Everybody knows that one William Goldman quote: “Nobody knows anything.” But, Rob Long asserts, sometimes, people know something you don’t. And that’s where the mystery of the industry lies. Because as much shakra and selenite crystal as you can harness, your fate lies in the hands of others, and that can require going to desperate measures to maintain your sanity.

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Movie stars and aristocrats are just like you and me: They put their trousers on one leg at a time. We don’t really have a proper aristocracy anymore, so there goes half that saying. But do we even have stars? Rob Long considers what a star was, what a star is, and what it means for the industry. Also, if you should wear a t-shirt with your name on it. 

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Rob knows a quote . . . from which Chinese philosopher, he’s not sure. It goes, “If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.” Showbiz translation: If you stay in Hollywood long enough, you’ll see Paramount bought and sold many times over.

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No doubt, the internet and technology vastly improved the tedious labor of writing scripts and making revisions. But Rob Long believes something was lost in the disappearance of an actual paper trail: Archaeological artifacts that reveal the process of jokes moving, characters losing lines, and test audiences wanting (and getting) a happy ending. And it turns out, like his friend, you didn’t even need to read Save the Cat! to learn how to write TV. All you needed was to roll up your sleeves and sift through the studio garbage. 

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Remember the Burger King Kids Club, the chain’s ad campaign targeted to “the kids?” There was Kid Vid, the white, video game-playing leader; Jaws, the Black kid who loved to eat; and a boy in a wheelchair named (seriously) Wheels. The idea, Rob Long speculates, must have been devised at one of those offsite retreats, the kind TV execs love to do in Laguna. But hits rarely are born from suits tossing around banal concepts. Instead they begin with a writers’ novel idea, the equivalent of a delicious-looking hamburger.

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Legendary fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld once complained about the way a room was decorated: “It was a lot of Louis Quinze mixed with Louis Seize,” he said. And then added: “Ugh!” The entertainment business runs on this sort of Lagerfeldian Ugh, a sort of lingua franca of Hollywood. But what if we tried, just for a while, to not slag others as conversational filler? Rob Long says then, very likely, you could expect a whole lot of deafening silence. 

Also, we’ve been nominated for a Webby Award, vote for us here by April 18th!

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Howard the Duck might not have won Best Picture, but if you’re a sandwich shop worker, or a young Rob Long at lunch with high-up producers, it’s probably best not to espouse how big a flop you thought it was. See, failure in Hollywood is a relative term. Movies fail, pilots fail, but after a failure of your own, it’s tough to see anything that makes it to the screen as defeat — especially if it came with a check. After all, getting paid in show business is getting paid to try. The later checks — the bigger ones — are about getting paid to succeed.

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When Orson Welles found an investor for a cheap little noir thriller, legend has it he devised a scheme. His opening sequence took up almost 10 pages of script, with descriptions and action all spread out. Except when he actually filmed it, he used only a high-tension, 12-minute “virtuoso” single tracking shot that became signature to Touch of Evil — but also fooled execs into thinking he’d be under budget and on time every day. As genius as Welles’ move was, Rob Long says he was also a practitioner of Haraka Baraka. And you should be too.

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Sixty percent of Americans say they read the Bible regularly. But in Hollywood, where Jesus and religion can feel — how do you say it — downmarket, people rely instead on the series bible, where writers flesh out their TV series’ characters, situations and possible future episodes. But Rob Long suggests Hollywood, much like he has, take a fresh look at the Bible — the one with a capital B, no IP rights, and packed with tragedy, sex and human weakness fit for a limited series.

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When Rob Long pitches anything these days, he knows that he’s not going to sell that idea in the room. That’s over. But he wouldn’t be upset if he didn’t hear, “Fun stuff. We’ll talk internally and get back to you.” What’s fun about that? If we can identify fun — rather than fun stuff — the entertainment industry can get back to being like that big, noisy party Rob throws, with a supermarket ham and cheap booze. Overthink it, and the party’s over.

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Rob Long loved his tailor — a man who ran his shop with unpredictable, cigarette-stained weirdness. But when he died, the business became faster, and it was easier to communicate with the staff. It was even open into the evenings. The new and improved shop certainly made for a better business. But the old tailor, for all his idiosyncrasies, was highly entertaining. And that is why Rob is not as worried about AI as many other people are. It may be more efficient, but can it pull a hilarious non-sequitur when you really need one?

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