The Dinner Game

Featuring IMDb Founder Col Needham Hosted by John Nein, Sundance Film Festival Senior Programmer
Monday, Jul 10, 2017 | 7:30pm Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library

Col Needham is the founder of IMDB. Not surprisingly, he’s a cinephile of the highest order and reliably the best fun to talk to at film festival parties. His cinema enthusiasm is infectious and for decades, he’s catalogued his film-watching habits, first in a meticulously kept diary (circuitously leading to the world’s most popular film website) and now for the web public to scrutinize.

Lesser known are the brilliant dinners he hosts at various festivals, gathering an eclectic group of film folks for dinner and a game. Guests are seated at different tables but furnished with the same list of questions meant to instigate conversation about movies…ways for us to share our love and appreciation of cinema, and by extension, way for us to get to know each other.

We’ll talk to Col about his lifelong love of movies and the founding of IMDB. And We’re joined by actress Molly Shannon, Director Miguel Arteta, producer Lynette Howell Taylor, and John Cooper, Director of the Sundance Film Festival, who will give the “dinner game” a try.

And we take a look at cinema’s best and worst dinners, those we’d want to attend and those from which we’d definitely want to be excused.

LFLA Member reception to follow.

 

Lost & Found at the Movies is generously supported by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association

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John Nein

John Nein

John Nein is a senior programmer at the Sundance Film Festival and deals primarily with US and international feature films. He also plans the festival’s panels and runs the Institute’s film preservation initiative. John grew up in Europe and the United States, studied history at Carleton College and earned his MFA from UCLA’s Film Directing program, where he made several award-winning shorts and lobbied tirelessly for better coffee in the vending machines.

Col Needham

Col Needham is the founder and CEO of IMDb, the #1 movie website in the world. Born and living in the UK, Col has had a lifelong interest in both technology and movies. After starting a computer games software business at the age of 14, he went on to complete a computer science degree at Leeds University before commencing a career in technology research in Bristol, England. IMDb grew out of a personal database of movie information which Col created as a teenager, combined with similar data collected on the Internet in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Col published the first version of IMDb online in October 1990 and co-ordinated IMDb as a worldwide volunteer effort from 1990-1996. IMDb incorporated in January 1996 with the volunteers as shareholders and IMDb became a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com in April 1998. Col continues in his original role to this day, working from an office in Bristol with IMDb staff members in countries around the world. Col is a board member of Into Film. He received a 2014 Creative Coalition Independent Spotlight award for his work to support independent filmmaking. Col was a jury member at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

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