Martini Shot

Last week’s Martini Shot prompted a lot of very kind notes that read like eulogies for what is essentially a back-end redirect of an audio feed. In that spirit, Rob Long reflects on the many ways Hollywood tells you it’s over without ever quite saying so: the actor who fired his agent while the agent was firing him, the showrunner removed from the show about his own father — they were right, by the way — and the writer whose deal simply wasn’t renewed, and who forgot to mention any of it to his assistant. Nobody was fired. Everybody felt fired. Next week, we set sail.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Years ago, a woman told Rob the greatest story he’d ever heard: Her doctor put her on testosterone cream — and then required her to attend weekly meetings with the other women who were also on it, so they could compare notes. Rob pitched it as a sitcom. The executives stared at him like he had gone insane. This week: why the sanding-down of genuinely weird ideas doesn’t start in the conference room but in the writer’s own head, what he’s learning from a new script with comedian Sam Morrison — and a big announcement about the future of Martini Shot.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jerry Lewis once blessed a nightclub audience by wishing them a life full of show business friends. Rob Long isn’t so sure that’s a blessing — show business friendship is a strange, contingent thing, built on projects that assemble and dissolve, sofas shared for a month, congratulatory phone calls that get read as job applications. This week: an awkward call to a not-quite-friend about her pilot, a rich old acquaintance unsettled by seminary news and a British actor stuck in contract purgatory at a long-ago dinner party who turned out fine. A theory of friendship, tested against thirty years of overlapping crews.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rob Long is in Tbilisi, a city he last saw 26 years ago when it was broke and hopeful and is now prosperous and — inconveniently — cozy with Vladimir Putin. Turns out streaming had the same trajectory: total freedom, total data and somehow the timidest programming decisions in television history. Rob has notes for Netflix executives: bring back the 22-episode season — nobody wants a six-year relationship with your drama. Then his godson Jackson shows him the real numbers — how many viewers abandon his Instagram Reels by the one-second mark — and Rob realizes he’s become exactly the kind of storyteller he just finished lecturing.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The summer box office is having its best season since before the pandemic — and the first real hits weren’t the franchise machines, they were two cheap horror movies made by guys who started on YouTube. Naturally, the industry is busy reading the wrong signs: mine Reddit, buy a graphic novel, staff up a division. Rob Long has seen this con before — he knows a successful project that was a script disguised as a self-published graphic novel with a fan base of five. The right sign is simpler, and it comes by way of a high school basketball coach and a friend who survived a stroke: We didn’t lose the ability to make a fun summer movie. We lost the feeling. And the feeling is the part worth getting back.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices