Quotes
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.
The best-case scenario: a prime-time schedule with no game shows, one reality show per network, one newsmagazine show per network, no sports in prime time. And a different Law & Order on every night of the week.
The agendas on the management side of the table now are not in sync like they used to be because you have vastly different entities supplying programming to networks.
The ad revenues still go up because nothing dependably delivers the eyeballs that successful series do.
T.V. has to be edited and scored and everything else, and if you don't like what you're watching it can be a very painful process.
People recognize certain things, like 'D' means 'this dialogue stinks.' We're dealing with shows that are written here, shot in New York and posted back here. Accurate communication is a necessity.
People have always taken risks. That's the nature of show business. It is certainly the nature of television, which has been a deficit-financed business for 50 years.
People do have viewing patterns, and you disrupt those at your own peril. That's something that everybody learned after 1988. The numbers have gone down every year since that strike. Big time.
Now somebody comes on as a staff writer and the next year they've got a hot agent and then they're a supervising producer.
It's show business. No show, no business.
It's a very competitive business. And everybody I know who does it is extremely competitive, but they show it or don't show it in different ways.
It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.
In a strange way, Mutiny on the Bounty was similar. Captain Bly was a great antagonist and Fletcher Christian was a great protagonist, but there are not pages of description about them.
If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike.
If the scripts are not good, I'll tell somebody, 'This isn't good.'
I would say that if you really wished to be a working member of the community, don't go out on strike because then there's no work and no potential of work.
I was running Miami Vice, but it wasn't my show so I got to learn an enormous amount. You were basically getting trained to have your own show.
I was raised not to be rude, but I also try to get the best work out of people.