Martini Shot

  • Autor: Vários
  • Narrador: Vários
  • Editora: Podcast
  • Duração: 49:12:09
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Informações:

Sinopse

A wry take on real life in Hollywood.

Episódios

  • The Tweet

    12/03/2009 Duração: 05min

    There’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...

  • Positive Rob

    05/03/2009 Duração: 04min

    Not 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"...

  • The Check

    26/02/2009 Duração: 04min

    A 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...

  • Honesty

    19/02/2009 Duração: 04min

    I have a friend who's an executive at a large television network. No, seriously...  

  • Monkey

    12/02/2009 Duração: 05min

    Circus 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...

  • The DVD Player's Not There

    29/01/2009 Duração: 04min

    Right 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...

  • Watching the Baby

    22/01/2009 Duração: 04min

    We’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...

  • We Don't Have a Phone

    15/01/2009 Duração: 04min

    First, 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...

  • Easy Sell

    08/01/2009 Duração: 04min

    One 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...

  • The Definition of a Problem

    01/01/2009 Duração: 05min

    I 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...

  • My Friend's Place 2008

    25/12/2008 Duração: 04min

    For 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...

  • Lies

    18/12/2008 Duração: 04min

    There's an old reporter's saying that they use when a story or rumor perfectly illustrates the point the reporter is trying to make. "Too good to check..."

  • High Seas

    11/12/2008 Duração: 04min

    Here'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...

  • Supermarket

    04/12/2008 Duração: 04min

    One 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."

  • Drunk

    27/11/2008 Duração: 04min

    A brilliant actor once told me that the hardest thing to play is drunk. And then he told me how to do it...

  • Burn

    20/11/2008 Duração: 05min

    Southern California is burning again, just like last year. But unlike last year, when the heart of the blaze was tony, expensive Malibu, this year, maybe in honor of the universally diminished financial picture, the blazes are mostly in Sylmar...

  • The Seventies

    13/11/2008 Duração: 04min

    There 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...

  • The Carousel

    06/11/2008 Duração: 05min

    Something 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...

  • We Got Nothing

    30/10/2008 Duração: 04min

    Once, 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...

  • Medical

    23/10/2008 Duração: 04min

    I 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...

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