Martini Shot

A lot of companies now offer a cool service.  They'll take your strings of voice-mails and automatically transcribe them into text.  There's an iPhone app that does a pretty good job of this, called Voxie.  And it's also a service of Google Voice, the Google-brand telephone service that lets you use one number for pretty much everything...

I have a friend who is a psychiatrist.  I once asked her what she does when she thinks a patient is lying to her.  "How can you really help someone," I said, "who isn't telling you what really happened?..."

In January of 1990, almost twenty years ago, I pitched a joke in the writers' room of TV's long-running, phenomenally popular comedy Cheers. The actual joke is forgotten – it wasn't a good one (I didn't pitch anything good, or even decent, for a while) but I was young, and it was my first real job, and so I knew about what someone who was twenty-four and starting his career knows, which is to say, nothing...

So, every writer has a Sinatra moment – you know what I mean, a moment when you got a note or a request from the studio or the network – change this character, make the mom younger, add a dog, don't mention cancer – you know, just the general stuff that every writer in Hollywood eventually has to deal with when the "art form" they've chosen – and yes, in case you didn't hear it, I made little quote marks in the air when I said "art form" – but when the "art form" that you've chosen requires $17 million worth of expensive equipment and three hundred people to bring to life, rather than a six dollar set of oil paints and a piece of canvas, you end up having to listen to a lot of people...

I have a friend who is working on a television show with two studios involved (which means two separate sets of studio executives, all giving notes and thoughts and suggestions on every single rewrite) and three non-writing producers, doing the same, and a separate set of network executives, doing the same...

The last time I went to New York, I got off the plane and headed to the cab line and thought: wait a minute. The line is huge. And the cab is going to run me about sixty bucks. So, overcome with a sudden attack of parsimony, I took the train. Bought a metro card, the whole thing. Got out on 51st street, headed to my hotel, and when I checked in they asked, “Do you need any help with your bags, sir?” and I said...

Not too long ago I was in a meeting with the president of a television network. The show I was working on at the time was on the air and successfully so. Sort of unusual for me, I guess, but it has happened in the past. Despite the impression that my four minutes here often conveys, I've had good meetings and successful exchanges and positive outcomes during my time here in Hollywood. And this was one of those meetings...

In the late 1980's, a huge phone company hired a top-of-the-line consultancy to make a forecast. Cell-phone usage was growing quickly, and the phone company needed to know how to plan for this new, business model transforming technology. So they paid these consultants a lot of money to answer this question: how many mobile phones will be in use in this country by the year 2000?

The cliché, of course, is that American television is awful.  You know the saw: bad sitcoms, predictable dramas, tame dialogue, soft characters.  About four years before it was even invented, people started hating television.  Now, not so much – there's a lot on that very good, and television's blood rival, feature films, have become mostly movies about robots, so TV – with its Mad Men and The Wire and 30 Rock and Weeds just seems more sophisticated...