As a huge cinema fan, I love old movies. They hold a special interest for me. Most of these movies have long been forgotten by today's movie goers. Yet these films from the late 1920s to the mid 1960s are not to be missed. Movies that won academy awards for Best Picture, Best Actor or Best Actress provided great performances and thrilled movie goers at the time.
And it's not just the movies that have been forgotten, it is the stars that have been forgotten as well. One of my favorites is Bette Davis who delivered some powerful performances during her long career. Not to be missed are movies like "All About Eve" and "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?". Another great film is James Cagney in "White Heat". Suppose you enjoy movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, you can list all his most important works and see which ones earned awards and budget and revenue numbers for each of his films.
- this project is not designed to be a complete and concise compendium of every movie ever made. There is IMDB http://imdb.com for that.
- Not meant to be comprehensive listing of all the actors for a given movie and all the movie details
- Not intended to be the authoritative source of data for a given movie
- Not designed to publish or host reviews for movies. There is Rotten Tomatoes https://www.rottentomatoes.com/ for that purpose.
- Not intended to be a critical analysis of the BEST movies ever made.
- Not my own subjective list of the BEST movies and the BEST actor filmographies
To create a golden age of hollywood movie explorer web application I relied upon the prodigious power of both ChatGPT and Google Gemini to research and produce the data including the following:
- one or more lists of noteworthy actors during this time-frame. I started with a list of 100, then expanded to 200 and finally a list of 320 to draw from.
- for each early decade and later each year, I asked the AI to create the definitive list of great movies. What defines "great"? For great I used movies that won or were nominated for academy awards, iconic and legendary actors, etc.
- for each actor on the list, I asked AI to create their best movie filmographies - their best, award-winning roles and performances. Obviously "great" for movies and actors may be subjectively interpreted by different movie fans, so we have to contend ourselves with what the AI was able to "dig-up" or discover. All this data is included in the main project folder either in the root folder of the src/main/resources folder.
As with any large undertaking unfortunately there are limitations that come into play. These are:
- I had to limit the number of actor/actresses to around 250 for the actor filmographies. Some of your favorites may be missing from the list. All the important actors from this period are there though.
- I had to limit the number of movies per actor filmography to around 25. Some actors/actress had short careers. Take Grace Kelley for example. She only made 11 movies before leaving Hollywood. Others had prolific careers spanning decades with over a hundred acting credits. I started with 10 movies per actor, then went to 20 and finally settled on a minimum of 25 if possible.
- Unfortunately AI chatbot technology is not perfect and the data is not perfect. There are gaps due to missing data that the chatbot could not find as well as IMDB actor, movie or director links that are incorrect. This is just a deficiency we must live with.
- Approximately 4200 movies are currently in the movie database for searching. This is not a comprehensive list, but is representative of the "best" movies from the birth of cinema in 1890 up through 2010.
- Search the entire database of all movies (approximately 4200) by simply clicking the search button
- Search movies by complete or partial title text.
- Search movies by genre: Drama.
- Search movies by multiple genres: Rom,Com (Note: OK to abbreviate)
- Search movies by director: hitch (OK to abbreviate hitch for Alfred Hitchcock)
- Search movies by actors either one or more: gable, colbert (This will list all movies starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert)
- Search movies in a given year or year range
- Search for movies that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actress, etc.
- Search all movies having a minimum IMDB rating or above
- Search movies by production studio
- Optional sort any column either ascending or descending by clicking the up/down arrows on the given column
- Optional default sort the results by title, year or rating.
- Find actors by partial actor name text.
- Run the Spring Boot app (default port 8080).
./gradlew bootRun
- Open
http://localhost:8080/in your browser for movie search or - Open
http://localhost:8080/af.htmlin your browser for actor filmography search
look at the following JSON data structure describing a single movie:
{
"title": "All About Eve",
"year": 1950,
"director": {
"name": "Joseph L. Mankiewicz",
"imdb_person_url": "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0542403/"
},
"production_studio": "20th Century Fox",
"mpaa_rating": "Not Rated",
"runtime_minutes": 138,
"budget_usd_millions": 1.4,
"gross_revenue_usd_millions": 8.4,
"ratings": {
"imdb": 8.2,
"rotten_tomatoes_critic": "99%",
"rotten_tomatoes_popcorn": "94%"
},
"genres": [
"Drama"
],
"actors": [
{
"name": "Bette Davis",
"imdb_person_url": "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000012/"
},
{
"name": "Anne Baxter",
"imdb_person_url": "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000882/"
},
{
"name": "George Sanders",
"imdb_person_url": "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001695/"
}
],
"oscars_nominated": 14,
"oscars_won": 6,
"oscars_won_details": [
"Best Picture",
"Best Director",
"Best Supporting Actor",
"Best Writing, Screenplay",
"Best Costume Design, Black-and-White",
"Best Sound, Recording"
],
"description": "A seemingly timid but secretly manipulative ingenue insinuates herself into the lives of an aging Broadway star and her circle of theater friends.",
"afi_ranking": 16,
"imdb_url": "https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042192/",
"rotten_tomatoes_url": "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/all_about_eve"
}As a movie lover and as fan of cinema I would like a JSON dataset of a minimum of 53 unique elements
for the most popular, iconic, celebrated or award-winning movies for that year.
Movies for inclusion should have a minimum IMDB rating of 6.5 and include all movies with
IMDB rating of 7.5 or above.
Use the above data structure as a sample of the type of data to return.
- include 1 or more genres.
- Use movie ratings from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes;
- find the film ranking from the AFI website if any;
- list the number of oscars nominated and won and which oscars were won in an oscar_details array;
- runtime of the movie in minutes,
- director and actors with links back to their imdb pages
- budget for movie and gross revenue
- the studio which produced the movie
- all the other data you see above in the JSON
Ensure the actors, director and movie IMDB links reference the correct IMDB page by matching its title. Ensure there are no duplicate data elements! Every movie in the dataset should be unique. please provide a quality dataset for the most important movies for a given year without duplicates or omitting important films. Start with the year 1950.
As a movie lover and as fan of cinema I would like a JSON dataset with a minimum of 25 or more unique films for a given actor or actress. Given the following example JSON dataset structure, produce a filmography for katherine hepburn which includes: the following criteria:
- all her most notable and important films
- all her iconic and memorable roles
- all her most popular films and celebrated films
- all her films she won or was nominated for awards (oscar, bafta, golden globe, etc.)
- all films having an IMDB score of 7 or greater
- American Film Institute (AFI) best of lists
- include any notes in the awards section to elaborate further on awards
- omit the suffix award and use grammys_won instead of grammy_awards_won. Use cannes_won, oscars_won, golden_globes_won, emmys_won , etc for other awards you can use _award.
- try to reach a total of 25 films for each actor, but if that is not possible then as many as you can that are noteworthy
- some actors/actresses have not won any awards yet their films are still important. try to do the best you can.
- if there are no awards, use null instead of "None".
- do not include URLs in notes
{
"actor_profile": {
"name": "Katharine Hepburn",
"year_born": 1907,
"year_died": 2003,
"imdb_url": "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000031/",
"image_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Katharine_Hepburn_publicity_photograph.jpg",
"year_of_first_film": 1932,
"year_of_last_film": 1994,
"number_of_feature_films_made": 44,
"actor_awards": {
"oscars_won": 4,
"oscars_nominated": 12
}
},
"filmography": [
{
"title": "Morning Glory",
"year": 1933,
"role": "Eva Lovelace",
"role_description": "A naive, ambitious aspiring actress from a small town who is determined to become a great star on the Broadway stage, willing to sacrifice everything for her art.",
"plot": "A naive, aspiring actress travels to New York to become a star.",
"awards": "Oscar: Win – Best Actress",
"ratings": {
"imdb": 6.9,
"rotten_tomatoes_critic": 88,
"rotten_tomatoes_popcorn": 55
},
"imdb_url": "https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024353/"
},
{
"title": "Little Women",
"year": 1933,
"role": "Josephine \"Jo\" March",
"role_description": "A tomboyish, independent-minded writer who resists societal expectations for women in the 19th century and is fiercely devoted to her sisters.",
"plot": "The four March sisters grow up in New England during the Civil War.",
"awards": "Venice Film Festival: Win – Best Actress",
"ratings": {
"imdb": 7.2,
"rotten_tomatoes_critic": 89,
"rotten_tomatoes_popcorn": 78
},
"imdb_url": "https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024265/"
}
]
}Note: We used the following prompt for each actor thereafter:
please do the same for notable, important and award winning films for marlon brando
The resultant JSON files for actor filmeography may be found in the src/main/resources/actor-filmographies folder