Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke

I've spent too long lately in the mirrored underworld of the literary blogs. (Too long = more than an hour a day for more than three days.)  So, to restore myself to health, I have been reading Rob Long's Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke. Whenever the idiocy of Literatureland seems too much to bear, a quick trip to Hollywoodland reminds you that it could be infinitely worse.

 
Rob Long wrote a bunch of episodes of Cheers. Towards the end, he executive-produced some, too. And, with his writing and producing partner, Dan Staley, he went on to write and produce a bunch of other TV stuff that (like almost everything ever done by anyone ever) wasn't as ludicrously successful as Cheers.

In the post-Cheers comedown he also wrote Conversations With My Agent, a grim classic that pretty much explains itself. Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke is the followup. Both are funny, have hidden emotional depths, and will help you a lot if you ever, God forbid, find yourself writing for television or the movies in Hollywood.

Here's Rob Long on pitching versus writing. This is as good an explanation as I've ever read of what's wrong with the entire development process in Hollywood:

 

"Most writers prefer to pitch an idea before they write it, but in our experience, this leads to difficulty.

    The whole point of writing a treatment – or, better yet, writing an entire script – is that there’s very little confusion left about what, exactly, the show will be about and who, exactly, the star or stars of the show will be, and what, precisely, is or is not funny about it.

But when you pitch a show, you pitch into the wide blue sky. You pitch the general idea, the concept – whatever that means – and you naturally smooth the sharp edges and tailor the pitch to the involuntary reactive facial muscles on the face of the highest ranking decision-maker in the room. It’s almost impossible not to. A pitch is like a performance by a raggedy subway clown. He just wants you to love him and toss him some change.

    So the network hears what it wants to hear: that your show will be perfect for an actor they have a deal with; that it will concentrate on family life, snugly fitting into an open 8.30 PM slot; that its point of view will be single people, or urban dwellers, or blue collar, or married with childrens, or whomever the target audience is for that network, on that night, that week.

But you go back to your office, mysteriously forgetting the shabby desperation of your pitch. You start writing the idea that was in your head before you started talking to the impassive face of the network executive, before he or she started grinning slightly, before the first laugh, before you made the sale.

And in the ensuing weeks – and sometimes months – between the sale of the script based on the pitch (which usually takes place in October or November) and the actual writing and delivery of the finished draft (sometime in January or even early February), the difference between what they bought and what you sold becomes enormous.”