Martini Shot

How Funny?

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Writers in Hollywood, as I might have mentioned once or twice before, get a lot of notes. From the studio. From the network. From the producer and the director and the actors and even, when they're stupid enough to ask for them, from their spouses and friends and colleagues...

Get Over It

It's pilot season – maybe you've detected the joy in the air?  It's come a little late this year – writers have been a little slower than usual with the rewrites and the drafts, mostly because for the past two weeks, any two writers together has meant at least two hours of conversation about Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker and NBC and if you multiply that out – two writers times two hours times hundreds of projects all across the television industry – you end up with what economists might call “intrinsic inefficiencies...”

Think Like a Writer

At some point in its creation, every writing project – a feature film script, a TV pilot, a four minute radio commentary, whatever --  is about twice as long as it should be.  And after you've played with the margins and fiddled with the font size, you eventually have to figure out what to cut...

Did We Lose You?

Writing is supposed to be a solitary thing. A lonely life. Not in the television business. Writers for television are positively surrounded by people. Executives, producers, actors – we’re never really able to achieve that ratty-sweater-coffee-mug kind of arrangement. Sure, there’s a week or two when we’re left essentially alone to bang out a draft, but within a few hours of turning it in to our paymasters, we’re on the phone, getting notes and questions and requests for revisions...

Tomatoes

Here's what it's come to. I take a simple kitchen timer – this one is shaped like a tomato – and I set it for 25 minutes. And then I sit in a chair and I work – mostly, I write – continuously focusing for 25 minutes...

Does This Work?

One morning, a few years ago, when I had a show in production, I got a call from an executive at the studio.  He was calling to tell me that he couldn't be at the runthrough that afternoon, but he had a question about a certain line...

My Friend's Place

Writers, like farmers, can find the bad news in any kind of weather. When it rains, a little too much, farmers complain about the bumper crop, which means over supply and collapsing prices.  When it rains a little too little, they complain about  parched soil, no crops, lower income...

Important Phone Calls

Let This One Go

Official Transcript

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...

What Really Happened

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?..."

David Lloyd, RIP

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...

Cave

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...

Part of the Process

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...

What I'll Never Do Again

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...