Public Database of Movie Theaters
Here is the plan, DIY filmmakers unite!
I was poking around tonight searching del.icio.us and I discovered a really cool site called editgrid.com that lets you post a public database any visitor can add to and edit. So I’ve just posted over 600 movie theaters to a public database.
What we want to offer other DIY filmmakers is the ability to use this database in anyway that is helpful to you and what we ask is that people begin to fill in the missing fields. For example, we don’t know how many of these 600 theaters have the ability to project digitally. For the 6 theaters our film is playing, we’ve filled in the data we know, but if you run a film festival or have distributed your film to any of these theaters, please fill in the fields you know and slowly but surely we’ll build a Digital Cinema Network.
So here is the link to the theater database. Just go there and browse the database just like you would in excel. If you see anything you can add to, just type in the missing information. Then hit “done” and the changes will be saved. Thats it, no user name or password or anything. Also if you are going to be adding a lot of data, you can use the “save as” options to make a copy as an excel file that you can more easily edit and then choose “upload new version” to replace the old database with the new one. Try not to wait too long between when you download and when you upload since you could over write data another user is entering. But 30 minutes to an hour should be safe.
If this doesn’t sound possible or sounds far fetch, just look at wikipedia.org. It’s a website in which an encyclopedia was created about everything you can think of completely by users who go on the site and wrote about what they were experts on. So collectively adding just a tiny bit of information you have can really add up and eventually having a very solid database that could be extremely useful to DIY filmmakers who want to distribute their films to theaters. And all the while, you can be using the database as we are already.
*Firefox web browser recommended.
*UPDATE: The public database sometimes gets deleted by weird people. So if that is empty for some reason, you can download the excel spread sheet:
download .xls spread sheet of movie theaters in US
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September 18th, 2006 at 10:59 am
This is awesome! As soon as I get a chance, I’ll fill in all the info gathered on our little screening tour last fall.Now what we need is an equivalent database of indie video rental stores. Does such a thing already exist? If not, maybe we should start one…
March 22nd, 2007 at 8:42 am
Hi,
I visited the EditGrid today to add some information and i noticed that the cells are all blank. Will you be reposting soon? It is an excellent resource.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Don’t give up on this project– perhaps David Strauss could help find a way to legitimize and publicize it? It looks like from Edit Grid that it’s really easy for somebody to go through, delete, or mess up the information. Currently the database is empty– but this could be a very useful tool! Came here via digimart webcast.
April 29th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Uh Oh. Looks like the database got trashed. There is an empty spreadsheet with one cell filled with nonsense!
May 16th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
So I’ve updated the blog post above with an excel spread sheet download so if someone trashes the public database again, people can just download the .xls file we started with. But of course the whole idea is that we all collaborate and add to the database. So I’ll try to back up the collaborated information when I can. But also, post a comment here if you add something to the database.
Arin
September 2nd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
love the idea, we will help. anybody have ideas or information on how to get the movie show times without having it feed in from other movie sites???
October 5th, 2007 at 12:22 am
Long time since I met you guys in Park City! Wish I had this database before we moved “Commune” to movie theaters. We played about 20 theaters, hard work and fun, it reminded me of my carny roots. Any, congrats brilliant stuff! Best, Jonathan Berman
October 5th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Oh yeah, these should just be independent type theaters, right?
October 9th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Arin,
This might be super helpful for “Skid Row”. We’ll talk more, I’m sure.
December 25th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
This theater database is a good creation. It would be great to find useful information with it. However, the database seems to be out of wack as far as the listings go. Some of the states and cities do not match up, etc. and so it seems that come grids may be off a little bit. Where is that .xls file ? That would be nice to check out and download since the direct link from the image on this page takes me to a databse that needs some adjustment and can turn out to be very confusing and a waste of time. Using the database, one would easy begin to check out a theater that is listed as being in California, when it is really in Georgia or Puerto Rico even. It is very odd.