Informações:
Sinopse
A wry take on real life in Hollywood.
Episódios
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The Tweet
12/03/2009 Duração: 05minThere’s an old story about former NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff. While he was running the network in the early 1980’s, he was on the phone in his office, talking to somebody about something, and he suddenly had a flash of inspiration – totally unrelated to the conversation he was having...
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Positive Rob
05/03/2009 Duração: 04minNot too long ago, I had a meeting with a couple of writers who had written an excellent pilot. They were experienced, smart guys – they'd been on lots of shows before, never quite at the top of the pyramid, but close enough – but for some reason, the network that bought the pilot wanted to add one more element, what's called in the business a "show-runner"...
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The Check
26/02/2009 Duração: 04minA few years ago, I had dinner with an actor and his manager. I was trying to woo this actor to take the lead role in a pilot I was producing. He liked the part, liked the script, but was a little hesitant about signing what was, essentially, a six-year commitment. In success, that is. The truth is that television pilots have about a ninety-eight percent failure rate, and of the successful pilots that go on to series, those have about a ninety-five percent failure rate...
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Monkey
12/02/2009 Duração: 05minCircus monkeys, deep down, are mean. Someone once told me that a decent circus monkey is only good for about seven or eight years until he decides to retire, which can come at any time -– hanging around the other monkeys, in the middle of a show -– no one ever knows when, exactly, a monkey suddenly says to himself, "Okay, had enough" but when he does, here's what happens...
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The DVD Player's Not There
29/01/2009 Duração: 04minRight now, we're deep into something called "Awards Season" here in Hollywood, and if you're not careful, you just might start to think these kinds of things matter. They do in a kind of generalized morale-boosting way, but the truth is, the people who pay for the full-page ads and the mountains of screeners and the Oscar night parties are really just engaging in an elaborate kind of marketing...
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Watching the Baby
22/01/2009 Duração: 04minWe’ve got a new president. Of the United States, not the studio or network – although we’ll have a new one or two of those before long, I’m sure – and I thought I’d share some show business wisdom with him...
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We Don't Have a Phone
15/01/2009 Duração: 04minFirst, a little background: Once, a long time ago, a joke in a script fell flat. This happens every now and then, of course, Well, more than every now and then. But the key is, fixing it. When you're in production, and you've got a few rewrites ahead of you, and a joke falls flat at a runthrough, you try to come up with something better. You try to fix it...
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Easy Sell
08/01/2009 Duração: 04minOne of the many, many reasons for never telling anyone on a plane or a train or wherever you happen to be sitting next to a stranger, "I work in the entertainment industry," is because they'll inevitable say something like, "You know what you should do a show about?" And then they'll tell you...
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The Definition of a Problem
01/01/2009 Duração: 05minI spent most of December on a container ship, heading from Seattle to Shanghai, across the roof of the Pacific. Bad weather to the south forced us to hug the Alaskan coast, slip through the Unimak Pass, cross over into Russian waters, then drift south, battling 10 meter swells, into the Sea of Japan...
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My Friend's Place 2008
25/12/2008 Duração: 04minFor some reason, I get an e-mail every now and then from an outfit called "TV Tracker." It's a pretty good service, I think –- I say I think because you have to pay to get access to the real stuff, what they call "the television industry's premier on-line, on time source for what's happening in TV" and if there's one thing I hate doing, it's paying for things...
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High Seas
11/12/2008 Duração: 04minHere's where I am right now. Well, I'm in the KCRW studios right now right now, but where I'll be when this is broadcast is somewhere in the Pacific, aboard the Hanjin Boston, a huge container ship making a slow, grinding passage from Seattle to Shanghai, carrying, I'm told, the only thing we have that the Chinese want to import – animal skins and scrap metal...
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Supermarket
04/12/2008 Duração: 04minOne of the things that's happened recently, since the sharp drop in the number of scripted television shows on the air, is the corresponding shop rise in the number of television show runners who are hanging around unemployed, reading the complete newspaper and sitting in coffee shops with notebooks filled with pages that say "Pilot Idea: Person, workplace question mark question mark. Marriage conflict difficult. Family. City question mark question mark."
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The Seventies
13/11/2008 Duração: 04minThere are two kinds of people in the world. The kind that can name, or at least picture, the two Darrens on Bewitched, and everybody else...
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The Carousel
06/11/2008 Duração: 05minSomething strange is happening in Hollywood: people are getting fired. Well, let me clarify: people get the sack all the time around here. Executives are tossed out with such routine indifference that any executive who hasn't been fired at least three times in his career is probably not very good at his job...
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We Got Nothing
30/10/2008 Duração: 04minOnce, I was working on a show when the director walked into the writers' room. Most of the time, the director spends the entire day on the stage, working with the actors. At some point, he calls the writers to the stage to watch a run-through of the script, and after that the writers go back to the room and complain about the run-through, make filthy jokes, complain about other shows on TV, attack and undermine each other personally, order dinner, then settle in to do the re-write...
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Medical
23/10/2008 Duração: 04minI once worked with a very talented actor who mostly worked in features. We didn't really know who he was when we were casting that particular role, but his agent and manager sent us his reel –- a tape with a sample of some of his best work 0– and it was obvious from the first clip that he was a gifted, smart, winning, and very funny guy...