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One of the things that's happened recently, since the sharp drop in the number of scripted television shows on the air, is the corresponding shop rise in the number of television show runners who are hanging around unemployed, reading the complete newspaper and sitting in coffee shops with notebooks filled with pages that say "Pilot Idea: Person, workplace question mark question mark. Marriage conflict difficult. Family. City question mark question mark."

A brilliant actor once told me that the hardest thing to play is drunk. And then he told me how to do it...

Southern California is burning again, just like last year. But unlike last year, when the heart of the blaze was tony, expensive Malibu, this year, maybe in honor of the universally diminished financial picture, the blazes are mostly in Sylmar...

There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind that can name, or at least picture, the two Darrens on Bewitched, and everybody else...

Something strange is happening in Hollywood: people are getting fired. Well, let me clarify: people get the sack all the time around here. Executives are tossed out with such routine indifference that any executive who hasn't been fired at least three times in his career is probably not very good at his job...

Once, I was working on a show when the director walked into the writers' room. Most of the time, the director spends the entire day on the stage, working with the actors. At some point, he calls the writers to the stage to watch a run-through of the script, and after that the writers go back to the room and complain about the run-through, make filthy jokes, complain about other shows on TV, attack and undermine each other personally, order dinner, then settle in to do the re-write...

I once worked with a very talented actor who mostly worked in features. We didn't really know who he was when we were casting that particular role, but his agent and manager sent us his reel –- a tape with a sample of some of his best work 0– and it was obvious from the first clip that he was a gifted, smart, winning, and very funny guy...

Not long ago, a newly-minted movie studio chairman flew to Tokyo for his first meeting with the owners of his company.  It was one of those corporate kabuki performances, a highly orchestrated and utterly meaningless display of PowerPoint pageantry that unwieldy behemoths prefer to, well, actually talking and deciding things...

In olden times, when half-hour comedies were on TV a lot, we wrote them mostly as a group, in something we called "The Room," which usually meant a large conference room with a table and chairs and a big sofa and a white-board and a lot of empty take-out containers...

I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times a year or so ago, about my experiences with the mini-bar at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas...