Does one have to be a lunatic madman to be an entrepreneur? Are all visionaries nutjobs? Highly debatable. However I recently happened upon two pretty compelling pieces of evidence that point firmly to “yes.”

The documentary film We Live in Public chronicles the rise and fall of Josh Harris, the most famous (and incredibly eccentric) Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of; in 1992, he predicted much of what the web has become:

The Internet is like this new human experience. At first, everybody’s gonna like it, but there will be a fundamental change in the human condition.

The film highlights Harris’ social experiments and how they ultimately predicted the exhibitionism that marks social media today. We do live in public. Harris called that shot years before YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.

And in Sunday’s New York Times, there was a feature on Seth Priebatsch and his start-up company Scvngr (pronounced “Scavenger”). The story focuses on the 21-year-old wunderkind who wants to “build the game layer on top of the world.” Huh, right? That sounds crazy, but so did the premise for all of the other sites that millions and millions of people use every day.

Recently I read a quote on the stages of a visionary, world-changing idea: silly, controversial, progressive, then obvious. When you think of it that way, crazy starts to make a lot of sense.

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Jack Rebney had a really bad day about 22 years ago. And we plan to celebrate Jack’s bad day during our next Red Tuesday event on September 7th. That’s right kids. We’re screening Winnebago Man. The documentary film explores how Rebney’s profanity-laden outtakes from a Winnebago promotional video have become a viral phenomenon (even before YouTube—the clips first circulated on VHS tape).

Here’s a safe-for-work trailer of the film. And our poster for the event.

I hope the delicate ears around our agency handle this well.

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We live for great advertising. It changes the game, moves popular culture and makes brands famous. So when we first heard about the documentary film Art & Copy, we got kind of choked up. Finally, someone made our Rocky. Our Karate Kid.

ART & COPY is a powerful new film about advertising and inspiration. Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, SCRATCH, HYPE!), it reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time — people who’ve profoundly impacted our culture with campaigns like “Just Do It,” “I Love NY,” “Where’s the Beef?,” “Got Milk,”  and “Think Different.”

We are super pumped to be bringing the film to our agency for a special Red Tuesday. The noon screening will be for agency personnel only, and the 6 pm screening will be for students and invitees (and any Red Square kids who want to see it a second time).

Jimmy Greenway, the film’s co-producer, will be at both screenings for Q&A. It’s going to be all kinds of inspirational.

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The director’s statement for Art & Copy easily sums up why great advertising transcends media and becomes woven into the fabric of popular culture. It also characterizes the kind of advertising we strive to create as an agency:

Hate advertising? Make better ads.

What’s different and perhaps surprising about this movie, is that it isn’t about bad advertising, that 98% of which so often annoys and disrespects its audience. I didn’t want to make a doc that just trashes trashy advertising. Too easy, too obvious, and why bother? Instead, granted access to a handful of the greatest advertising minds of the last fifty years, I felt it could be a more powerful statement to focus the film only on those rare few who actually moved and inspired our culture with their work. And that higher standard made me want to make a film that reflected the same kind of disciplined artistic approach that my subjects used.

The films features such ad greats as Mary Wells, George Lois, Cliff Freeman, Hal Riney, Rich Silverstein, Jeff Goodby, Dan Wieden and Lee Clow. Read about the film and watch the trailer here.

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