How do they make a video like this?

Cafe Society
1

I just watched a YouTube video WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE (Sung by 257 Movies!). They took a song and reproduced it by editing together words spoken in movies.

I’ve seen other videos like this. Here’s Rapper’s Delight Brian Williams feat Lester Holt.

How do they make these? How is somebody able to shift through literally thousands of hours of footage to find a specific word they need? If somebody asked me to find a movie where somebody said the word “Panmunjom” for example, I wouldn’t even know how to begin looking. Googling “movie where somebody said Panmunjom” didn’t produce any usable results.

Is there some massive searchable database that contains the transcripts of every movie and television show ever made?

2

I found a pretty big searchable one after just a few moments of Googling, so yes. Entered a few pieces of the Billy Joel song and it delivered.

No idea about the legality of hosting all those scripts (they claim fair use since they only show a few lines of a script at a time) so I won’t post it here.

ETA: “Panmunjom” is apparently in Scent of a Woman, Hot Shots, and about thirty episodes of MASH (discourse won’t let me do the asterisks).

3

That was really well done.