Martini Shot

They Listened to You

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....

What's Your Social?

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...

Show Business

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."

Kick the Can

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...

Robot Baby

Having a baby is hard, I'm told, but it can't be harder than working with a baby.  And I don't mean that metaphorically, either.

Courtesy Laugh

The great thing about laughter – and the big reason most of the writers I know got into comedy in the first place – is that it's involuntary.  It erupts – that's what we say: the audience erupted into laughter – from some reptile part of the brain...

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