Martini Shot
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Veteran TV writer and producer Rob Long shares his behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood life on "Martini Shot." A contributing editor for the National Review and Newsweek International, he was a co-executive producer of "Cheers" while still in his 20s and is the co-creator of a string of (cancelled) sitcoms: "George & Leo," "Men, Women & Dogs," etc. Rob is also the author of "Conversations With My Agent," the cult classic about real life in Hollywood, as well as its recently published sequel, "Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke."
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The Definition of a Problem
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
A brilliant actor once told me that the hardest thing to play is drunk. And then he told me how to do it...
Burn
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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
Legacy Player:
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...
Bomb
Legacy Player:
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...
Inside the Room
Legacy Player:
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...
In Contact
Legacy Player:
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...
Maximum Individual Contribution
Legacy Player:
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..."
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Host
Rob Long
Rob Long presents a laugh-out-loud, mostly true telling of life behind the scenes of the “real” Hollywood.
Schedule
Live
Tapes & Transcripts
Click the Full Details link to view the complete transcript. Tapes are not available.
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