HOLLYWOOD HUMORIST

Gore Vidal once said something interesting and perhaps true.

If you are now recovered from the shock, I will tell you what it was. The reason for the postwar decline in American fiction, Vidal said, was that all the young people with narrative talent had forsaken novels and gone off to Hollywood to make movies. There’s a corollary to this, which is that the reason for the decline in American humor writing is that all the really funny writers have forsaken books and magazines and gone off to Hollywood to make sitcoms.

If you watch a lot of sitcoms, you may be dubious. But it’s at least partly true, after you consider that the best of Cheers or Seinfeld or half a dozen other shows is as good as the best of Benchley or Thurber. Rob Long is a case in point. He was a writer, and then a writer-producer (the distinction is mysterious but apparently crucial), for Cheers in its last few seasons and has since gone on to co-produce two other, shorterlived sitcoms, Pig Sty and Good Company. By losing him to Hollywood, the world of written humor lost a great deal. Just how much can be seen every two weeks in National Review, where Long writes (without a byline) the ” Letter from Al” column, probably the best political satire written in the age of Bill and Hillary. As funny as the column is, it’s just moonlighting. Rob Long is a first-tier writer, and Hollywood has him for good.

But not completely, for he’s now written a book, too. Conversations with My Agent recounts his efforts, post-Cheers, to get another sitcom on the air. The book takes the form of a long script, complete with stage directions and extended stretches of dialogue — the conversations of the title — that fairly pop off the page. Interposed are patches of expository prose in which Long guides his readers through the intricacies of Hollywood culture.

On the conflicting interests of networks and sitcom writers, for example:

The network likes things likable. The writer likes things funny. Sometimes – – rarely — these two forces mesh, and create a funny, likable show. Sometimes — usually — the network gets its way and another show hits the airwaves set in the Village of the Happy People, where characters learn things and share and hug and make everyone sick. And sometimes — with roughly Halley’s comet’s frequency — something slips through the sticky machine and comes out funny, likable, sharp, and new.

This, of course, was the kind of show Long and his partner set out to produce, against the predictably overwhelming odds, after Cheers went off the air. One of the greatest obstacles seems to be the ennui that comes from being paid large amounts of money to do what appears to be nothing. This is called a “development deal”: “Essentially, the studio agrees to pay a writer a minimum sum over two years, hopeful that the writer, once the novelty of being paid good money — sometimes, great money — to do absolutely nothing but sit and think wears off and he’s thoroughly disgusted with a workday that begins at eleven in the morning and ends roughly after lunch, will just decide, ‘What the hell, I may as well create a hit television show.'”

All writers are complainers, worldclass division, but Long, notwithstanding the boatloads of money and large offices and secretary and expensive lunches in trendy skylit restaurants, complains with such a winning insouciance that you won’t begrudge him any of it. (Well, not a lot of it, anyway.) (Okay, a lot of it.) What writers complain about most, after editors, is money, and if the book has a weakness it is that on this point Long is frustratingly vague. Hollywood writers are the first in the long history of wordsmithing not to complain about money. The reasons are desperately obvious. We are told only that the money involved is “great” — or, as his agent puts it, “very serious moneys.” Yes, but how serious? How great? I want to know dollar figures, to the decimal point. Then again, maybe I don’t.

Long’s greatest source of complaint is his agent, never named, a character of hilarious and unforgettable vividness. She appears only on the phone, only in dialogue — swirling, almost surreal dialogue that could have come from Samuel Beckett, if Beckett weren’t such a sourpuss, or dead.

MY AGENT: I hear you yelled at a studio exec.

ME: I didn’t yell.

MY AGENT: I didn’t say you did.

ME: Yes you did.

MY AGENT: You’re getting defensive.

ME: Yeah, but —

MY AGENT: What is this? A “gotcha” conversation? Are we playing “gotcha”? Well, fine, but I can play with the best of them, okay?

ME: [Pause. I pour another Scotch.] Okay, okay. I yelled.

MY AGENT: Good for you. Bust his chops a little. If they push and you roll, then the next time they just push harder. You want me to call him and scream a little?

I won’t be giving too much away when I tell you that Long and his partner end up producing their show, and getting it on the air, and that it — as they don’t say in Hollywood — bombs. By book’s end they are back to being known as the boys from Cheers. If there’s justice in the real world, which excludes Hollywood, Rob Long will in time be known as many things, not least as the author of this splendid book, the funniest Hollywood memoir in years.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.