How to be twice as funny for half the price

Traffic advice can be better than career tips for those new in Hollywood, writes Rob Long.

Bette Davis, pictured in the 1950 film All About Eve, knew how to give advice. (AP Photo)

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Fountain Avenue, for those who don’t know the streets of Los Angeles, is a sinuous road that goes east to west through Hollywood. It has minimal traffic lights and, if you’re a dexterous driver, you can zip across town pretty quickly.

Someone once asked the legendary movie star Bette Davis if she had any advice for young actors starting out in Hollywood.

“Yes, I do,” she is said to have replied. “Take Fountain.”

What they were hoping for, obviously, was something more along the lines of: “Stay true to your values” or “Never give up” or “Learn to dance”. What they got were driving directions. That may have been disappointing, but on the other hand, there’s something refreshing about really practical advice. It’s impossible to know, exactly, if you’re staying true to your values or just being a stubborn fool. But everyone knows when they’ve found an efficient traffic shortcut.

I’m rapidly approaching my 25th year in show business – you can tell I’m an old-timer because I often call it “show business” rather than the sleeker and more elegant “entertainment industry” – and I’m often asked to hand out advice to young writers.

Usually my advice is a half-serious: “Go home!”

There’s too much competition in Hollywood as it is – especially among writers – so the fewer the better.

Occasionally, though, I’m too late: the young writer is not only already here in Hollywood with an apartment, a car and a head full of dreams, but now that I’ve got a sitcom on a large cable network, the young writer is frequently working for me, on the writing staff.

I’ll try to sneak out to my car or pretend to be engrossed with my iPhone 6, but sooner or later the young writer will corner me by the coffee machine and ask for career advice.

If pressed I’ll offer up some threadbare bromides – “Stay true to your values!”, “Never give up!” – but only if pressed again will I get practical.

Writing is lonely, I’ll say. It’s the kind of thing that people imagine as a solitary act – the writer toiling away in the chilly attic, that sort of thing. Writers harbour romantic (and impoverished) images of the scribbler’s life – coffee cups and old sweaters and lots of crumpled up pages of rejected material. These fantasies are only pleasant in the abstract. When you’re actually doing the job, it’s, well, it’s a job.

The way to beat the loneliness is to write with another person. This is especially useful when you’re writing comedy – that’s mostly what I get paid to do, or at least get paid to try to do – because there’s someone else in the room either laughing at what you just said, in which case it gets written down, or not, in which case it gets rejected. There’s comfort in having a built-in audience.

And because all writers are lazy, but they’re rarely lazy at the same time, having a writing partner increases the likelihood that the working day will be spent actually writing rather than surfing the web. Writing as a team, then, is both more psychologically comforting and artistically rewarding. The scripts are funnier and get written faster with a lot less heartache. When I’m asked for advice, that’s the advice I give.

Sometimes, my advice is so compelling that young writing staff members who don’t have partners are inspired to partner up. They’ll find another writer on the team with whom they have some comic and personal compatibility and join forces.

A few months later, they’ll outwit me again as I pretend to be preoccupied with an incoming text, ambush me by my car and gush about how much better the whole experience is now that they’ve decided to write comedy as a team.

“Thank you,” they’ll always say. “Thank you for that excellent advice.”

And I’ll always do the same thing: I’ll shrug and tell them it was nothing and try to get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.

Because what I know – and what younger writers who are new to Hollywood do not know – is that when you write alone you are paid as a single entity, but when you write as a team, the team is paid as a single entity.

That means that two writers writing separately cost the production and the executive producer (that’s me, by the way) almost twice as much as two writers writing as a team. And during big group rewrite sessions, when the entire staff gathers in a conference room to rewrite a script, five teams of two writers are half as costly as 10 writers working solo – but in both cases you’ve got 10 writers working.

At some point, of course, the young writers discover this – usually when their agents call to inform them that the studio lawyers are sending over new paperwork – but only rarely are they furious. Mostly they’re practical. Writing is either lonely and hard or social and easy. You’re not going to get paid the same either way. Sometimes the shortcut is the best choice.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl