Every writing project hits the same wall: the neurotic feedback loop of details that don’t add up. Who’s watching the baby? Who’s watching the bar? Rob Long has been around long enough to remember the lost art of script research. You’d messenger your draft to a company, and they would send it back annotated with neutral and merciless notes. When Frasier Crane mentioned his deceased parents on Cheers, a margin note came back, Establishes for Frasier: parents deceased. Oh, how that same script research company must have reacted when they received the Frasier pilot.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re finally through Oscar season, which means it’s time to think about prestige, status and the difference between the awards you want and the awards you get. Rob Long has a People’s Choice Award obtained through what can only be described as informed consent, a WGA Award for the Earth Day Television Special, an LA Press Club Award that doesn’t read on camera and an Emmy certificate that looks terrific... on the wall.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A friend asked Rob Long for career advice at Zankou Chicken. Rob hates giving advice — especially career advice, which is mostly just autobiography dressed up as wisdom. But while his friend waited for an answer, Rob started thinking about a leather jacket he bought in the early 1990s with $400 he didn’t have — and how Hollywood, despite devastating unemployment numbers, has always run on the assumption that something great is about to happen. For Rob, it did. For everyone else: the hope still remains.

Transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whether it was Sally Field as The Flying Nun or Julie Andrews playing a novitiate in The Sound of Music, audiences used to watch priests and nuns and ministers — unremarkably — as part of American life on screen. But that all went away, and Rob Long is well aware why that is. Church attendance declined steadily for decades, and the stigma around religion has become unavoidable. Which made it all the more impressive how Rian Johnson brought faith to the screen in one particular scene of Wake Up Dead Man: an embodiment of what prayer does for people.

Transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Lynton, the former CEO of Sony Pictures, has a new book that tells the story of greenlighting the Seth Rogen comedy that provoked North Korea into hacking his studio. He traces it back to an awkward childhood in Holland and a lifelong need to fit in with the cool kids. Rob Long also had an awkward childhood in Holland. He also ended up in show business. But he’s not sure Lynton’s story is really a cautionary tale. The entertainment business isn’t suffering from too much risk. It’s suffering from too little. Also: Puppets might have helped.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rob Long tries — unsuccessfully — to convince his Hollywood friends that seminary isn’t a branding exercise. His stint at Princeton, where he’s working towards a Masters in Divinity and ordination, has all the hallmarks of a great pilot. But according to Rob, it’s the opposite. Show business has prepared him well for studying the Bible — and led him to the unsettling realization that biblical scholarship and credits arbitration are basically the same thing.

Transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The late and irreplaceable Catherine O’Hara’s greatness lived in the microscopic choices — the mouthed lines, the half-beats, the emotions stacked on top of jokes — none of which were written down, and all of which made the comedy work. From Waiting for Guffman to Best in Show to Beetlejuice, she gave audiences “permission to laugh” by making even the most absurd premises feel emotionally true. Which is why the Home Alone franchise became a global phenomenon, and why for writers especially, her loss is painful in a very specific way: The best, funniest, most essential parts of a script aren’t written, if you’re lucky enough to have Catherine O’Hara reading your lines.

Transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Correcting others in public is an irresistible temptation — and almost always a mistake. Rob learned that lesson early, as a young writer on Cheers, when he pointed out that a character, a sort of ‘80s finance type, couldn’t actually be arrested for launching a hostile takeover as the line was written. He was right. But it annoyed everyone. The lesson however stuck: knowing when to let things go matters a lot more than knowing you’re correct.

Transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Awards season is here, which means Hollywood is again awash in parties, cocktails and mocktails. And yet, somehow, none of it feels like much of a celebration. Rob Long remembers the best awards party he ever went to — the one no one planned — and traces how an industry that once knew how to have fun became serious, fragmented and anxious. His antidote to malaise? A really good, wide-open bash — that someone else pays for.

Transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heated Rivalry, the horny hockey drama, employs a classic Hollywood formula: Sprinkle in some nudity, and suddenly the odds of your crapshoot becoming a hit improve. Like the perpetually packed “European-style” pool in Las Vegas, audiences are drawn in by the allure of illicit skin. And in a business where a hit can be hard to come by and certainty is nonexistent, nudity — whether from closeted hockey players or HBO hits of yore — remains the simple, reliable grease. 

Transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices