Imdb.com is a great site. Just type in any Actor’s name and get a list of all the movies he/she has ever been in, see everyone he/she has ever worked with. It has everyone on it; from the biggest Hollywood stars ever, to obscure foreign assistant directors, to friends of mine who have only ever been extras on one or two TV shows.
If you don’t know the format, it’s a simple one, the most important feature for this article being that most actors and film-types listed have a little picture next to their name, one selected, cropped, and posted by someone working for imdb.
Sometimes I’m shocked by the poor quality of the headshots displayed for particular actors. Especially when, for each personage, there is a special page labeled “photos,” that houses 1-100s of photos of that particular celebrity; naturally, the more famous they are, the more photos there will be.
So, I’ve made a list of great actors who have terrible imdb photos. Even my friends who are extras have better photos, much better, than the ones below.
Billy Crudup
This photo of Billy Crudup clearly comes from the movie Almost Famous. But Crudup is a good actor, and I don’t think he’d be too happy if that movie, and only that movie, defined his career. Imagine if imdb had decided to do that to him with his role from Watchmen. He would just have a big, blue, eyeless, CGI face. Plus, that mustache makes him a little hard to recognize.
Marlon Wayans
I don’t even think I have to say anything. This would be a terrible picture of anyone, let alone a big movie star. What’s even going on here? Is he hanging his head out of a moving car? No one could find a better picture of him? Really?
Talia Shire
She was Adrian in Rocky. She has 62 acting credits on imdb. But this photo doesn’t even show her face front on. Did someone take it at a restaurant with their camera-phone?
Allen Covert
You may not know who Allen Covert is, and you would never figure it out based on this picture. This headshot is a still image from the Adam Sandler movie Little Nicky. If this picture was all you knew about Covert, you would think he was an overweight, nearly bald, old actor. He’s not. This is not at all what he looks like. It was a particularly grotesque part in a particularly horrible film. So who is he really? Allen Covert is Sandler’s boy; appearing in basically all of Sandler’s movies, and even starring in a few of his own (although they were produced by his friend Adam’s company “Happy Madison Productions”).”
Sam Neill
He was in Jurassic Park! That movie was huge. You couldn’t find a photo where there was proper lighting?
John Bellushi
Uh, what? John Belushi doesn’t have a picture? I know that he died young, but I’m pretty sure there was some photographic evidence of his life. And are there really no die-hard Animal House fans out there willing to email an image of their drunken hero?
Another thing, the URL for people listed on imdb all have a similar ending – each listing starts with “nm” (for “name,” I assume) which is followed by a string of numbers (the code for things besides people is slightly different, for example, the URL for movies and TV shows says “title/###”). The ending for the John Belushi pages looks like this; “nm0000004,” which means that Belushi was the fourth actor added to the site. He was forth in the mind of the website creators, in front of every other movie actor ever, besides 1-3. It goes Fred Astaire at nm0000001, then Lauren Bacall, Brigitte Bardot, and then John Belushi, after whom comes Ingrid and Ingmar Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, and then Brando at eight. It’s a weird list, I know, but Belushi is right in the middle of it, so you would think someone would paste a picture of his big face next to his name. Even a terrible picture would be better than none at all. (For the record, all the actors and the one director listed above have great imdb headshots)
That’s it. I’m going to keep looking. It’s something that used to bother me a whole lot, but now I think it’s kind of a fun game.
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