There are two keys to making money in showbiz: make a hit, and make it easy to watch and find. In other words, make the experience more like shopping on Amazon. Easy is why kids are on YouTube, Rob Long is watching The Gilded Age in TikTok snippets and why Amazon makes being online a seamless experience — except on Prime Video.

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Rob Long recently sold all the old junk from his house: airplane bottles of Dutch gin, a Yemeni incense burner, asparagus tongs and two boxes of computer cables, naturally. Refreshed and ready to begin a new chapter, Rob thinks studios need a similar garage sale with each other’s libraries. Offer up titles, make some swap deals — and reset the whole system, from the IP up.

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Languages other than English have special words for special situations (looking at you Germany and your fingerspitzenfühl). Now, Rob Long proposes a new local lexicon to help capture this particular moment now in the industry, a place where schadenfreude is giving way to another, strange new feeling: Hope for even someone else’s show, any show, to get made. Even if it’s about linemen in buckets.

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Mid-life, Rob Long has gone back to school. Princeton Theological Seminary has been a nice timeout from Hollywood — no profanity, shouting or the pressure to wrap up every meeting with a joke. But Rob is not ditching Hollywood. Instead he ponders bridging the secular and ecclesiastical divide by showing up to his next meeting in a priest’s collar to watch what happens.

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Brand extensions? Prequel? Janet Bond?? Rob Long bets meetings at Amazon are underway with those bullet points in a PowerPoint now that the franchise has been wrested away from its legendarily impossible owners, the Broccolis. Corporate-controlled and obligated by fiduciary responsibility, 007 has secured the plot of his next adventure: shaking every last dime out of his Savile Row suit.

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One of the problems facing showbiz right now: Too many production companies, private equity investors, and celebrity shingles — but not enough set-up projects. That’s why it’s worth remembering the actor-producer-garbageman Rob Long once hired, whose business card was a reminder of simpler times: the producer’s vanity card.

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New streamers all want to be the place that gets it. They’ll say, “Come here and be creative! Give us your quirky, oddball stuff!” But before you know it, Rob Long finds they’re giving notes on the act break and telling writers to raise the stakes. But anybody that’s been in this business awhile, or had any degree of success, can relate — it’s easy to forget that you don’t know all the answers.

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When the streets of L.A. and New York hummed with production, Rob Long would pass so many shoots that he’d zip through and stealthily swipe a coffee and pastry. Now, though, as production shrinks, artisanal donuts and Nespresso pods have given way to Dunkin’ and off-brand coffee. And you know the industry’s in really bad shape when rumors about having to pay for valet parking at your own agency pop up — and everyone believes them.

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When tourists come to Manhattan, some check out “historical landmarks,” like the Sex and the City cupcake shop, where a bite of buttercream frosting can spark the fantasy of a romantic adventure in the Big Apple with best friends. Indeed, Rob Long believes showbiz is at its greatest when, in hard times, it lets the audience daydream. Especially today, amid so much ash and smoke, when the people who make movies and TV need their own escape.

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“Gelson’s is gone.” That’s what Rob Long heard the TV newscaster say solemnly as he watched flames engulf the grocery store. Rob loved that now burned-down market off Sunset in the Palisades, now in the midst of catastrophic loss. All kinds of industry folk — executives, crews, a couple of famous faces — also did. Now with an industry-wide contraction, he understands you might be asking yourself: “Is it time to go?” But the industry’s best trait has always been to ignore and adjust. And start again.

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