Transcript: Dumpster Diving on the Studio Lot

Rob Long on what one TV writer gleaned from Paramount's garbage

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Everybody comes to Hollywood for different reasons, I guess. I came because I really didn’t have any other skills. If you can call this a skill.

In some cases I could mention, the reasons go deeper than stars in your eyes or the irresistible need to be a storyteller. I know one guy who became a television writer simply because it afforded him the opportunity to write on a cop show and name all the strippers, prostitutes, and nude female corpses after his mother. Which is a lot of stuff to unpack.

Now, most of us think of Los Angeles as a place you come to rather than a place you come from, but some writers, though, were here already.

Here’s a true story: the son of a famous television sitcom actor tried, hopelessly, to connect emotionally with his prickly and distant father. The son had grown up to be a very successful television writer and producer himself  — motivated, probably, by the icy limits of his father’s affection — and sat with his father near the end of his life for one last attempt at something — anything! — resembling paternal warmth.

“Isn’t it amazing, Dad,” he is reported to have said in a softly plaintive voice, “that when I was a little boy and we lived on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, you’d leave in the morning and head down Santa Monica Boulevard, take a right on Cahuenga, and then pull into the studio to do your show? And now, when I’m grown, I live on Maple Drive too, and have a little boy too, and I drive down Santa Monica and take the same right on Cahuenga and pull into the same studio where I have a show, too? Isn’t that amazing?”

His father looked into the middle distance and shrugged.

“I took Willoughby,” he said.

And that was that. Moral of the story: show people can light up the screen with wit and warmth, but at home they tend to the cruel and the cold. But the great thing about growing up in Los Angeles, in the cradle of show business, where it really is the local business, is you can learn other useful things, in addition to learning that famous show business parents often withhold affection. You can learn how the mill works. How it churns out product.