Martini Shot

A nice friend of mine wrote a great feature film script, and he gave it to me to read, he said. But he didn't really care if I read it. What he wanted me to do was send it along, to agents or producers or directors I know. Which was fine – it really is a great piece of work – but he's new to the business, so he asked me to wait a week. Until, he said, he had time to register it with the Writers Guild...

People often think that pitching a television series is unpleasant. It's not. It's not easy, of course – you sort of have to work out a lot beforehand, and then there's awkward small-talk to negotiate – but the process itself can be sort of fun. I mean, look, it's the easiest kind of sales call to make: the buyer is in the market to buy. They have a budget all worked out. It's sort of like selling cars – it's not easy work, of course, but anyone who walks onto a car lot and looks around for five minutes is going to buy a car from someone...

Last week, almost five million people refused to obey orders. They watched a show called Hot in Cleveland, which has older female stars who are well-known to television audience in a multiple camera sit-com shot in front of a live audience...

Hollywood is what they call an OPM business. Other People's Money.  That's really the key to success around here – the ability to take someone else's money and gamble it on an entertainment product, after taking a small fee, of course...

You can get all artsy about it, I guess, but the truth is, the way most writers approach a writing project is, first, they ask themselves this question: what's the least amount of writing I can do before someone will write me a check?

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot on KCRW and it's not 6:44 anymore, it's 4:44 now, which is called, in the television business, a time slot change...

Once, not too long ago, I went to a local coffee shop and ordered a tall coffee with room at the top for milk.  Those are pretty much the words I used: tall coffee, room at the top, but what I got was a tall coffee with no room at the top.  Filled to the rim... 

Hear that? That's silence.  That's what all writers are supposed to require to get anything done.  Except for the writers who want to hear this [loud music]...

A friend of mine loves to reminisce about the old days, when she first moved to Hollywood to make her way in the entertainment business. She arrived almost totally penniless, which is often a recipe for the first act of an ABC Afterschool Special – which they don’t even make anymore, I think, these days, when it’s impossible to shock anyone, especially a teenager. But back in the day, as people who do not realize just how powerful the gears of time are put it, back in the day, an ABC Afterschool Special was what you watched when you wanted to know what happened to kids who drank too much, or ran away, or got into strange vans. These days I guess kids don’t need to watch that on TV. They see it everyday. In homeroom.

The human life can be neatly divided into two halves. In the first half, when the phone rings, you think, "Oh, great!  Someone's calling me!" In the second half, when the phone rings, you think, "Oh.  Great.  Someone's calling me." In olden times, of course, when the phone rang, it really rang.  It wasn't just a twenty-second snippet of some Lady Gaga song.  And the phone was a shared object –  it could be for anyone, so when someone answered it, there was this delicious sense of mystery: who's calling?  Who's it for?