Martini Shot

A TV writers room can be a cranky, hostile place. Rob Long and his colleagues spend their days arguing over which story beats to keep, whose joke is funnier, and what to order for lunch. But is it better when that chaos happens with people you’ve worked with before or strangers? An academic study gave Rob the answer.

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler or apply to The Ladder, a new members-only hub for early career entertainment professionals.

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

The next few weeks are going to be tough, a little bit like being force-fed goat cheese if you are Rob Long. So in this current toxic political environment, or really in any uncomfortable situation forced upon you, Rob has some simple advice. Use the word ‘huh’ — the one magic word that saves you from further confrontation.

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler or apply to The Ladder, a new members-only hub for early career entertainment professionals.

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

The Ankler recently launched The Ladder, a hub for early career entertainment professionals, which has Rob Long wondering one thing: What are these people thinking? Gone are the days where a 24-year-old like Rob could come to L.A. and months later be staffed on a show like Cheers, or make a lot of money specializing in just story beats or jokes. Today, you have to be a “multi-hyphenate,” or, to put it in Rob’s old Hollywood lingo, a “sweat act” — able to do a little bit of everything.

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler or apply to The Ladder, a new members-only hub for early career entertainment professionals.

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

A normal person, when a friend tells them about their broke dad with cancer, think this is a sad story; this poor guy; how can I help? Not Rob Long. He latches on to the part of the story about the dad having to move in with his New-Age vegan daughter to be closer to the hospital, and begins to wonder could this be a pitch?

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler or apply to The Ladder, a new members-only hub for early career entertainment professionals.

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

We perform plastic surgery on a lot of things in Hollywood — even history. Say you’ve got an amazing true story about the highest-ranking woman in the mafia, as Rob Long once did, but you don’t know how many people she killed. Why not make it lots of them? Now it’s not quite true, it’s “based on true events,” but good enough. As Rob can attest, there’s not a story in the world — true or not — that couldn’t use a little Botox. 

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler.

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

Like many writers, Rob Long enjoys opining on writing more than actual writing. There’s no greater procrastination than, say, teaching a class on “maintaining focus.” Meanwhile, there are other writers at their computers, getting ideas out the door that are getting pitched first. Which may be when it’s time for procrastinators to turn to the best TV writing hack of all time: Sell the house.

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler.

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

Indiana Smith didn’t sound quite right to Spielberg and Lucas, so they changed it to Indiana Jones — and the rest is history. You never know what’s going to work and what’s going to fail. Or why. That’s part of what makes notes, a pillar of Rob Long’s existence, so tricky. Because sometimes you should play ball with what a network wants. But other times you might need to pull a Sinatra: “My Way.”

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler.

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

It’s not easy being blunt in Hollywood, with a lot of time spent dancing around the truth. Is a network or studio actually interested in the pitch? How much money are they willing to pay? That’s why it’s worth remembering the fan letter an actress friend of Rob Long’s received, where the sender was less invested in her career than making sure she answered his more prurient podiatry queries. After all, someone has to ask for what you want, get to the point and keep everyone focused on the important things, which is how Rob finds himself praising, yes, his agent.

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler.

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

When a fading comedian says they want new material, that's not what they want. What they want is “new old material,” meaning fresh jokes that sound like the ones they’ve already told. Hollywood today finds itself in the same predicament: needing new shows that feel like the old ones. Because, as Rob Long points out, the comforting and the familiar are what audiences crave — like Italian food — and can fix an industry today broken right down the middle.

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler.

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

Rob Long has tried everything: Meditation, free writing, morning pages — all in an effort to be more present, to get out of reading trade headlines and reflexively wondering, But how does this benefit me? In an industry pathologically insular and insecure, it’s hard to imagine the world outside. Now with Hollywood in desperate need of a shakeup, Rob’s going first: He reveals the surprise masters degree he’s now pursuing and you won’t believe it. Just don’t say he left showbiz.

Transcript here. For more entertainment news, subscribe to The Ankler.

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