Last week, our local daily’s online poll question was, have you ever Googled yourself? It has been years since I plugged my name into Google so just for kicks, I did and I was surprised by what turned up.
There were the usual links to my blogs, news stories and book pages but a link to IMDB also appeared. IMDB, in case you don’t know, stands for Internet Movie DataBase. It’s like Linked In for film and TV performers. Stars on the A list are all there. In fact, having an IMDB entry is the only thing I will ever have in common with Julia Roberts.
I’m Lisa Brandt III with exactly one credit listed and that’s the Toy Mountain TV Special that aired on CTV in 2006. My assumption is that someone at CTV or Rogers put the listing up but I’ll probably never know. There was an empty photo file and an empty biography and one measly, little credit. I aimed to fix that, signed up for a 2-week trial to IMDB Pro and got to work.
The only TV credit that matters in my career is Whatever Happened To. I’ve appeared on other shows over the years but this one’s still running and people somehow see it all the time. People have approached me all over, at the grocery store, the bookstore and the Western Fair to ask if I’m that woman who talks about the stars! Whatever Happened To isn’t listed on IMDB and this is where my attempt to make myself look legit breaks down. In order to even ask the powers that be at IMDB to consider adding a credit for a show that isn’t already on the site, you have to know everything about it. I faked my way through most of it, remembering the names of the director, producer and other details. But then it came to budget, production schedule, and a whole lot of other things that I would have no way of knowing. Seriously! I was expected to know the show’s budget? That, my friends, is a brick wall. I wrote a short, benign little bio, cancelled my subscription and moved on.
On the one hand, I’m helping to make Lisa Brandts I and II look really good. And it’s not like I’m trying to prove anything. But someone thought I was worth listing and it’s a little bit sad that my only credit is a one-time, unpaid TV appearance. IMDB says it will remove anything I added because I cancelled my subscription. No wonder George Clooney never calls.