Bruji

In DVDPedia, I use the "starring" tag to make a field in the database so that I can search for films with certain actors. When Bob Hoskins passed away this week, I checked which of his films I had. To my surprise (because I thought I had a rather large film collection), I didn't have 'The Long Good Friday'. I ordered the DVD and when I started entering it in DVDPedia, it told me it was a duplicate. (Fortunately, I entered it before the DVD had shipped, so I was able to cancel it.)

The problem is the "starring" tag. The "starring" field (in DVDPedia) for 'The Long Good Friday' lists actors in order of appearance. So, neither Bob Hoskins or Helen Mirren are displayed in the "starring" field despite the fact they star in the film. I looked on IMDB and cannot see a field marked "starring". Furthermore, the cast list displays the actors in the 'correct' order - importance of the role.

Where does this "starring" data come from? Is this something that needs to be fixed by IMDB or is it something in DVDPedia? I don't know how many more films have this problem, but I checked 4 or 5 and the "starring" field seemed all right. So far, only 'The Long Good Friday' is wrong.

Glad you were able to cancel the DVD,duplicate detection to the rescue.

Depending on the search plugin if there is starring information provided it uses that. In the case of IMDb there is no starring field and hence it uses the first 5 credits. As you mention this can be an issue for movies where the credits are listed alphabetically or in order of appearance instead of top billing. So you need to move more famous actors into starring manually when adding a movie that has alphabetical listing. In the case of 'The Long Good Friday' you must have added information from two separate sources for the first 5 credits to differ from the starring. It does sound like the first plugin you used was IMDb as the starring information is in order of appearance but the credits have been updated to have Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren first.

For example the Doghouse does provide a starring field information that is independent from the credits, but all the entries on Doghouse for 'The Long Good Friday' have been moderated by users to include Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan.

dvdpedia://dogTag=759

Sadly there no automatic way to judge billing and modify the starring automatically. Although maybe that something we can build into Doghouse in the future since we do have cast information to work from.

As a side note you can use smart collections to pick up any movies that might need updating when you suspect an actor of being missing from starring. The smart collection would have two rules and be set to "all". Any Credit is "Bob Hoskins" and "starring" is not "Bob Hoskins".