Film · 1979 · Films · 1970s
Being There
Scored from 276 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Chance, a sheltered gardener who has spent his entire life tending the grounds of a wealthy Washington townhouse, is forced into the outside world when his employer dies. His simple, television-shaped pronouncements about gardening are mistaken for profound metaphors by the political and business elite, and he is swept into the orbit of a dying tycoon and his wife, rising to improbable national prominence.
Being There (1979) is a film IMDb files under the comedy and drama genres. Inside comedy it is classed as Satire.
The calibrated figure is built from 276 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 285 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,549 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s films — 2,406 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Being There lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1970s (2,406 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 276.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
