The title of this is an experiment.  It seems that when I write about hookers and celebrities the hits to this blog spike.  I figured that if I threw the devil in the mix I might attract Mel Gibson’s crowd as well. Yesterday’s backhanded self-help blog, which I tried to masquerade as vitriol flung at my (in my opinion) psycho landlady, Susan Blais, has the lowest rating ever. Clearly nobody out there wants to hear about how I’m pulling myself up by my bootstraps and soldiering on.  Hmpf.  All they care about is Amanda Seyfried’s boobs.

The reason I’m picking on Natalie is she is number one today on the IMDb Starmeter, which is a ranking of who has the most hits on the IMDb public page, as opposed to the IMDbPro page.  So by making this about her, I’m hoping for more hits to my blog when scandalized Googlers, who always suspected there was something fishy about that Portman girl, just way too nice, tune in here to get the real story about her hooking up with The Horned One.

Now, we people in The Biz are not supposed to care about our IMDb ranking, it’s decidedly not cool.  At most we use IMDBPro for its industry news aggregation and because it has a reasonably up-to-date listing of who represents what actor.  But I’ve just looked mine up for this blog (honestly, I swear, I never look at it), and I’m the 265,783rd most famous person on the IMDb, which is weird because last week my ranking was 444,840.  Hmmm. I know last week’s because the Starmeter keeps a record of it, and because last week I was writing about the IMDb for an audition web content article I scribbled for InteractMedia in which I commented about my lowly status in the industry, and I looked it up then.  So this means that people have been hitting the IMDb looking for me.  But I have had no news posted about me lately, nothing to warrant a surge of close to 50% in popularity.  I’m now paranoid.  What if it is the (in my opinion) villainous Susan Blais and her minions scouring the web for information about me to add to the pyre on which she intends to burn me alive?

We’re not supposed to care about this because those of us who are so lowly on the Starmeter rating system know that the big kids, the real celebs, the people ranked above 20,000, don’t give a damn about the IMDb, much less their Starmeter rating.  They don’t post pictures to their profiles, those are pulled from news services, or managed personally by IMDb staff members, I’m guessing.  I learned my lesson about this shortly after they invented the Starmeter and like a total dweeb I congratulated Louise Ward on her client Channing Tatum making the number one spot, currently occupied by Natalie Portman, who may or may not be carrying the spawn of Beelzebub; after all, her career has suddenly soared due to a horror movie, of all suspicious things.  Louise kinda went, “Huh? What’s that?  Oh, that IMDb thing.”  I felt small for caring.

The truth is there are people out there, people I work with, who do care very much about their ranking, much more than I do.  I won’t say who you are. Or maybe I will because I want your hearts pounding while you hold your breath and murmur, “Sweet, Jesus, James! Don’t let them know I monitor my rating!  I’ll option your script, promise!”  When I blog more about the HATTER dramedy two years ago, I’ll even introduce you to some characters who had pictures taken purposely, professionally for their IMDb profiles — that (in my opinion) is the height of dweeb.

I remember another Starmeter rating moment when I was having lunch at the Cannes Festival with a producer of mine in 2008.  This was the peak of my rating: I was above 70,000 that week.  When I told my colleague he said, “You bitch! Mine has never gone above a hundred thousand AND I’VE JUST PRODUCED A FILM WITH ROBERT PATTINSON.”

Yes, he’s gay.