<p>Has any one done this before? It would seem to me that there should be a webservice but i can't find one.  I am writing an application for personal use that would just show basic info from IMDB.</p>

There is no webservice available.
But there are enough html scrapers written in every language to suit your needs!
I've used the
.NET 3.5 Imdb Services opensource project
in a few personal projects.
1 minute google results:
Perl:
IMDB-Film
Ruby:
libimdb-ruby
Python:
IMDbPY