How to Count IMDb Credits: It’s Harder Than You Think

I have highly mixed feelings about the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). I have since the beginning. Soon after it appeared on the web, I wrote to them, begging that they do credits properly. It bugged me especially that they didn’t list screenwriters in credit order. It also bothered me when they started adding a bunch of (uncredited) entries. That’s fine for a minor actor that you can see in the film. But just because a screenwriter was paid to write a draft or punch up a script doesn’t mean a single word or idea made it into the final script. Leave it to the WGA to work out. That’s a big part of what they do.

And there are other problems with IMDb. The biggest is just how cozy they are with Hollywood. All the ridiculous, overblown advertising. And it bugs me that now the studios just feed them their complete credits. Certainly, it makes the site more efficient and profitable. It also makes the site less human and fills it up with a lot of garbage credits (the Hollywood style). And the site has shown no interest and going back to old and odd films and filling them in and correcting errors.

IMDb’s Biggest Practical Problem

But the biggest practical problem I have with IMDb is the way they list credits. And I’ll explain with character actor William Kerwin, but this is true of almost anyone who worked in any capacity in television. If you check IMDb, it says he has 132 acting credits: films and television shows. And that’s the killer. Because a film is equivalent to an episode of a television show, not the whole series. I’ll come back to Kerwin in a moment.

Consider Robert Clary, the actor who played LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes. According to IMDb, he has only 22 credits! Yet he’s actually been in 219 films and television episodes. And in most of those he was a major part of the cast.

Now I know a lot of people think that television is very different than film, but it really isn’t. That’s especially true for character actors. Regardless what they’re in, they are usually going to be working for a day or two. So whether on film or television it doesn’t matter.

For the technical people, television is generally easier because the shows are shorter and they have established sets and so on. So directing for television shows is a whole lot easier. (Note: directing a television movie is in no way different than directing a theatrical film.)

I’m usually looking at actors and I want to have an idea of how much they’ve worked. And that “credits” number is often wrong.

How to Fix IMDb’s Credits Problem

But there is a relatively easy way to make the correct calculation. Scroll through all of the titles that the person has worked on. Make a note of any television show they were on more than once. In each case, note down one less than the number of episodes they were on. Add all these up and add them to the number IMDb reports as “credits” and you have the actual number of films and television episodes they worked on.

So returning to William Kerwin, we have Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (5), Play of the Week (2), Lancer (6), Blind Ambition (4), and Romance Theatre (5). So that’s 4 + 1 + 5 + 3 + 4 = 17. So we add 17 to the IMDb credits total of 132, and we get 149.

This Matters

I picked Kerwin both because of his association with Herschell Gordon Lewis, but also because he never starred in a series or played many recurring characters. So it was an easy example.

But this has always bothered me. In his case, it isn’t that big a deal: 132 vs 149. But in the case of Clary, it’s huge: a difference of almost 200: 22 vs 219. Or consider Valerie Harper, who has 70 “credits” but starred in 110 episodes of Rhoda alone. Or Julie Kavner with 69 “credits” but 110 episodes of Rhoda and 643 episodes of The Simpsons.

So this can be a very big deal. And since Psychotronic Review takes film (especially low-budget film) very seriously, we will always provide the right number and not just take IMDb’s lazy and offensive number.