In order to rebuild what has been lost when my laptop died, I am also redesigning my company website. Here is something interesting. About 10 years ago I created a site to sell some of my paintings and other work on. It was a crazy and hard to navigate mess, but I sold a bunch of paintings. Friends would often give me advice on making the site more professional.
I am never quite sure what this word professional is supposed to mean. I think my friends wanted the site toned down and less obnoxiously hectic. That site fit what I was doing at the time. After I sold the vast majority of my paintings and I moved on to other ventures I stayed away from site building. At some point I was dragged back in and built another site to show some of the films I was creating. I often heard from a bozo friend, the type who always has uninformed opinions but expresses then with such conviction that you think they are informed, and his vast knowledge of nothing was what led him to constantly offer tips on creating the new site.
Here is something interesting. People who have never done something often appear in your life as experts. This happens to me all the time. Recently I was talking to a friend about a screenplay and I was reminded of a time when I was writing scripts for a pilot television show in Los Angeles. The show had been picked up for production and the producer was scouting for writers. My friend had been contacted, but his skills lay elsewhere, but mine were needed. I was asked to write a half hour script. I followed the format, created a situation and went with it. The producer loved the script and paid me handsomely for it. She asked for another, which I created. At this point, my friend, who was the connection to the producer did everything in his power to destroy this opportunity. He was an uncreative moron, but he was the connection to the producer. If memory serves me, I ran from that scene as fast as my chubby legs would take me.
Very soon after I was in an emergency room and a nurse asked me what I did for a living. I mentioned that I had sold a couple of scripts for a new TV show and immediately the nurse took me aside and began to share with me all the funny and strange things that happen in emergency rooms and pitched me a concept of a show based in, you guessed it, an emergency room. It quickly dawned on me that everyone thinks their life is worthy of a book deal, a production contract or at the very least, a TV sitcom. I think at that point I never again mentioned that I had written for a TV show.
A few years ago I was adding content to the site I was creating for showcasing my film work and almost daily I would get these semi-retarded calls from a corpulent post modern bonehead who would share with me concepts for making the site cleaner and more professional. He even tried to edit some of the films because at some point he began to believe he had a vision. What was remarkable about this is that mutual friends had warned me of his egocentric attitudes, coupled with his complete lack of creativity, original thought or understanding of process. Having been warned, I paid little attention to his diatribes. What was interesting then, as now, is how often people not involved in a project seem to think they know how to make it better. I would imagine people from architects to garbage collectors get this same treatment, everyone else is an expert with a better understanding of what the other person is doing.
That said, I am about to load a new website for the film business, which seems to be kind of on fire right now, so that too is another reason for the randomness of posts. That and I keep getting calls from bozo-friends who have brilliant ideas on the new site.
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