As a writer, I kept asking myself: why are the adjectives just right? Mind-bending and sandal-and-sword (you know, Conan!) and Twisty Tale and Rogue-Cop and Mad Scientist and Underdog and Feel-Good and Understated.
The words themselves were carefully chosen. By whom?
There were questions we still had, too. From a Los Angeles Times article, we knew the basics of tagging. But how did the tags relate to Netflix's "personalized genres"? What algorithm converted this mass of tags into precisely 76,897 genres?
If most people attempting to understand Netflix's genres were like the classic blind man trying to comprehend an elephant, I felt like I could see the front half of the beast, perhaps, but not the whole thing. I needed someone to explain the back end.
So, after I'd secured my data, I called up Netflix's PR liaison, a Dutch guy named Joris Evers who keeps a miniature windmill on his desk. I told him we had to talk.
After I filled him in on what we'd done, I waited to hear his reaction, wondering if I was about to have my Netflix account permanently canceled. Instead, he said, "And now you want to come in and talk to Todd Yellin, I guess?"
Yellin is Netflix's VP of Product and the man responsible for the creation of Netflix's system. Tagging all the movies was his idea. How to tag them began with a 24-page document he wrote himself. He tagged the early movies and guided the creation of all the systems.
Yes, of course I wanted to meet Yellin. He had become my Wizard of Oz, the man who made the machine, the human whose intelligence and sensibility I'd been tracking through the data.
At our interview, Yellin turned to me and said, "I've been waiting for someone to bubble up like this for years."
* * *
On the day I visited Netflix in Los Gatos, California, a lesser-known Silicon Valley town, there was a recycling center fire spewing toxins all across the Bay Area. The sky turned strange colors and the smell of burning plastic crept into one's nostrils.
Netflix is housed in a huge Italianate building that looks like a converted spa: yellow stucco, fountains, sky bridges. People live in apartments directly behind their headquarters, and the residents there share a gym with the Netflix folks.
It feels oddly like a movie set, except everybody is doing the wrong thing, like if you showed up at a Universal Studios backlot and it turned out to be a branch office of Charles Schwab. They should be lounging by a pool, eating olives and drinking rose, but instead they're typing in vast and admirably adult rows of cubicles.
Yellin had some of the misplaced Hollywood feel, too. Intelligent, quick, and energetic, he feels like a producer, which makes sense as he's been, by his own accounting, "on all sides of the movie industry." Physically, he bears a remarkable resemblance to the actor Michael Kelly, who plays Doug Stamper, chief of staff to Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in Netflix's original series House of Cards.