Transcript: 'It Only Made, Like, $50 Million'

Rob Long considers failure, hate-watching and flops

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.

Once, for a television pilot I wrote and produced, we needed to shoot up a car.  

The show was about three young men trying to live a bolder, more consequential life. Part of their journey involved one of them — the married guy, the guy who suffers under the thumb of his domineering wife — realizing that all of his meekness and lack of courage is wrapped up in the car his wife made him buy. 

It's an electric car — a Prius — and he hates it. Electric cars don't emit a throaty, manful roar when you hit the accelerator, so what’s fun about them? And so, egged on by his friends, he takes a bat to it.  

The cops arrive — someone called them to say, “Hey, there’s three guys beating up a Prius!” — and he tells the cops that it’s okay, it’s his emasculating car and the cops see his point and hand over their weapons and they all take turns shooting at the Prius.

The way you film a sequence like that is dizzying: you get a bunch of angles of the guys pulling out the guns and pointing at the car. And then you rig the car's side panels and passenger window with tiny explosives — squibs — which will make it look like bullets hitting the car when in fact they're doing no such thing.

Because there are no bullets in the guns. Because the guns aren’t real. The goal in show business is not to make things seem realistic. It’s to make things seem real.