I got a text message from an acquaintance on Monday. It was the night of the Emmy Awards, and I suppose he thought he was being witty when he wrote: “Guess UR watching the Emmy Awards show. Do U wish U were there? Are U ever going to write another show 2 put Urself back on the map?”
Now, I have a policy about all awards shows: I only watch the ones where I have an actual chance of winning. In other words, if I’m not nominated, I’m not watching.
But the message from the friend – well, he’s not a friend, really, and certainly not now – crawled under my skin. Of course, I have been to the Emmy Awards, several times, as a nominee. And though the series I have currently on the air isn’t really Emmy material – it’s pretty broad, a little off-colour – I wouldn’t say that I’m no longer “on the map”.
There’s a chance, I suppose, that I’m overreacting. Writers in Hollywood have a tendency to see vicious character assassination in the most innocuous exchanges.
“You should put that in your little show,” someone’s mother once said to him. For context, the “someone” was a major writer and producer with a moderate hit show on the air, and the “that” that his mother wanted him to put in his “little show” was a story she told about not being able to find the garage door remote control and having to park on the street.
He told me that he didn’t exactly lose his temper – though if you have to put it that way, you probably did – but he did get snippy. “It’s not a little show, Mom,” he told me he said. “And we don’t really deal with things like lost garage door openers.”
“It wasn’t lost,” his mother said. “It was misplaced. That’s what makes it funny.”
And maybe she meant it meanly, maybe she didn’t – in my experience, unless you’re a member of the blood family, you’ll never really be able to detect the subtle language of disapproval. “You only hear what you want to hear,” a writer friend of mine’s mother once shouted at him during an argument. “No, Mom,” he said, “I never hear what I want to hear. I learnt that from you.”
But what’s amazing, of course, is that a phrase like “your little show” – or, for that matter “back on the map” – from someone who really doesn’t know what he or she is saying can get inside your head and rattle around making trouble. My friend’s mother, my texting nemesis – these are people who really shouldn’t have that kind of access to our moods and ego. Of course, that guy is totally wrong. I’m still on the map. It’s a smaller map, of course – and getting smaller every year – but it’s still a map and I’m still on it.
A few weeks ago, on the set of the television comedy I’m producing, the father of a young staff writer came up to me to talk. We had just wrapped shooting his son’s script – sometimes the younger writers invite their parents to the filming – and it was one of those odd moments of parenthood, I think, when you’re not sure how to make the transition between talking to your kid’s teacher and talking to your kid’s boss.
“I want to thank you,” he said. “You’ve really taught him a lot.”
The young writer’s father, clearly, had chosen to think of me, the employer, as a teacher.
Across the stage, talking to a group of other guests, I caught the young writer staring at me with a mixture of rage, humiliation and resigned fatalism.
“Well,” I stammered – I don’t know how to talk to the parents of people who work for me because I don’t know how to talk to the people who work for me themselves – “Well, you know, he’s a, you know, just a good writer, and he’s going to, you know, keep learning, in the writers’ room and in the, rewrites and, you know. It’s just, it’s a job. It’s a job.”
Later, as we were all leaving, the young writer blocked my exit.
“What exactly did you say to my father? That I needed to learn more? That I needed to learn more about the writers’ room? What? What? What did you say? Because he told me that I probably need to work harder in the room and in the rewrites.”
“Look,” I said, “it was a conversation, and like every conversation I have throughout the day, it’s one I was trying to get out of. I have zero memory of what I said.”
He looked at me witheringly.
“Don’t tell my dad anything about me, OK? He’ll just use it to undermine me,” he said. And then he wound up with: “If you have something to say, just say it directly.”
As if anyone can say – or hear – anything directly.
Rob Long is a Hollywood writer and producer
On Twitter: @rcbl