Age and gender in film and television: The case of Huong Hoang

Huong Hoang, who goes by her stage name Junie Hoang, is an American actress who sued Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for revealing her chronological age. According to her formal complaint document, filed with the United States District Court in January 2012, Hoang subscribed to IMDb’s professional services (IMDbPro) in 2003, and began entering her acting profile information to increase her exposure to the media industries. In order to subscribe to these services Hoang had to provide detailed personal and credit card information to pay for the subscription. Shortly after subscribing to IMDbPro, she realized that her legal date of birth had been added to her public acting profile on IMDb. com, which she had intentionally not entered herself. Hoang argued that her date of birth is associated with her legal name, Huong Hoang, and was not public information prior to her subscribing to IMDbPro. She requested that IMDb, the company owned by Amazon that operates both IMDb and IMDbPro, remove her date of birth, but the company refused. Hoang claimed she has rigorously protected this information to benefit her acting career, and she anonymously filed a $1,000,000 lawsuit in 2011 against IMDb and its owner Amazon. The news media quickly began coverage of this case as a story about “ageism in Hollywood.” This chapter draws on Hoang’s legal battle against IMDb as a platform from which to explore issues of age and gender inequalities in film and television and their implications for life course scholarship in general and age identities in particular.