Martini Shot

The story goes that halfway through the first script reading for an episode of Lucille Ball's final, doomed ABC sit-com in the late 1980's, she stopped mid-sentence...

I had this fever for about three weeks – and that's not a euphemism, I mean an actual hot brain, exhausting, sweaty alarmingly high body temperature thing that kept recurring at regular times during the day, until the cycles got tighter and eventually it just came and stayed, and I spent about three days stumbling around New York city with glazed eyes and burning ears and occasional lapses in consciousness.

The way the television business used to work was, if you had a pilot in production, you'd call up your writer friends and ask them to help out for a day, and they would – usually with some grumbling...

There are really only two kinds of businesses that make sense. One, you can make a billion things and sell them for one cent each, or Two, you can make one thing and sell it for a billion dollars...

A friend of mine finally hit the big time. She was asked to star in her own reality television series. She turned it down flat. I know myself well enough," she told me...

Sometimes, when I tell friends of mine who are not in the entertainment business, about the goings-on within the entertainment business, I get a sad little chuckle and a shake of the head in response, as if to say, You guys are nuts.  I’ll never understand it....

Not too long ago, I was producing a pilot and like all pilot-producing experiences, this one had its moments of panic, short-tempers, and those weird moments where you think we're talking about a script and a TV show, but we're actually talking about the network executive's crippling fear of the network president, or the studio executive's stomach-churning regret over having leased the Mercedes and not the Audi, which would have been a safer choice since everyone knows there are going to be big changes in the studio development department right after pilot season...

You’d think that a business famous for its double-talk and lack of candor would have more complicated and oblique jargon, but the entertainment business is pretty straightforward when it comes to that.