Why I created Deep Dive Cinema
Sunday, July 13, 2025
How It All Began
For years, I never considered myself to be a collector of any kind. In fact, I was a breed of anti-collector. I would actively discard things that appeared to be the start of a collection.
Why? Because, as the proverb goes:
"The things you own, own you."
I can't really begin to describe how true this is, but I digress.
Texas, 2001 â The First Reel
I started collecting movies when I moved to Texas for a gig in 2001. I wasn't going out much anymore, and I couldn't tolerate commercialsâso it seemed like a good solution. I would buy 2 or 3 movies on Saturday and Sunday and add them to the collection.
The first DVD I ever bought was Natural Born Killers, incidentally. This ritual continued for my entire 3-year tenure in Texas. By the time I arranged to move back to Florida, I had nearly 300 DVDs.
I had become a collectorâofficiallyâand I was really okay with that. By this time I was nearing 40, didnât get out as much, didnât live out of a backpack anymore, and so collecting something I loved felt appropriate.
A Life in Film
Did I mention I love film?
I wrote film reviews in college and have a film theory minor. Regretfully, I didnât make it a major. But I think it was this love of cinemaâof the auteur processâthat encouraged me to continue growing my collection.
Once back in Florida, I increased the pace of my purchases. I was now bringing in as many as 10 films per week. The collection was thriving. I began pursuing rare and out-of-print DVDs, and found I truly enjoyed adding those rare jewels to my shelves.
This went on for several years. By the time I moved to Colorado, I had just over 2,000 DVDs and Blu-rays, more than 100 of them rare or out-of-print.
The Streaming Pause (and Revival)
When streaming began to rise, I slowed my collecting, reserving purchases for only the films that must be added.
(Tolkien is a good example.)
But then streaming got greedyârising prices, intrusive adsâand that was enough for me. I began actively growing the collection again. It had reached around 2,500 titles, and tracking them all was becoming difficultâespecially as I got older.
Go figure.
From Frustration to Creation
One of the nagging issues, like a stone in my shoe, was the poor search experience on IMDb, TMDb, OMDb, and others. They use full-text search with very limited capabilitiesâno natural language support, no real boolean logic.
As a software engineer with 30 years of experience, and deep knowledge of Apache Solr, I decided to index my collection myself.
I use Greek letters to identify rows (youâll see "location" fields in the archiveâthatâs what that means).
And as I was indexing, it hit me:
Other cinephiles might love a search engine that supports natural language queries, boolean logic, and full Lucene syntax.
đŹ And So⌠DeepDiveCinema.club Was Born
"You may have arrived here chasing a single title, or out of curiosity, but my hope is that you'll explore and leave with a greater knowledge of film then when you entered."
I sincerely hope you enjoy browsing the collection.
Happy viewing,
â Kevin Cowan
Founder, Deep Dive Cinema Club
Written in the projection booth by Kevvie
DeepDiveCinema.club
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