Rob Long (1)

Rob Long was a writer and producer on "Cheers" and then went on to produce half-a-dozen sitcoms each of which sank in one season or less. I think the only one of them that anyone aside from Rob's mother cared for was "George and Leo" with Bob Newhart and Judd Hirsch back in 1997.

This book is difficult to categorize. It is sort of a novel, but the author tells us up front that "This book is half true." That earned my first laugh when I read it. In fact, what would make me recommend this book is that it had me chuckling often enough and was otherwise enlightening to me with regard to "the television producing business" as the author calls it. (I like television from many different angles. I love everything about it. One of my heroes is Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television, but that is another book to put on my shelf on another day.)

In his own words, Long tries "a pastiche of forms" including screenplay format and anecdotes to present a "half-comic half-tragic look at the business through the eyes of a writer, maybe a guy like me" in the hope "that maybe it'll form some kind of accurate picture or snapshot" of a business that is mysterious to most people. This sounds more serious than it is however.

From the beginning and periodically throughout the book, Long's unnamed protagonist meets with a group of studio or network executives--I am not clear which--who are basically a group of yes-men with a nominal leader. The meeting is about the book I hold in my hands. Long has asked the question: What if this book had to be shopped around like a movie or TV series? It would have to get past a committee that would critique it (called giving notes in the business) and try to turn it into something completely different while pretending they were only making teeny-tiny suggestions. The meetings are silly-funny because all the yes-men and yes-women have to go around the table and say hello; if someone wants to participate but isn't physcially there, they have to be put on speaker phone; and two of the participants are named Josh which becomes extra confusing when one of them is on the speaker phone. My favorite meeting scene is the one in which the writer-protagonist is late, so the meeting starts without him. A new member of the group, Delia, goes on and on about her favorite entertainment concept, then the meeting gets down to putting together a list of notes for the writer. Everyone in the group then says he has to be somewhere else, so they ask Delia if she can meet with the writer and convey their notes to him. She agrees, but when the writer arrives, Delia gives him not the notes the rest of the committee agreed on, but her own favorite entertainment concept. In any well-run industry, someone like that would end up being justly fired, but Delia, we later learn, has been promoted!

Television is a crazy business. Long, who previously wrote "Conversations with My Agent" takes up much of this book with further conversations with a colorful Hollywood agent who tries to encourage and cajole the writer into picking himself up after his TV series is cancelled and write a new series. The agent sometimes seems like a father telling his twenty-something son that he has only so many months to find a job or find himself out on the street.

Hollywood is a place where mixed signals are the rule, not the exception. In the latter half of the book, when the writer is trying to figure out how the network is reacting to his new series' mediocre ratings, he gets into a disagreement with his agent over whether the network sending him a fruit basket means that they are keeping his show on the air or kissing him off. The writer goes into a panic when he sees someone delivering a fruit basket to his building and is relieved when the delivery man goes to someone else's office.

For those who like the TV series "Curb Your Enthusiasm," this book will seem to be taking place in that same universe of shmoozing writers and actors being seen at the hot restaurants and trying to get ahead in the business or trying to cushion their fall. There is some tragedy in this story as when a friend of the protagonist commits suicide. ("The Meeting" tries to give notes on whether the protagonist should have a different reaction to the suicide in order to make him more sympathetic to the reader.)

A very witty look at the half-delusional, half-philosophical, and entirely neurotic life of a TV writer/producer as he rides the roller coaster of elusive success in "the business."… (altro)