Martini Shot

When I was trying to break into show business, and older, more experienced writer – I think he was twenty-five; I think he once had a script optioned by a Serbia-based producer – told me that the only way to break into television writing was to be on a list of network-approved writers. It was a real list, he said, with a lot of names on it, and only those names would ever be hired to be on a writing staff. Get your name on that list, he said.  It's the only way...

When I first moved here – and exactly when is really none of your business – I drove a battered old Subaru station wagon, with a rusted undercarriage and New Hampshire plates.  It burned a quart or so of oil every month, and when you made a left turn it emitted a smell like a burning plastic doll...

People love to say "Carpe Diem" or "Seize the Day," but they never tell who, exactly, to seize it from. I mean, you have to seize it from somebody, right?  If there was any time in your possession at all, you’d have seized it months – maybe years – before.   My theory is this: there are two kinds of people in this world: the kind that seize the day, and the kind whose day get seized...

For something that everyone in show business eventually has to deal with, you’d think we’d have come up with a better way to do casting. Although you have to marvel at the efficiency of the system.  When a casting call goes out, in something called, with unintentional accuracy, The Breakdown, wheels set in motion deliver to you, in a few hours, multiple human versions of whatever was described on paper...

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot… on…. KCRW I am here, just a minute I have to send this one email and then I'm here, totally, let me just….
Send….this out. And now I'm done.  Here I am.  Sorry....

Not too long ago, I worked on a project with a friend of mine.  We wrote a script together, that, despite being the best script every written with one or two exceptions, didn't, as the current euphemism sweeping the business says, move forward...

For the past five years or so, I've been telling anyone who'll listen – well, boring anyone who'll listen – about my theories on the emerging economics of the television business. In a nutshell: the exploding universe of unlimited bandwidth combined with unlimited storewidth have created a classic case of margin squeeze....

When I first came to Hollywood to be a writer – and it's really none of your business when, exactly, that was – what I discovered was that every other writer I met seemed to be working on something, seemed to have some angle, some in with someone important. Everyone I met seemed to be one or two steps away from greatness...

About a week after I started working as a television writer, a guy who had been in the business a while was telling me a few stories from his career, and he wound up this way. "I've got a lot of stories like that," he said, "because I've spent twenty years in show business."

A "first look" deal is a deal between a producer or writer-producer and a studio or network that stipulates, essentially, that in exchange for a certain sum of money, the producer or writer-producer guarantees the counter-party (in this case, the studio or network) that they’ll have dibs – or "first look" – on any project or script that the other side comes up with.   What it doesn’t specify, of course, is what a "look" is, or what "first" means...