- Long, Rob.
Conversations with My Agent (and Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke).
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, [1996, 2005] 2014.
ISBN 978-1-4088-5583-6.
-
Hollywood is a strange place, where the normal rules of business, economics,
and personal and professional relationships seem to have been suspended.
When he arrived in Hollywood in 1930,
P. G. Wodehouse
found the customs and antics of its denizens so bizarre that he parodied
them in a series of hilarious stories. After a year in Hollywood, he'd
had enough and never returned. When Rob Long arrived in Hollywood to attend
UCLA film school, the television industry was on the threshold of a
technology-driven change which would remake it and forever put an end to the
domination by three large networks which had existed since its inception.
The advent of cable and, later, direct to home satellite broadcasting
eliminated the terrestrial bandwidth constraints which had made establishing
a television outlet forbiddingly expensive and, at the same time, side-stepped
many of the regulatory constraints which forbade “edgy” content
on broadcast channels. Long began his television career as a screenwriter
for
Cheers
in 1990, and became an executive producer of the show in 1992. After
the end of Cheers, he created and produced other television
projects, including
Sullivan & Son,
which is currently on the air.
Television ratings measure both “rating points”: the absolute number of
television sets tuned into the program, and “share points”: the
fraction of television sets turned on at the time viewing the program.
In the era of Cheers, a typical episode might have a rating
equivalent to more than 22 million viewers and a share of 32%, meaning
it pulled in around one third of all television viewers in its time slot.
The proliferation of channels makes it unlikely any show will achieve numbers
like this again. The extremely popular
24
attracted between 9 and 14 million viewers in its eight seasons, and
the highly critically regarded
Mad Men
never topped a mean viewership of 2.7 million in its best season.
It was into this new world of diminishing viewership expectations but
voracious thirst for content to fill all the new channels that the
author launched his post-Cheers career. The present
volume collects two books originally published independently,
Conversations with My Agent from 1998, and
2005's Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke, written as
Hollywood's
перестро́йка
was well-advanced. The volumes fit
together almost seamlessly, and many readers will barely notice the
transition.
This is a very funny book, but there is also a great deal of wisdom
about the ways of Hollywood, how television projects are created,
pitched to a studio, marketed to a network, and the tortuous process
leading from concept to script to pilot to series and, all too often,
to cancellation. The book is written as a screenplay,
complete with scene descriptions, directions, dialogue, transitions,
and sound effect call-outs. Most of the scenes are indeed
conversations between the author and his agent in various
circumstances, but we also get to be a fly on the wall at story
pitches, meetings with the network, casting, shooting an episode,
focus group testing, and many other milestones in the life cycle of a
situation comedy. The circumstances are fictional, but are clearly
informed by real-life experience. Anybody contemplating a career in
Hollywood, especially as a television screenwriter, would be insane
not to read this book. You'll laugh a lot, but also learn something
on almost every page.
The reader will also begin to appreciate the curious ways of Hollywood
business, what the author calls “HIPE”: the Hollywood
Inversion Principle of Economics. “The HIPE, as it will come
to be known, postulates that every commonly understood, standard
business practice of the outside world has its counterpart in the
entertainment industry. Only it's backwards.” And anybody who
thinks accounting is not a creative profession has never had experience
with a Hollywood project. The culture of the entertainment business is
also on display—an intricate pecking order involving writers,
producers, actors, agents, studio and network executives, and “below
the line” specialists such as camera operators and editors, all of whom
have to read the trade papers to know who's up and who's not.
This book provides an insider's perspective on the strange way television
programs come to be. In a way, it resembles some aspects of venture
capital: most projects come to nothing, and most of those which are
funded fail, losing the entire investment. But the few which succeed
can generate sufficient money to cover all the losses and still yield
a large return. One television show that runs for five years, producing
solid ratings and 100+ episodes to go into syndication, can set up its
writers and producers for life and cover the studio's losses on all of
the dogs and cats.
July 2014 