe that IMDb needs a MAJOR overhaul of personnel or else the whole site may collapse.

It's a business decision;Amazon decided the boards are more trouble then they are worth.

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It's a business decision;Amazon decided the boards are more trouble then they are worth.

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A very lucid conclusion in just sixteen words, which can be reduced to three: business is business.

"business is business"

Say you own a candy store because you get satisfaction and an income from it. However, it seems an armed robber enters your establishment for cash present, and with no interest in candy. Armed robberies occur sporadically at your store.

Rinse and repeat, and your store is not the fun it once was.

You decide to go out of business, because that unpredictable and potentially deadly hassle isn't worth it.

Part of many businesses is going out of business. For that, many here are blaming the candy store owner.

E pluribus unum

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you get satisfaction

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Smart and clever.

I like that.

It's like a fable or a parable.

You don't need a Facebook account to do it. Lot's of things to talk about as long as you like the subjects that they bring up. Apparently no one does because no matter what the thread subject, all that I see there are posts protesting the closing of the boards.

You don't need to sign up for Twitter either to look at the comments there. It's great for those who are generally the type to post "terrific movie" or just give four-star ratings but how the hell are you supposed to describe some film on which you feel strongly in just 140 characters?



It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

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but how the hell are you supposed to describe some film on which you feel strongly in just 140 characters?

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Especially if the films are

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes.

Or

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Apparently there's a way to stagger consecutive posts. It's probably simple but Trump hasn't mastered it and he's been using Twitter for 8 years.

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

And:

Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad,

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,

Who's Harry Kellerman, and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?,

and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Don't forget The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957)

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

Seven films that would be perfect for a Twitter review!!

I'm gonna miss this brilliant repartee, and I'm now regretting my long absence from these boards (a choice made out of necessity).

Yes, CFB has its own Algonquin Round Table.

So am I. Mine for nine months, that I would like to recover now, but how could I possibly foresee that something like this was going to happen?

I can't read that Twitter stuff - too much concentrated in a small space. Bullet points are fine if some real ammo will follow. That's why it's good for the Trumpster as he has a limited vocabulary.



It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

Neither can I. I don't even have iPhone, iPad, tablet and those things. Just our old (well, not so old) computer.

I've read that the Pope, the Dalai Lama and others have Twitter accounts. But even Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 probably has more than 140 characters (I didn't count them: it was not a time for counting)

I have two desktops - I don't like anything smaller and I need a fairly large screen. I barely use the newer desktop which came with Win 8. I did upgrade to Win 10 on that machine, but I still don't like the layout.

This PC is 7 1/2 years old - the longest that I've ever had a machine. It runs well but slowly. The time to retire it is coming and I've ported over all that needs to be moved. But I like the Win 7 interface and it hardly ever freezes unless I go to InfoWars. No kidding, it froze twice on that site and while I abhor Alex Jones for his Sandy Hook stance (a personal connection), I do like to keep somewhat current and aware.


It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

We (my wife and I) have only ONE desktop in neutral territory (the living room) and we both use it very often, so we keep having domestic quarrels ("Now it's MY time; no, you had yours this morning!", and that kind of thing). After 20 February she will be so happy

I have the old computer in my 'studio', but without Internet connexion. Fortunately I kept hundred of PDFs, cache things, documents, old CFB threads, etc.

I'm a hoarder - if I read something on the web that I like, I save it. I'm otherwise disorganized, but I live alone so it doesn't affect anyone. But my documents, my music - anything on the PC is labeled properly and easy to find.



It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

I envy you. I have thousands and thousands of books, magazines, newspapers, papers without news, vynil, cassettes, CDs, videos, DVDs, Super-8 films, folders,etc, etc, etc, (plus my wife's novels and things, but that's a world apart). Not enough bookshelves and boxes and space for everything (and it's not a flat or an apartmment, but an old, isolated two-floor house! Towers (lika Pisa's) of books and the like.Plus dust and some mice here an there. Terrible,

Quite often it's impossible for me to find what I'm looking for.

I repeat: I envy you.

Are you kidding - I'm only organized on the PC. I've got books, CDs, cassettes (VHS - maybe 1,000 of them), BluRays and DVDs all over the place. Some on shelves, some in boxes, some in the closet and some just stacked on tables.

But I have converted at least 1,000 movies to MP4 format and those sit on various external drives and those drives are all detailed in spreadsheets. In my career, I often worked for people with really clean desks but who did very little during the day other than cover the butt. My desk was cluttered but I was productive like few others. I rather thrive on clutter but I see the PC as a brain extension and I insist on order there.

A paradox, I know.



It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood you.

I have well OVER one thousand videotapes (I stopped cataloguing them when I reached #1000), both VHS and Beta (and my Beta player doesn't work, and try to find one now). I'll have to consider seriously the MP4 option.

I too have a paradox or contradiction: I am extremely disorganised with things, objects, but very organised with TIME and its measure (I even wrote a paper on that), and this includes dates, different calendars, time zones, planetary ephemeris and the like.

I'm very fixated on dates. Just the other day I was speaking to a friend and telling him that I could remember what we did 50 years ago that Feb 5. He asked how I could remember and I said "because I don't try, I just do."

We went to see Island of Terror and The Projected Man at a theater in Brooklyn. He asked "What did we do the next weekend?" and I told him we went to a sci-fi convention at the McBurney YMCA. That since Monday was a holiday (Lincoln's b-day), we stayed up and watched Burn, Witch Burn on WABC.

That he was able to check somehow with a friend who has access to old listings and he called me tonight to say that I was right.

But I have no idea what I ate for breakfast this morning.

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

That has a name. Selective memory or somerthing like that, the ability to retrieve certain facts and events but not others. Remembering old events but not recent ones has another name, but it's too recent and I FORGOT!

For me it's events, such as taking my younger sister to the movies for her twelfth birthday, a double bill of Trog and Taste The Blood Of Dracula.

Movie stuff doesn't necessarily predominate but it often tends to. I remember when you once mentioned the Thanksgiving airing of Myterious Island in I believe it was 1965, Thanksgiving, and dang,I rememberedI'd seen the movie already, in the theater, didn't expect to find it on TV. We were visiting relatives, who were wealthier than they were, thus they had a color television (it would still be a few years before we'd get one).

Then there was that Sunday afternoon when we visited our grandparents and Gary Cooper's death was on the news, while the other channel was airing Spawn Of The North, with Henry Fonda and George Raft. The scenes of Raft blowing cigarette smoke out of his,lung? was like something out of Tod Browning. Times being what they were it would take me a full decade to track down the title of the film. I just remembered a few scenes. Ah, memories

I can recall almost every theater in which I saw any given movie. And with whom. While my body may be breaking down, my memory remains of the steel-trap variety.

I am pretty much the same. That the vast majority of those theaters of my youth and childhood are gone now, literally torn down, I find sad. At least some of the showcase theaters downtown remain and have become historic landmarks.

Come to my city. We still have two old theaters standing and operating - one built circa 1915 and one built around 1940. They're within walking distance of each other.

Of course we have plenty of new theaters around, too.

~~~~~
Proud to be Canadian!

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That the vast majority of those theaters of my youth and childhood are gone now, literally torn down, I find sad.

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All of mine are now gone, with the exception of Radio City Music Hall, which no longer shows movies on a regular basis. Many have morphed into retail spaces and churches, while others, which I actually watched being built, have been demolished. Because my love of old movie theaters equals my love of classic films, I find this situation indescribably depressing.

That's awful. I haven't been to NYC in years. In its heyday it was the theater capital of America, and of,as if I need to tell younot just movies and the so-called legitimate theater but of opera and ballet, vaudeville and burlesque.

But it's become a sort of micro-home entertainment world. I'm a regular at the local library and until a couple of years ago they featured lectures regularly, by scholars, authors and journalists, on a variety of topics. As time went by the number of patrons dwindled and they stopped doing them. It was social, too, and I knew a lot of the people from being around and about. I really miss that. It was like a night on the town in the neighborhood.

Sometimes I can't recall the name of the theater as we chased a lot of horror films and spaghetti westerns down using Cue Magazine and traveled to joints from the tip of Brooklyn by Stillwell Ave to Dyckman St uptown. I may not recall the name but I recall where they all are.

I can pretty much recall every double-bill too.



It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

The double bills were memorable, weren't they?

Some of the notable ones I recall:

The Terror and Dementia 13

The Hand and Konga

Rome Adventure and Four For Texas

The Spirit Is Willing and Bonnie And Clyde


In Cambridge, at the Brattle, where, for years, going to the fall Bogart festival was a rite of passage for Harvard undergrads, the double bills were nearly always Bogart and Bogart. I can't remember all the combos, and it's not really important. They tended to show films from the same era, thus The Petirified Forest would go with something from the 30s, The Maltese Falcon, the early 40s, and so on.

I saw The Spirit is Willing with Warning Shot. I thought the Castle film was terrible. The Busy Body wasn't much better.

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

That's interesting. Wasn't Warning Shot Paramount? I just looked up The Spirit Is Willing, and it's Paramount. Bonnie And Clyde was Warners, and while there was a lot of mixing up of films on double bills back then I believe the studios still sent them out to smaller theaters just like before. One local theater showed British films as B offerings in their double bills, mostly (my guess) because they were overwhelmingly black and white, were probably picked up for a song, then thrown away as the lower half of a twofer. I felt kind of bad for guys like Kenneth More and Richard Todd on account of it. They were winding down as star attractions anyway, but still.

Most of the time studios would pair up two homemade features back in those days of RKO and Loew's being the primary circuits here.

But in 1965 for example, the WB film Two on a Guillotine played RKO with another WB movie, only this was the indie outfit Woolner Brothers and the film was Hercules in the Haunted World. Maybe it was because the studio did send Connie Stevens and Caesar Romero on a PA tour for the film, the theater chain opted to add a second feature.

When Having a Wild Weekend played the RKO chain that summer, the second feature was AIP's The Time Travelers. Coincidentally, the stars of the WB film, the Dave Clark Five did a PA tour to support their movie.

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

Do you know who owned those theater circuits back then? I believe RKO was bought by Glen Alden after the divestiture, not sure about Loew's. Up here in Boston and New England my sense is that many of those chain theaters were either sold off individually or that they were bought up by smaller local chains.

Not sure about RKO. There were two major ones in Boston, with the bigger of the two called the Keith Memorial. It still stands! Actually, the other one's building is still there but the theater is long gone. For a long time it housed the state department of welfare! Not sure about the other RKO theaters, which were a presence in the Merrimack Valley (Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill) but not in Boston's western suburbs. I find this ironic, since B.F. Keith himself, who died around the time of the First World War, lived in Lowell; however the Keith chain was itself a national one.

Paramount was a major presence around here. The larger of the two local theater in my home town was called the Paramount, kept the name till it closed down some thirty or more years ago. It looked to me like it had been designed for stage shows, given its size and spaciousness. Luckily, Boston's downtown Paramount has been preserved, right down to its name, which is still in lights, just like before. The smaller Paramount, the Publix, lasted till around twenty years ago, though it was I believe shuttered for some time.

I had a customer, a long time ago, with whom I got to talking once about theaters who, as it turned out, had worked for a local chain that owned the two theaters where I grew up and a bunch of others as well. It was called M-P, and he said they were quite a large outfit locally. They picked up the local Paramount, the suburban one, though it wasn't made clear to me that they bought the entire chain post-1948.

Also, while on this rather arcane topic, do you know which of the studio owned theater chains were the largest? It's been my sense from my reading that Paramount and then RKO were far and above the biggest, with the other three major studios much smaller, with Fox much stronger west of the Mississippi, Loew's, apparently the best managed of them all, strategically basing their theaters in large cities throughout the country, pretty much steering clear of smaller markets. They apparently passed on suburbs and small towns, would, for instance, in, say, Missouri, have theaters in St. Louis and Kansas City, and no place else. That consent decree was a strange one, I've always thought. The studios did in engage in unfair and monopolistic practices, on the one hand, and yet their ownership of all movie theaters nationwide never got above the 20% mark, leaving the remaining theaters in the hands of local owners and in many cases regional chains; Great Lakes, lower South, Northwest, and so on.

That whole divestiture thing has always bugged me, if only because that and HUAC were simultaneous blows against the movie colony that was mostly New Dealers who served the purpose during the war years.

As far as Loew's is concerned, I thought that Marcus Loew spun off an entirely separate company to run the chain which was mostly settled in midwest and eastern cities of size. Didn't the majors get to keep some of the theaters? It seems to me that I read that Paramount kept about half of its theaters but I don't know the details - the spread in terms of seating capacity and thus revenue. That's a part of film history that I didn't much follow, mostly because there was so little out there on it other than coffee table books about the movie palaces themselves.

To show how the laws have changed, the ownership of Loew's would change several times and eventually would fall into the hands of Sony who owned Columbia also. I've lost track of subsequent ownership as international partnerships began to play shell games with it and now i believe it is part of the AMC chain.

It was my impression that Paramount was the largest chain, they had about 1,500 houses at the time of the split. Since it was "the Paramount decree" that formed the decision, that one strikes me as the one most covered. A subject worth doing some legwork on but I need more coffee and a clearer head than I have at this moment - 730am and only three hours of sleep.

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

The emphasis on the studios of the classic era in books and articles is mostly on their glamorous aspects, such as stars, directors, producers, with in recent years stuff on Eddie Mannix at Metro and other "fixers"; politics with studios, scandals, but not much that I know of regarding the nuts and bolts of, specifically, the theater chains, how they were run.

It is my understanding that the monopolistic aspects of theater management and studios policy were such as to keep lesser and indie outfits from gaining a foothold in the industry, thus in a place where other majors were weak, say, Phoenix or Albuquerque, and where Fox was strong, the other studios would aim for a Fox theater, if they could get one and it was available, rather than one that was independent or part of a regional chain.

But wasn't there some lopsidedness as to who owned theaters where? I read somewhere that Warners wasn't strong in theater ownership, yet were dominant in Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. This strikes me as a quite narrow focus and not quite right sounding. Didn't they buy the First National studio and theater chain after their first flush of big league success in the early talkie period?

A couple of years back in a book on the Laemmles and Universal I learned that Uni had actually invested in a theater chain during the 20s, then solid it off when talkies came in on the assumption that they'd be too expensive to wire for sound! In their case I wonder if it would have made much difference as to the survival of the Laemmles at their studio as their management style was old-fashioned, almost quaint, and they were riding for a fall sooner or later.

I know the Warner people did have theaters in NYC and Los Angeles, just before the sound era and flush with funds from some recent Barrymore films, they built them to have those coast-to-coast anchors. Then just after sound they bought the Skouras chain and made Spyros the head of the entire theater division.

That whole First-National business is confusing as they owned both companies but had to run them separately, then they got dispensation to merge them but still had to release some titles under the F-N name for some legal/tax purposes. Cagney once said that he went to the same place every day but never knew whom he was working for. to make it worse, when on the west coast, his checks would be drawn on a east coast bank and vice versa when he was east doing promo tours. He figured it was stingy accounting since back in those days, it took a week for an out-of-state check to clear.

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

I'd go with stingy. In the early Thirties they nearly went out of business when they didn't have enough cash to pay the electric bill and they were threatened with a winding up suit from them. After that every night Jack Warner would go round the studio making sure all the lights were turned off at the end of the day.

Still, when Lost Horizon went so overbudget that Columbia literally ran out of cash, Harry Cohn just told everyone they wouldn't get paid for a month while UK supermarket Marks and Spencers put all their staff on unpaid holiday for two weeks when they had to refinance, so Cagney was lucky by comparison.


"Security - release the badgers."

All of my life's accumulated possessions are sitting in two huge storage units in Miami (wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling) until I locate my final abode here in my hometown, New York City. Ten thousand movies, five thousand vinyl albums, hundreds of CDs, more books than Barnes and Noble, six sets of china, six sets of flatware, two bedrooms, two living rooms, a full dining room, two big-screen televisions and a surround-sound system. I shudder at the thought of moving and setting it all up.

Join the club: two thirds of my life (including most of my books, films and 95% of my CDs) is in a storage unit while I try to find an affordable and decent new abode while the place I was just going to rent for a few months inbetween starts looking increasingly permanent a couple of years on (EDIT - the horrible realisation sinks in that it's three Christmases now!)

"Security - release the badgers."

I've been in a "temporary" furnished apartment for three years. Throwing money away on
A) a "home" that isn't my own, and
B) those very costly storage units.

And I'm without my stuff!