Martini Shot

Every writing project hits the same wall: the neurotic feedback loop of details that don’t add up. Who’s watching the baby? Who’s watching the bar? Rob Long has been around long enough to remember the lost art of script research. You’d messenger your draft to a company, and they would send it back annotated with neutral and merciless notes. When Frasier Crane mentioned his deceased parents on Cheers, a margin note came back, Establishes for Frasier: parents deceased. Oh, how that same script research company must have reacted when they received the Frasier pilot.
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We’re finally through Oscar season, which means it’s time to think about prestige, status and the difference between the awards you want and the awards you get. Rob Long has a People’s Choice Award obtained through what can only be described as informed consent, a WGA Award for the Earth Day Television Special, an LA Press Club Award that doesn’t read on camera and an Emmy certificate that looks terrific... on the wall.
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A friend asked Rob Long for career advice at Zankou Chicken. Rob hates giving advice — especially career advice, which is mostly just autobiography dressed up as wisdom. But while his friend waited for an answer, Rob started thinking about a leather jacket he bought in the early 1990s with $400 he didn’t have — and how Hollywood, despite devastating unemployment numbers, has always run on the assumption that something great is about to happen. For Rob, it did. For everyone else: the hope still remains.

Transcript here.
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Whether it was Sally Field as The Flying Nun or Julie Andrews playing a novitiate in The Sound of Music, audiences used to watch priests and nuns and ministers — unremarkably — as part of American life on screen. But that all went away, and Rob Long is well aware why that is. Church attendance declined steadily for decades, and the stigma around religion has become unavoidable. Which made it all the more impressive how Rian Johnson brought faith to the screen in one particular scene of Wake Up Dead Man: an embodiment of what prayer does for people.

Transcript here.
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Michael Lynton, the former CEO of Sony Pictures, has a new book that tells the story of greenlighting the Seth Rogen comedy that provoked North Korea into hacking his studio. He traces it back to an awkward childhood in Holland and a lifelong need to fit in with the cool kids. Rob Long also had an awkward childhood in Holland. He also ended up in show business. But he’s not sure Lynton’s story is really a cautionary tale. The entertainment business isn’t suffering from too much risk. It’s suffering from too little. Also: Puppets might have helped.
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