Martini Shot

Not long ago, a newly-minted movie studio chairman flew to Tokyo for his first meeting with the owners of his company.  It was one of those corporate kabuki performances, a highly orchestrated and utterly meaningless display of PowerPoint pageantry that unwieldy behemoths prefer to, well, actually talking and deciding things...

In olden times, when half-hour comedies were on TV a lot, we wrote them mostly as a group, in something we called "The Room," which usually meant a large conference room with a table and chairs and a big sofa and a white-board and a lot of empty take-out containers...

I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times a year or so ago, about my experiences with the mini-bar at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas...

Look, let's not get into politics, okay? Too incendiary, and, frankly, my politics, as I've discovered from years of working in Hollywood, aren't really in line with most of my colleagues. I've heard stories from people who are more on my side of the fence, politically, of being denied jobs or shouted at on sets, but my experience has been generally fine – at best, I've been ignored; at worst, the object of a hilariously condescending curiosity, like, "Um, you're a Republican? But, how can that be? I know you. And you're not, like, a terrible person..."

This is a strange time in the television business. All of the writers who are working on shows are working -- they're busy writing and producing and editing and getting ready for the rolling premieres which start around now...

I heard a story recently that may or may not be true, but since it perfectly conforms to my prejudices and biases, I'm going to just go ahead and tell it, act as if it's true, and not bother to pin down its accuracy. Okay? Here goes...

Last week, for a whole bunch of peculiar reasons too complicated to get into on public radio, I was in Azerbaijan...  

A few years ago, during a long, hot-tempered pilot production week, I was hanging out backstage, waiting the for fresh cookies to appear on the craft services table, when I overheard one of the set decorators ask one of the lighting guys if a certain set decoration looked right...

A few years ago, I lived at the beach in Santa Monica. It was a two-story rectangular beach house, and in the afternoons I would sit on my balcony, smoke a cigar, sip a bourbon, and watch the sun set over the Pacific...

When I was in film school, we used to have to present a few pages every week of our script in progress, to be, I guess the phrase is "workshopped" by the rest of the class...

Once, not too long ago, I was flying back to LA from London. The young woman in front of my, checking in, was doing her very best to finagle a free upgrade to first class...

Last week I told the story of a writing team I know, and what happened at their last pitch meeting together...

Once, a writing team I know pitched a show to a network. Pitches are tricky things – sell too hard, too slick, with too much prepared "Hey! How are ya?" kind of patter, and you turn everyone off. You turn something that's supposed to be a sales call disguised as a casual meeting into a sales call disguised as a…well, disguised as nothing. As a sales call...

You can make a good movie from a bad script. You can make a good television show from a bad script, too, though it's slightly trickier. And of course, the reverse is true, too: a lot of wonderful scripts have turned pretty awful when they got to the screen...

There's an old cliché about people in this business shouting at each other, "You'll never do business in this town again," or something along those lines –- as if a person (any person) was powerful enough to read someone out of the entertainment industry...

The best way to give somebody bad news is, first, give them a doughnut. This is basically the idea behind what we in Hollywood call "Craft Services..."

There was a time, not too long ago, when the best way to cast a television show was to make a list of the biggest stars you could think of who were currently having money troubles. And then you'd work your way down the list until money troubles plotted on the X-axis and size of part plotted on the Y-axis met, and, suddenly, you'd have a cast...

The trick to being successful in the entertainment business – maybe it's the trick in every business, I don't know – is to get people to do stuff for you without realizing that they're doing it. Get people to write your script, be in your movie, produce your pilot, for as little cash outlay as possible...

We were shooting a pilot a few years ago, and one of the actresses was, for some reason, wearing a strange-looking headscarf. At some point, I guess, one of us had approved it, but on shoot night, it looked a little odd. It wasn't until we had three scenes shot that someone from the network mentioned it...

Sometimes in movies or TV shows, there's a moment where a character reveals something about himself, something embarrassing or humiliating, but something he hopes other characters share. And after an awkwardly humorous pause, it turns out they do, and the characters are drawn closer together thanks to the one character's willingness to be honest and vulnerable...