Dick Wolf
You're given information about Sherlock Holmes, but the information is procedural: he smoked a pipe, used cocaine, played the violin, had a brother. You could write everything you knew about Sherlock Holmes on one sheet of paper. The story was the thing.
You have this disturbing reality that there are a lot of people who would rather say, 'I'm on strike' than 'I'm unemployed.' And those are the people who vote for strikes.
When this strike is over, there will be fewer jobs. The people who were unemployed prior to the strike aren't going to be the first ones back to work.
When the first six episodes came in, people at NBC said 'No, no, no, no, no. You can't do this and you can't do that.' Luckily, there were these two 500-lb gorillas standing there saying, 'Let it alone!'
When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them?
Well, television has become an unforgiving environment and you don't get to make mistakes. That was the great thing about Universal in the old days.
To quote General Patton, 'I don't like paying for the same real estate twice.' If it's not done, you say, 'This is not what we agreed on.'
TIVO executives stand up and say, 'Well, we're not getting rid of commercials, but we are letting them fast forward, because people like commercials, and if they see one that they like they stop and watch it.' I mean, please.
There was an interesting article in Los Angeles Magazine about women directors. A woman director makes one bad independent film and her career is over. Guys tend to get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.
There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.
There are other options out there, after all, like read a book, go on the Internet, rent a movie.
Their argument is that most shows are losers, which is true, but it's also disingenuous to say, 'We are not going to take the risk unless it is totally covered by the few successful shows that are out there.'
The threat to free television. The reason television is free is because it is a life support system for commercials. That fundamental aspect is about to change.
The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.
The most positive step is to try to expand the employment base by making it, if not economically friendly, at least not economically disastrous, for studios to take on deficits.
The margin notes are not for the writers, they go to the executive producer, and I try to make them short and succinct.
The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.
The great strikes of the '50s and '60s were bloody and awful, but at that point there were only three networks. Everyone came back to work.
The first thing I ever wrote was a serial in my school paper, when I was 12, about a character who was basically an American Sherlock Holmes. It ran for two years, and when I graduated from the eighth grade, I ended it with 'To Be Continued.
The environment doesn't change that radically. You are still going to go home at night and NBC is going to be there, ABC and CBS will still be there.