Martini Shot

For two weeks in the summer, Hollywood empties out. This happens twice a year – the town also evacuates during the weeks around Christmas and the New Year and...

I have a friend who has 13,487 Twitter followers, and the reason I know that is because he mentions it a lot. Like at lunch, the waiter will come and he'll say...

Write what you know, is the advice writers often get.  Which in Los Angeles, unfortunately, means a lot of scripts about private school tuition and Prius driving, suggesting...

I was talking things over with some colleagues yesterday – we're all working together on a project, and we were trying to figure out what the best way to get it set it up at a network might be...

Once, not too long ago, I went to a fancy store on a Saturday afternoon to buy a suit.  Before I went to the store, though, I took the dog to the dog park and replaced a bunch...

Around the corner from me in Venice Beach is a restaurant with an unpronounceable name. Or maybe it's only pronounceable if you're cool enough, and clearly, I'm not...

An actor friend of mine once fired his agent for sending him out on too many auditions where he looked exactly like everyone else auditioning...

An actor friend of mine – yeah, I have them – once landed a fair-sized part on a series. When he shared the news with his then-best friend...

Ashton Kutcher is about to save television. Okay, he's not exactly saving it...

Some celebrities have side businesses, like restaurants or cosmetic lines. Some appear in Japanese commercials, some on the Home Shopping network...

When things get too complicated, or I want to get out of a conversation, I get itchy. Upgrading software, calling customer support, figuring out a second act...

The story goes that halfway through the first script reading for an episode of Lucille Ball's final, doomed ABC sit-com in the late 1980's, she stopped mid-sentence...

I had this fever for about three weeks – and that's not a euphemism, I mean an actual hot brain, exhausting, sweaty alarmingly high body temperature thing that kept recurring at regular times during the day, until the cycles got tighter and eventually it just came and stayed, and I spent about three days stumbling around New York city with glazed eyes and burning ears and occasional lapses in consciousness.

The way the television business used to work was, if you had a pilot in production, you'd call up your writer friends and ask them to help out for a day, and they would – usually with some grumbling...

There are really only two kinds of businesses that make sense. One, you can make a billion things and sell them for one cent each, or Two, you can make one thing and sell it for a billion dollars...

A friend of mine finally hit the big time. She was asked to star in her own reality television series. She turned it down flat. I know myself well enough," she told me...

Sometimes, when I tell friends of mine who are not in the entertainment business, about the goings-on within the entertainment business, I get a sad little chuckle and a shake of the head in response, as if to say, You guys are nuts.  I’ll never understand it....