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?

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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. 

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Writing is a tough, lonely profession. One of its worse qualities: the payment structure, broken up into a zillion little pieces, withheld in full until the bitter end and altogether utterly unpredictable. The whole charade can make someone like Rob Long, understandably, crazy. That’s why, when a production company asks for a tax ID number, or a residual check comes in at $12, not $11, it’s hard not to get a little emotional.

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When tourists trek to Hollywood for their summer vacations, they want a look at the glamour they see onscreen. Instead they get Hollywood Boulevard, and filthy Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in a fist-fight. Yet when the tourists disappear and the season turns, so do Rob Long’s emotions: Into fears about age, the business passing him by, why he never had another career. But then, as reliable as Labor Day on the calendar, he puts the costume back on again.

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Ever tell the stranger sitting next to you on a flight what you do for a living? If you work in entertainment, your seatmate likely will first say, “Have I seen anything you worked on?” and then, “You know what you should do a show about?” And forget about answering the question about how your job exactly works. Because the rules of TV writing and the business have all the inconclusiveness and ambiguity of an annoying French sitcom.

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