Transcript: Hide Your Job on a Plane

Rob Long dreads the question, 'Have I seen anything you worked on?'

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A French producer I know once sent me a text. “Come to Paris,” he said. “We want to talk about a show.”

Which was a text I’ve always dreamed of getting. I have always wanted to produce a show in France. Television, as everyone knows, is a global business. American shows have always been popular in France, but it’s now a two-way street. We get their shows, they get ours, we steal their shows, they steal ours. This seemed like a perfect moment to restart a France-based project I had actually worked on a few years ago and that had lost some momentum. 

The short version is this: I had been part of the creative team on a promising project — a show that's designed to be shot partly in Los Angeles and party in Paris, for a French audience — and the reason I agreed to help out — aside from the primary motivation that it's a fun, smart idea — is that I've always wanted to be able to respond this way to someone when they ask, "Hey, can we get together next week for lunch?”

"Next week? No, I'm sorry. Next week I'm filming in Paris."  

And even though I don't smoke cigarettes, in my version of this conversation I am suddenly smoking, and wearing a scarf, and sipping a small cup of coffee. And looking both sad and amused at the same time.

See? I am so ready for this.

My only fear about the project was that I’d be there as the American guy, the American writer, the guy who writes Le Sitcom. (Which, by the way, sounds like “Le Zit Comb.”) 

My French partners have made a string of complicated, arty films and television shows, the kind where you often don’t know why the people on the screen who are kissing are also fighting, and what the story is about, and when it’s actually over. 

As a proud writer of Le Zit Comb, I prefer a linear narrative with a simple story structure and characters who behave with psychological consistency, plus laughs.

So in our first creative meeting, I braced myself for a lot of polite condescension from the French producers and a lot of creative demands that would make my simple project more ambiguous, more arty, more French.  

I expected notes like: Can the story be less conclusive? Can this character have a greater sense of “surrealism”? Can the romantic heroine be depressed for mysterious unexplained reasons? We think the main character here, on page three, should die. The child character needs to be eroticized.

You know, French.

Now, I speak a little bit of French, and I understand it pretty well, but in the meeting, which was entirely in French, I was about six seconds behind. My brain translator was a bit slow that morning, but I wasn't worried, really, because I thought I had the notes already figured out: less American, more French.

So when I heard the phrase plus aimable I sort of snapped to attention.