Martini Shot

By KCRWArts

Martini Shot episodes

March 22, 2007 Bellweathers
When Bob Crane, the star of TV's Hogan's Heroes, was found
murdered in an Arizona motel in the late 1970's, among his personal
effects were several hundred pounds of video equipment. Crane had
state-of-the-art equipment for 1974: a huge video camera, a heavy
playback tape machine (roughly the size of four microwave ovens stacked
together), and enough lights to form a small production company.
6 min
March 15, 2007 The Aflac Duck
So, how do I do this? On the one hand, I want to share something about a certain network. This certain network ordered a pilot recently based on the caveman character in the Geico insurance ads. Have you seen them? Kind of funny. The idea is that if you're a caveman somehow living in today's world -- I don't mean like a caveman, I mean an actual caveman, with eyebrow ridges and stringy hair and like that -- anyway, the point of the commercial is that if you were such a caveman, making your way in the modern world, you'd have to deal with a lot of prejudice. People thinking you're stupid or oafish or dazzled by fire or whatever...
5 min
March 08, 2007 Writing for Free
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Said Samuel Johnson, at some point, to someone. Good advice...

6 min
March 01, 2007 Episode Two
Now that I'm officially not making a pilot, and am deep into my seasonal I'm-quitting-this-idiotic-business muttering and stomping around, I need to get something off of my chest....
6 min
February 22, 2007 Technically Dead
This year, I had two pilot scripts in contention for the fall 2007 season. Both of them are now, in the words of the networks that paid for them, technically dead. Technically dead. Not dead. Not alive, certainly. But dead, technically...
5 min
February 08, 2007 We're Going to Be Okay
5 min
January 25, 2007 The Bonus
A few years ago, we shot a pilot for a network that didn't want it.
They were cornered by something called a "pilot commitment" -- which
means, essentially, that at some point someone at the network agreed to
pay a huge penalty (something pretty close to the cost of producing a
pilot) if they didn't produce the pilot. So, faced with the prospect of
paying one-million-two for a something and one-million-one for nothing,
they thought, "Okay, what the heck. Make it. But we hate it. But make
it. Even though we hate it..."
5 min
January 18, 2007 Standards and Practices
I have a friend, actually, I do, this part is true, who currently has a show on the air, and in a recent episode, they had a joke that was a bit too risqué, a bit too explicit for network television. Now what happens in this case is, usually, the joke appears in the table draft, which the actors read at the table reading, which is attended by about sixty thousand people from the network and the studio, all of whom gather in little clumps afterwards to think things over and decide exactly which parts of the script were the funniest, freshest, and most lively, and then ask for these specific parts to be removed...
5 min
January 04, 2007 Getting Things Done
For the past week I've been reading an excellent book called Getting Things Done by a very interesting guy named David Allen. The book's title sort of gives it all away: it's a book about, well, Getting Things Done, and it's a pretty thorough, compelling system for organizing your life and work for maximum productivity...
5 min
December 21, 2006 We're Cranking!
For the next, oh, ten seconds, I'm going to be lying to you... The script? It's going really well. It's basically done, we're just
tweaking things here and there and trying to get it down to a tight 40
pages. You should be getting it very soon. Really, you know, in the
next couple of…you know…just in the next…you know, sooner rather than
later, of course. Of course. Seriously. We're cranking on it...
5 min