We figured we would document how we put our pages together.

Step 1.  We went to our Request Hotline page and saw that we had a few people had requested Alan Ladd.

Step 2.  We pulled out our Rating The Movie Stars book and identified how many movies we needed to research.

Step 3:  We went to our UMR database to find out how many Alan Ladd movies we already had researched.

Step 4:  We pulled out all of our Variety Year End Magazines and looked for Alan Ladd’s Top Grossers.

Step 5:  We went looking through our MGM, Warner Brothers, RKO and 20th Century Ledgers looking for Alan Ladd movies.

Step 6:  We then start going through the many movie books we have at the house.

Step 7:  Identified the 10 missing movies left to research and starting checking out Wikipedia, IMDb.com, and “book” searches on google.  This is like looking through a haystick for a needle…but we did find some treasure nuggets out there like….Paratroopers/The Red Beret earned $8 million in worldwide box office.

Step 8: At this point we had 47 movies researched….and 6 missing movies.  Of the 47 “found” movies….one was Citizen Kane.  We decided to not include the movie…because (a) he is uncredited and (b) his part had nothing to do with the success of that movie…it is just cool trivia.   We also decided his part in Duffy’s Tavern was a cameo and his part in The Black Cat (1931 version not the classic 1934 version) was too small to be counted.  That left our new totals…of 46 movies researched and 4 missing movies.

Step 9:  Using reverse engineering we tried to figure out the best possible educated guesses on the box office grosses for the 4 missing movies.  Some of the main factors we knew for sure, included, none of these movies reached $1.0 million in box office rentals and all were considered box office disappointments.  So knowing the box office ceiling…we were able to come up with a range that these movies fell into.  It is very possible that these 4 movies actually did worse than our estimates…..but they did not do better.

Step 10:  Once all of the box office information was put into the table, we researched critic and audience reviews, checked for movie award recognition and listed the his co-stars….and we were ready to publish.

So that is how we put these pages together.  We will keep looking for the 4 missing movies……but for the time being…we feel very good about our box office numbers that are listed in this page.