Yesterday, in an IM interview (to be published the last week of March), Duane Swiercynzski asked me why I decided to keep a public tour blog and how it would be different.
Well, for one thing, in this tour blog — the joke’s always on me. In the original one, I admit, I had a little fun with one stalker-ish fan and a limo driver who said: “People always tell me that I should write a book . . .” You know what? When someone says you should write a book, they might actually be saying: “Because if you don’t stop talking now, I am going to go blind with boredom.” Two years later, with no dates or details, it’s impossible to identify these two people, and that’s the way it should be. But when I’m keeping a tour blog, day by day, there are too many clues.
I also think certain events should be off-the-record. So, for the record, I went to New York today and had a lovely lunch with six nice people. We talked a little bit about TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS. Very sexy. Also, I am of the opinion that screenwriters and their significant others are not anywhere near that articulate and clever and thoughtful that early in the morning. Among other things.
An interviewer had to cancel — breaking news, to which I’m always sympathetic — so I took an early train home, read some student work and watched a downloaded episode of Thirty Rock. My sister introduced me to this, and I am very grateful.
I’m just now starting to come around to 30 Rock. I was initially enamored of Studio 60 but that show started to die out for me and I fell in love with 30 Rock. I’ve always been a Tina Fey fan and don’t know why I didn’t catch onto this earlier. It has the same sort of dry feel as Curb Your Enthusiasm only cleaner…sort of.
The Comeback has more of that skin-crawling-please-don’t-I-can’t-avert-my-eyes aspect of “Curb.” It also has a great cumulative effect, really growing on you as you watch.
I’ve grown more and more attached to 30 Rock since about the fourth episode. (I’m missing it right now since my local NBC station is running regional basketball conference championships, but that’s why I love iTunes.)
One of the happiest quotes I’ve heard in a while was from an event a few weeks back, might have been a Writers Guild event, where Tina Fey got up and said–and here I paraphrase–that she’d heard Aaron Sorkin was wearing the same dress, but it was twice as long and not funny.
As for Ten Days, very sexy and maybe believable if they were all Sorkin-esque English majors specializing in clever dialogue. I’m normally a Smiley fan, but this did little for me.
I an thrilled to read that your lunch was lovely. I will have to check out TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS, now.
That Tina Fey story made my week.
Here’s when STUDIO 60 lost me…it was LIVE air time, and some tragic news event forced them to jettison several minutes of material. We saw Matthew Perry as the writer/producer sitting trying to write a brand-new sketch to take the place of the cut material.
A brand-new sketch. For a show that was already being performed live into the living rooms of America.
What were they going to do after he wrote it? Put it up on the Teleprompter, stand the actors on a set (set? what set? how would you have a set for a scene that was just written?), and read it cold? Without them knowing what it was about, who they were supposed to be, and where they should stand or walk?
Were that to happen, they’d ask the musical guest to play two extra songs, add some jokes to the news segment (which can be read off scripts live), throw in a taped piece, or have any of the cast members with a standup background to do his old act (which Eddie Murphy was once asked to do early in his tenure on SNL). They would NOT sit and try to write a brand-new sketch.
That’s when they lost me.