Fametracker

» see fametracker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Between 2002 and 2005 I was in Turkish internet cafes playing Counter-Strike and pulling down mp3s. Fametracker's readers were in North America, reading a very funny English-language site about whether a given movie star was as famous as they were behaving. Those two internets barely touched, and the language layer alone would have kept me out of it.

Tara Ariano and David T. Cole started Fametracker in 1999 from Toronto, with Adam Sternbergh. The year before, the same couple had launched the recap site that became Television Without Pity, so the house style arrived already formed. It was long, and it was unkind about the work rather than about the person, which is a distinction that most of what came after it lost.

The site billed itself as The Farmer's Almanac of Celebrity Worth. That was the joke and it was also the method. Fametracker treated fame as a quantity that could be audited, and then went ahead and audited it in public, on a schedule, with reasoning attached.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

The Fame Audit was the flagship. Once a month it took a working actor, laid out what that actor's public standing appeared to be, compared it against what the career actually supported, and issued a verdict. It read like a performance review written by somebody who had watched every one of your films and was not angry, only disappointed.

2 Stars 1 Slot ran the same instinct as a head to head. Take two performers who occupied the same narrow casting niche and work out which one was really going to get the part. It was gossip with a spreadsheet underneath it, at a moment when the alternative was a magazine telling you who wore it best.

~ hey! it's that guy! ~

The column people still quote was Hey! It's That Guy!, which profiled character actors whose faces everyone knew and whose names nobody could produce. J.T. Walsh was the archetype. You had seen him in nine films and could not have told anyone what he was called.

This was genuinely useful in a way that is hard to explain now. There was no IMDb in your pocket and no pausing a stream to search a face. If you wanted to know who That Guy was, somebody had to have done the work and written it down. In 2005 the column became a book, Hey! It's That Guy!: The Fametracker.com Guide to Character Actors, which is a strange and lovely thing for a website feature to turn into.

~ the boards ~

Fametracker ran message boards with over a hundred regular posters, and in March 2005 they closed. The reason given was bandwidth costs, which sounds absurd in 2026 and was completely ordinary in 2005. Traffic was a bill that arrived monthly and forums generated a great deal of it for no revenue at all.

Losing the boards took out the part of the site that ran without the founders having to write anything. Once the community was gone, Fametracker was two people producing long features by hand, and that is a workload with a ceiling.

~ the hiatus that never ended ~

The last new piece went up on 26 February 2007. After that the front page carried a line saying Fametracker was on hiatus until further notice, and the archive stayed readable behind it. Nobody wrote a farewell post, because a hiatus is not a farewell. It just turned out to be one.

Its functions drifted over to Television Without Pity, which NBCUniversal bought that same year and then closed in 2014. Ariano and Cole went on to other work and the celebrity-analysis instinct went everywhere at once, mostly into podcasts and newsletters. As of today fametracker.com does not answer at all, so even the hiatus notice is gone.

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