Martini Shot

Not too long ago, I had a meeting at a network. It was going to be a big meeting – big meaning a lot of people, not big meaning important. And these days, I shouldn't even really bother to say "big" either because every meeting I have seems to involve at least four more people than there are chairs, and one or two poor souls on speakerphone, who can't be heard, ever, because someone in the room is always talking and the speaker only goes one way, and they can't hear anything on their end anyway because that odd star-shaped speakerphone thing is positioned too close to someone with a pen-tapping habit, which manages to drown out the other voices...

A friend of mine pitched a television show last week to a big cable outfit.  He told me the pitch went really well – everyone was making good eye contact, they were nodding and taking notes attentively, laughing at the right spots, leaning forward at the exciting places – and then, he said, things went south...

I went to a party recently at a giant house out somewhere in the mountains around Malibu. It was one of those houses with lots of rooms and pools and splashing ponds, room for tennis and volleyball and outdoor living, enormous stones from some exotic river had been sent across an ocean in a shipping container, then dragged up the hill by smoking and squealing trucks, arranged along the pathways and then dramatically uplit. It was the kind of place that you walk around and think, instantly, this house belongs to a Bond villain.  I expected piranhas in the koi ponds and guys in matching jumpsuits...

It doesn't end well, I don't think, for the kids on MTV's Jersey Shore.  I don't know exactly what the third acts of those lives are going to be, but they don't strike me as the kind with the swooping orchestral track and the crane shot.  They strike me as the kind of third acts that end up in a Cinnabon somewhere...

If you've called me anytime since early last week, I probably didn't get the message, if you left a message, because I have no way of knowing there's a message waiting for me...

Anything you want to know about the television business you can learn from watching the Dick Van Dyke show, which has it all, including a perfect example of the mis-lead in the opening titles...

The best way to get money in Hollywood is to act like you don't need it.  That's the logic, I think, behind giving millionaire celebrities lots of cool, free swag just for announcing award nominees or showing up at a charity function. On the way home from some swank event, inside every expensive car gliding away from the port cochere – or whatever that's called, let's call it an awning, but an expensive one – there's the deafening sound of tissue paper being ripped apart, bags being emptied and turned out, as whoever is in the passenger seat – and, occasionally, the driver's seat, too – tears open the gift bag to find out how much free stuff they got...

A veteran television writer once said to me, "My career goal is to go home." Meaning, let's get this rewrite done and get into our cars as fast as possible. Real professionals in this business don't really want to have late-night writing sessions, or production shoots that go past eleven....

There’s an old story about a terrible production of the play, The Diary of Anne Frank. It was so awful, apparently, that in the scene early on, when the Gestapo comes to search the house, someone from the audience called out, “She’s in the attic!  She’s in the attic!” You know, because they wanted it over and stuff...

A few years ago, I got a call from a studio executive I was working with.  It was about this time of year – pitching season – and the executive wanted to know what, if anything, I was thinking about pitching...