One of my jobs in my relationship with my partner is to know where he knows people from. This can be people we know—things like, “You know, he performed that wedding we went to in that park that one time.” More often, though, it’s people from movies. “He was Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption” or “she’s on that one episode of Quantum Leap with the baby.” I’ve done that with friends, too; the other day, I figured out where my friend had seen Joaquin Phoenix. Meanwhile, I had recognized Richard Kind from something like two frames of the same trailer.
One of the reasons for this is that I’ve just seen so many more movies than most of my friends, except those who likewise identify as Movie People. In years where I’m having a hard time watching full movies, I still manage to watch at least a couple dozen. I have friends who manage to watch that many in a good year. Now, there’s more to it than that; I have an extremely good memory for connections that came in really handy during college (my professor thought I did reading I didn’t because of it). However, for a vast majority of actors, I’ve seen or at least chose not to see their best-known movie.
For the most part, people who read or write for this site are Movie People. We don’t just watch movies, we care about them. A lot. We talk about them. We think about them. Obviously, we write and read about them. Our friends ask us for recommendations. And it is our job to remember things about movies. Oh, we may have specialties—I’m generally good for Oscar trivia, and if I want box office statistics and am not in enough of a hurry to look them up myself, I’d ask our own Nerd in the Basement—but people who know us ask us questions and we generally answer them.
And we recognize people, and we talk about what they’ve been in. It’s definitely true that Movie People developed Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. (I am a champ at Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.) There was a Jack-in-the-Box commercial where I thought, “Wait, is that Kimmy Robertson?” And let me tell you, it’s hard to track down for sure who’s in commercials, because people do not in general have that information easily available.
One of my friends refers to the Internet Movie Database in my head. Now, I always have IMDb open when I’m writing certain of my articles, simply because it makes cross-checking a lot easier and includes the tiny, forgettable roles from early—or late—in people’s careers, which I might not know. Yes, I know the Jack-in-the-Box commercial, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Webster, and I wouldn’t have known Kimmy Robertson did that. On the other hand, for Richard Kind, I could probably have written an entire article just on the few dozen roles I knew. And for what it’s worth, my friend knew him as the voice of Bing Bong. And Joaquin Phoenix as Joker.
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