As someone who visits the IMDb site pretty much every day, and finds it an almost invaluable resource (my only bugbear is movie running times – I’ve found them to be maddeningly inaccurate over the years), I just wanted to add my congratulations to founder and CEO Col Needham and his team for the sterling work they’ve been doing over the last twenty-five years.

In terms of how much I’ve relied on them for thedullwoodexperiment, I can’t thank them enough, and I’m looking forward to delving into the site for another twenty-five years to come. And as a movie buff, I’ve learnt a lot that I wouldn’t have found out otherwise. Here are five examples that come under the heading, Well I Didn’t Know That Until Now:

1) John Travolta was offered Tom Hanks’ role in The Green Mile (1999).

2) John Carpenter was disappointed with The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and would have loved to direct it himself so he could make it “much more frightening and gripping”.

3) The bridge explosion in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) had to be filmed twice as there was a mistake first time around: the command to set off the explosion was misheard and no cameras were rolling.

4) Some Like It Hot (1959) was originally banned in Kansas as being “too disturbing for Kansans”.

5) In The Big Lebowski (1998), Julianne Moore wore a prosthetic butt for her nude scene as Maude.