See?

Legacy Player:

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. A shabby please-buy-my-thing kind of event, no different from those people you see lugging pharmaceutical samples around doctor's offices, handing out pens and pre-printed post-it notes...

Casting

Legacy Player:

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...

The Last Day in the Business

Legacy Player:

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...

Craft Services

Legacy Player:

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..."

My Entrepreneurial Attitude

Legacy Player:

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...

We Love You

Legacy Player:

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...

Faster Funnier

Legacy Player:

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...

The Bad One

Legacy Player:

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...

Second Act Trouble

Legacy Player:

Among the many, many smart things F. Scott Fitzgerald said, surely the least smart is, "There are no second acts in American lives..."

Milt and Marty

Legacy Player:

Every writer – well, every comedy writer – has made this mistake. You're at work, and you're laughing with your colleagues, about something – usually what we call a "room run" – a joke that originates entirely in the writers' room, one that's usually so objectionable, so foul, so indefensibly cruel and wrong and ugly, that the entire room is paralyzed by laughter...

Dark Skies

Legacy Player:

Race to the Computer

Legacy Player:

Once, a famous writer gave a talk to a lot of aspiring writers.  This kind of thing happens all the time – and not just at colleges and universities, but at weekend scriptwriting workshop seminars and writers' conferences, that sort of thing.  I've done a few myself...

He Likes That

Legacy Player:

I know someone who works in advertising, and on his first week on the job, years ago, a more seasoned copywriter took him aside to give him advice. They were both on their way to the creative director's office, to pitch him some ideas for a new campaign...

Can We Talk about This Later?

Legacy Player:

The people who run KCRW only give me four minutes to make these little jewel boxes of commentary –- something about wanting to broadcast the news or I don't know what –- so it's hard to fit everything in sometimes.  Most of the time it's easy, of course, because everything I say pretty much boils down to: writin's hard...

No More Cupcakes

Legacy Player:

A few years ago, a friend of mine tried to fire his agent. It didn't go well. After a long, wearying phone call, in which the agent tried everything in his bag of tricks – you owe me! This is wrong!  I screwed up, I know! Gimme one more chance! This is a bad career move! -- all of them, my friend finally agreed to the thing he had been dreading – the thing that every single one of his writer friends told him, under no circumstances, to agree to...