The 1 Second Film - IMDb History

IMDb History

The director of The 1 Second Film submitted the celebrity producer credits of The 1 Second Film to the Internet Movie Database. After being rejected, the director sent a link to a video of Stephen Colbert requesting his $11 producer credit be listed on IMDb. IMDb then began to list all of The 1 Second Film's credits, including unknowns who donated $1 or more to the project online. Thousands of people began to discover the film title under the production credits of the various celebrities involved. The project spread online, attracting donations from around the world. Several celebrities also donated online, including Jonah Hill and Ryan Reynolds. The IMDb listing reached over 3,000 Producers. However, due to the high volume of submissions, IMDb replaced all of the film's individual producer credits with a single credit for "Producers of The 1 Second Film." The entire project was then removed from IMDb. Jon Reeves, head of data acquisition, gave the following reasons on the IMDb message boards when revisiting the eligibility of the listing:

At the time I met Nirvan, he had assured me there would be significant national press coverage by last summer. We gave him the benefit of the doubt, and a significant grace period. I see no entries in the Google News archives or anywhere else that come close to meeting that standard. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that, whatever the intentions of the filmmakers (and Nirvan certainly seemed earnest when I talked to him), in practice, 1SF is currently more of a performance art project than an actual film. (Note that the bulk of the film has been, ever since we originally listed it, the documentary of the various events surrounding it.) I will say that this is the first time that I've looked at their site where the emphasis really does seem to be on finishing the film, and not the various circuses around it.

I would point out that Nirvan said last February: "Jon, I promise we will have significant press to show within 3 months, and am fine with you suspending all our listings if we haven’t done so by then." At the time, they were working on revamping their website and their Oprah promotional tour. Since both those activities are now complete, I see no reason not to suspend this title.
—Jon Reeves,IMDb.com, January 8, 2008

He later posted an update stating that the title manager agreed and had made the decision to suspend the listing until further notice.

When this decision was later questioned, he added:

When I spoke with Nirvan (over a year ago!), he was given specific benchmarks and timetables which he agreed to for its continued listing. Those were not met, and the listing was removed (in fact, quite some time after the deadline).

This film has been 7 years in the making, and is still only about 1/4 of the way to its fundraising goal. Our usual standard for listing an in-production film is that it have significant involvement of "name" individuals and measurable progress every 6 months. The involvement of the "name" people in this case is generally about 5 minutes each, plus trivially small (for them) financial contributions. The progress has continually been a moving target, with no end in sight. The words "The Last Dangerous Visions" will make sense to science fiction fans (it's a book that's been famously "coming soon" since 1973).
—Jon Reeves, IMDb.com, April 21, 2008