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It would be like asking each male actor personally: Which movies were you in when you were between the age of 20 and 30? To be clear, that would be 30 years and 364 days old.

For example, for today, this would find me actors like: Miles Teller (Whiplash), Ellar Coltrane (Boyhood), Evan Peters (Kick-Ass), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass)

But of course I'd like an overview of all time, so also movie titles that had male debutants aged 20-30 in 1970 or in 1889.

I think this would involve some query that compared Actor-Birthdate to Movie-Shooting-Date.

This might be conceptually as follows:

IF **Actor-Birthdate** -/- **Movie-Shooting-Date** > 20 but < 30
  then give **Movie-Name**.

This query or algorythym or function has to be performed on every single male actor, I guess.

I would need actor datasets with their D.o.B, the movies they made and the film shooting dates of those movies.

I suppose the IMDb site itself does not offer tools to do this, so I guess it would have to be imported into some database program like SQL or Wandora. Or Excel or MS Access

I'd be very happy if anyone had any idea how to do this.

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  • There are some APIs built on the IMDB data (details), but none seem to include the actor details you require.
    – philshem
    Mar 8, 2015 at 7:56
  • Or DIY with python and the text files: github.com/nandhp/python-imdb
    – philshem
    Mar 8, 2015 at 8:23
  • Some actors/actresses don't want their birthdate (and hence their age) known as it can bias people against hiring them. If they can pass for 30-50, knowing they're actually 45 might keep them from getting the younger roles. (this is even more likely for actresses)
    – Joe
    Mar 8, 2015 at 13:20
  • Naturally, when no DOB is known .... So, me personally, i try to focus on the data that is there.
    – GwenKillerby
    Mar 8, 2015 at 13:24
  • @GwenKillerby Not for every actor, but for the ones IMDB has a birthday, I might be able to help. I am just building that database others refered to.
    – Andris
    Mar 31, 2018 at 19:15

2 Answers 2

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Have you taken a look at http://www.imdb.com/interfaces which includes a link to FTP mirrors where you can get data files that can presumably be joined in a RDBMS or other type of database system. Files you probably want to investigate are actors.list.gz, movies.list.gz, and release-dates.list.gz

Hope this helps!

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  • yes, already got those, but how would I use them? I got no experience with MySQL or any RDBMS
    – GwenKillerby
    Mar 8, 2015 at 6:34
  • If you know a programming language but not SQL, then you can use steps from this answer
    – philshem
    Mar 8, 2015 at 7:22
  • BTW, the files are just text files. For example, the release date file has lines like this: Arizona Dream (1992) USA:9 September 1994 . With some preprocessing you can import them to Excel or Access. One issue may be the large file sizes.
    – philshem
    Mar 8, 2015 at 7:51
  • I know they are just text files, and this is the problem. Fields aren't properly separated by commas or tabs or whatever.
    – GwenKillerby
    Mar 8, 2015 at 12:57
  • I know they are textfiles, this is the problem, fields arent' properly separated by commas or tabs or whatever. Also, the actress file doesn't have Date of Birth info.
    – GwenKillerby
    Mar 8, 2015 at 12:59
-1

as I know imdb has not official api but some unofficial data is available for example: omsbapi also there is a useful api for yts

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1
  • Can you please expand on your answer (see here for why)
    – philshem
    Apr 6, 2015 at 8:04

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