Martini Shot

Hear that? That's silence.  That's what all writers are supposed to require to get anything done.  Except for the writers who want to hear this [loud music]...

A friend of mine loves to reminisce about the old days, when she first moved to Hollywood to make her way in the entertainment business. She arrived almost totally penniless, which is often a recipe for the first act of an ABC Afterschool Special – which they don’t even make anymore, I think, these days, when it’s impossible to shock anyone, especially a teenager. But back in the day, as people who do not realize just how powerful the gears of time are put it, back in the day, an ABC Afterschool Special was what you watched when you wanted to know what happened to kids who drank too much, or ran away, or got into strange vans. These days I guess kids don’t need to watch that on TV. They see it everyday. In homeroom.

The human life can be neatly divided into two halves. In the first half, when the phone rings, you think, "Oh, great!  Someone's calling me!" In the second half, when the phone rings, you think, "Oh.  Great.  Someone's calling me." In olden times, of course, when the phone rang, it really rang.  It wasn't just a twenty-second snippet of some Lady Gaga song.  And the phone was a shared object –  it could be for anyone, so when someone answered it, there was this delicious sense of mystery: who's calling?  Who's it for?

When I was trying to break into show business, and older, more experienced writer – I think he was twenty-five; I think he once had a script optioned by a Serbia-based producer – told me that the only way to break into television writing was to be on a list of network-approved writers. It was a real list, he said, with a lot of names on it, and only those names would ever be hired to be on a writing staff. Get your name on that list, he said.  It's the only way...

When I first moved here – and exactly when is really none of your business – I drove a battered old Subaru station wagon, with a rusted undercarriage and New Hampshire plates.  It burned a quart or so of oil every month, and when you made a left turn it emitted a smell like a burning plastic doll...

People love to say "Carpe Diem" or "Seize the Day," but they never tell who, exactly, to seize it from. I mean, you have to seize it from somebody, right?  If there was any time in your possession at all, you’d have seized it months – maybe years – before.   My theory is this: there are two kinds of people in this world: the kind that seize the day, and the kind whose day get seized...

For something that everyone in show business eventually has to deal with, you’d think we’d have come up with a better way to do casting. Although you have to marvel at the efficiency of the system.  When a casting call goes out, in something called, with unintentional accuracy, The Breakdown, wheels set in motion deliver to you, in a few hours, multiple human versions of whatever was described on paper...

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot… on…. KCRW I am here, just a minute I have to send this one email and then I'm here, totally, let me just….Send….this out. And now I'm done.  Here I am.  Sorry....

Not too long ago, I worked on a project with a friend of mine.  We wrote a script together, that, despite being the best script every written with one or two exceptions, didn't, as the current euphemism sweeping the business says, move forward...

For the past five years or so, I've been telling anyone who'll listen – well, boring anyone who'll listen – about my theories on the emerging economics of the television business. In a nutshell: the exploding universe of unlimited bandwidth combined with unlimited storewidth have created a classic case of margin squeeze....

When I first came to Hollywood to be a writer – and it's really none of your business when, exactly, that was – what I discovered was that every other writer I met seemed to be working on something, seemed to have some angle, some in with someone important. Everyone I met seemed to be one or two steps away from greatness...

About a week after I started working as a television writer, a guy who had been in the business a while was telling me a few stories from his career, and he wound up this way. "I've got a lot of stories like that," he said, "because I've spent twenty years in show business."

A "first look" deal is a deal between a producer or writer-producer and a studio or network that stipulates, essentially, that in exchange for a certain sum of money, the producer or writer-producer guarantees the counter-party (in this case, the studio or network) that they’ll have dibs – or "first look" – on any project or script that the other side comes up with.   What it doesn’t specify, of course, is what a "look" is, or what "first" means...

Having a baby is hard, I'm told, but it can't be harder than working with a baby.  And I don't mean that metaphorically, either.

The great thing about laughter – and the big reason most of the writers I know got into comedy in the first place – is that it's involuntary.  It erupts – that's what we say: the audience erupted into laughter – from some reptile part of the brain...

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Writers in Hollywood, as I might have mentioned once or twice before, get a lot of notes. From the studio. From the network. From the producer and the director and the actors and even, when they're stupid enough to ask for them, from their spouses and friends and colleagues...

It's pilot season – maybe you've detected the joy in the air?  It's come a little late this year – writers have been a little slower than usual with the rewrites and the drafts, mostly because for the past two weeks, any two writers together has meant at least two hours of conversation about Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker and NBC and if you multiply that out – two writers times two hours times hundreds of projects all across the television industry – you end up with what economists might call “intrinsic inefficiencies...”

At some point in its creation, every writing project – a feature film script, a TV pilot, a four minute radio commentary, whatever --  is about twice as long as it should be.  And after you've played with the margins and fiddled with the font size, you eventually have to figure out what to cut...

Writing is supposed to be a solitary thing. A lonely life. Not in the television business. Writers for television are positively surrounded by people. Executives, producers, actors – we’re never really able to achieve that ratty-sweater-coffee-mug kind of arrangement. Sure, there’s a week or two when we’re left essentially alone to bang out a draft, but within a few hours of turning it in to our paymasters, we’re on the phone, getting notes and questions and requests for revisions...

Here's what it's come to. I take a simple kitchen timer – this one is shaped like a tomato – and I set it for 25 minutes. And then I sit in a chair and I work – mostly, I write – continuously focusing for 25 minutes...