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- [00:01]
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Welcome to the new books network.
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Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, I'm your host, Ryan Schinkel. Today, as we continue Season five, I have with us as our guest the longtime Hollywood professional Author and podcaster, Mr.
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Rob Long.
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B
A Yale graduate and former UCLA School of Film student, he was a writer for the classic sitcom Cheers and later its executive producer, a title he has held for over a dozen other TV series and films. A frequent National Review contributor and a monthly Commentary magazine and weekly Washington examiner magazine columnist, he is the author of two comic memoirs, Conversations with My Agent 1998 and Set Up Joke Setup Joke 2005, and a contributor to the volume The Seven Deadly Virtues 2014, and the editor of Bigly Donald Trump in Verse 2017. As the founder of Ricochet.com, a media network and one of our distributors, Mr. Long is additionally a serial podcaster, both hosting the Martini Shot, a bite sized showbiz series that began on NPR in LA 15 years ago and is now on the Ankler and co hosting the Glop Cultural podcast, which I have followed since its inception. For years I have heard Mr. Long on podcasts and audiobooks and often quite relished his very hilarious pieces. But podcasts and pieces cannot respond to questions. Now, however, I have the chance to ask them in person. And recently on a prior episode this season we had Matt Frank with us to talk about films. This time we have someone to talk with us about television shows, but from the production side. Lastly, Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Long is a Master of Divinity student and here at Princeton Theological Seminary pursuing his studies to become an Episcopal priest. When I arrived in Princeton to host the show, it seemed like a ripe opportunity to have him on to talk about his life in Hollywood and subsequent religious studies. So, Mr. Long, welcome to Madison's Notes.
- [02:12]
A
Well, thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun. Boy, I forgot, when you do the podcast you don't have to answer questions. That was a strategic error coming here, I think. Well, go ahead, you can ask away and if I don't like it, I'll just answer something else. That's my normal pattern.
- [02:23]
B
I am grateful for whatever answers you provide. Tell me a bit about yourself first. How did you get into Hollywood screenwriting? You're originally from Boston. How did you come to la?
- [02:31]
A
I'm not originally from Boston, actually. We moved around a lot when I was a kid and so we lived in Northern California for a while. My dad was in the electronics Business. So he was in Silicon Valley, and then he was on Route 128. And so we moved back, and he moved back for a job. And my mother worked in schools for a long time, and I went to school in Massachusetts, and then I went to college. So I love New England, but I can't really claim to be a New Englander. I'm much more of a Californian, actually, which is weird when you think about it. And the way I got to Hollywood was just that I didn't have any other skills. And I graduated from college in 1987. And the law, 1987, was that you had to be an investment banker. And I didn't even have any skills for that. And that, at that point, was a pretty low standard. I think it probably is low standard, but you really only had to be able to do some math. And I couldn't even do that. And so I was in a writing class taught by a guy who was getting his MFA at the Yale School of Drama. And his wife had just moved to LA to be a professor at the UCLA Film and Theater School. And he said, oh, you should go there. And this is a moment in your senior year in college when you think, I don't know what I'm gonna do. And then somebody says, do that. And like, okay. Thank God he didn't say, you should move to Budapest. So that's really where I went. And I thought, under the COVID of being a student, it's amazing what you can get away with, especially with your parents paying. So I headed out to LA to be a student to get an MFA at UCLA in screenwriting. But really, it was just to figure out how it worked. That's really how I ended up there. I'd written a couple plays with a friend of mine in college, and we really loved it, and we loved WR comedy. And he had graduated earlier, and he was already working in advertising. And so I thought, okay, I'll just go out there. Like, weird little first recon trip. And I still had LSAT prep books in my little bedroom apartment in la, just that I could look at every morning. This is what awaits if you can't make this work.
- [04:09]
B
Good motivational tool.
- [04:10]
A
Oh, my God. I would have been the worst lawyer. I think I would have been a worse lawyer than an investment banker, which just doesn't mean I wouldn't have made a living at it, or even a good living, but I would have been miserable. And then you figured out, and the great thing about show business then was that everybody was working too Hard to explain how you break in, but nobody wanted to keep you out, especially in the television business. They couldn't wait for you to knock on the door. TV is the one entertainment sector where all the material appears every night. You need new material every day. And so there's this constant need for young writers to come in. And I was just, right place, right time, it was great. And I also have to follow it up by saying, this world that I'm describing does not exist anymore. Do not take anything I say as encouragement to follow in those steps, because those steps don't exist anymore. I'm describing a map of a landscape that's been substantial, consumed by coastal erosion. Right. It's like Atlantis. And maybe it was there, but it's not there now. So don't go looking for it. It's a totally different business.
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B
Well, in the former days of the industry, what was it like when you first got into the writers room? How did you go from UCLA MFA to being on the show for Cheers?
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A
You never really know what's gonna be because your whole life has been spent on the other side of the screen. So I asked somebody, how do you get an agent? And it was a very simple thing. Wasn't easy, but the process was really simple. You find the names of agents who represent writers on TV shows that you like who are at the younger, lower level. Right. So the agents who represent young writers, and then you write them a letter and you ask them if they will read your spec scripts. And that's how you do it. I don't think you do it that way anymore, but back then, that's how you did it. And I walked in and met this agent that everybody loved and told me was great for young writers. And she happened to be one of the agents that packaged the show Cheers. And so she was kind of tough, but great and very honest. And she said, all right. It was December. She said, I need another spec script from you guys. Don't call me ever again. Don't ever call me and ask me what I'm doing or if there's anything for you. I will call you and tell you if there's something. She really knew how to handle young writers. And then we went away. It went away for Christmas, and it came back in January. And she called us up and said, put on some clean pants. You got a meeting at Cheers and just showed up. I mean, it sounds insane.
- [06:05]
B
Is this during the height of the show?
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Yeah, it was like the seventh season. I think it wasn't quite the perennial number one show, but it was that era, 1990.
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B
So this is before Frasier, Before Frasier. Seinfeld had already started, but it wasn't
- [06:17]
A
up and running yet. Well, Seinfeld hadn't started yet. That came the next year for us. And. Or maybe a year after that, Seinfeld had a weird stutter start. So it's hard to know. But it was definitely. I mean, Frasier was a character in our show. We wrote for the character Frasier.
- [06:28]
B
Very different background.
- [06:29]
A
Yeah, right. It's funny because when you're writing the show, you write whatever you want. It never occurred to us that there would ever be a show called Frasier that would have its own story. And we wrote him. He was an orphan. He grew up in Boston, and his mom was played by Nancy Marchand on the show. And his father we described as remote figure who was some famous Harvard researcher. And his father died when he was young.
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B
And it's not like there's a back catalog in which you can access and there are people online putting together all the backstories.
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Not then. Right. I remember reading the pilot of Frasier, the TV show, three, four years later, and thinking, oh, they can't do this. They can't have his father. He's an only child and an orphan. And I wasn't quite still as young as I was when I started. Even then I knew, oh, come on, nobody cares if it's funny. People like it. And the smartest thing they did, I think, is to say, okay, same character, we get to make up everything we want to make up. The result of that was that great
- [07:15]
B
Joe Fraser on one episode in season one, they bring back his ex wife from Cheers.
- [07:18]
A
Yeah, no, they brought her back, actually. I think all the characters they brought back, I think they got Norman, Cliff, they definitely got Ted, of course, because your continuity of it was fine. And someone told me once there was one episode where they referred obliquely to the fact that he had lied to the team and told them that he was an orphan and he lied about his father, which I guess they felt was funny and needed to do. And maybe 10 people in the world got it.
- [07:38]
B
So the writers room is a kind of lost world. The way it was when you first joined. Describe for people, what was it like?
- [07:43]
A
Well, if you've seen the Dick Van Dyke show, it's kind of like that. It really kind of was. I never imagined that there would be that many funny people in one room being funny just because they're funny. And when you first start out, you're new and you're young. You don't know that. The protocol is you're not supposed to laugh all the time. Like, you're not supposed to withhold laughter. But the first couple days, everything is hilarious. You can't believe it, how funny everybody is. At a certain point, you have to stop, because then it feels a little like you walk into a room and sit on the sofa, and then other people make you laugh, and then you get paid and you go home and you forget, no, my job is actually to make them laugh. And then that's another struggle because then you try too hard, and then you're pitching too many dumb things. And if they're nice, they'll guide you to what they really need. But it's very hard to find your place in those rooms. Those rooms are really tough. And some people just absolutely hate them and they're crushing. And some people just flourish and love it.
- [08:31]
B
How does a joke in a sitcom work? Can you describe the structure of it?
- [08:34]
A
Yeah, and I kill it. That's how you kill it. E.B. white said that comedy, like a frog, can be dissected, but the frog tends to die in the process. Well, really, in the best possible room. It's a spontaneous little play that you're putting on for your writer colleagues. In fact, at least how I learned it. It's add form to pitch the idea of a joke. Or here's what we need. We did this kind of joke that's like, hey, you're not getting paid to tell me the shape of the thing I need. You're getting paid to pitch something that somebody says. An actual line of dialogue I can put in the script. So the spontaneous improvisation of everything and the way you work with a bunch of people that are your colleagues and your friends. But you're also competitive because you're writers. You want to make them laugh, and you want to be the guy to save the show. Whatever. You don't want to ever reverse engineer it. You want just get to the point. I remember people whose great skill was setting up something. They kind of knew there's a joke over here, and they would pitch the setup, and then somebody else would pitch the punchline. And that's also important. One of the first three bosses had a great phrase. He was very improvisational, very spontaneous writer. He said, look, even if you pitch the stupidest, worst thing ever, well, now we know we want the opposite of that. So we know a little bit more than we knew before you pitched it. Which was not a license to go and just pitch random garbage. But it's it did make you feel better when you pitch something and people are like, oh, God, no. Oh my. Not oh. Like when you're younger and you're just starting out, that's crushing. That's like, oh my God, no one's gonna fire me. They just think I'm bad. And that's killer. That's a hard thing, but everybody goes through that.
- [09:56]
B
In one of your books, you mentioned that anyone can be taught how to write a story, but you can't be taught how to be funny.
- [10:02]
A
I wouldn't rank them. I think the craft of it is really important. You have to compress a satisfying story of characters that people have ownership of. They don't tune in to cheers or to a show. They love to watch your un take on this. They want to watch the characters that they know and own do a story that you've written, but they still feel like they own it. So you have to be really respectful of the audience. That has built up with loyalty over time. The craft part of it, you learn it by just doing it and you learn it by doing it with people who are really smart. So the people who ended up being my mentors were people who started writing for the old Mary Tyler Moore show and before. And so their whole standard of how things worked and how you actually made a show and how you thought about it was in the crucible of the James Brooks world, which itself came from the Dick Van Dyke show, which itself came from sort of Carl Reiner's work on the Sid Caesar yeshove shows. And there's like trees of it. And you can see different personnel go to different shows. And that's how you learn. You learn by being with those people and seeing what they notice as a problem. Seeing what they notice is not a problem. Seeing how they solve something, seeing how they head off a problem. You just learn a lot of the craft by being an apprentice, which is what a young writer used to be. And unfortunately now that's gone. They don't have that anymore because mostly because it's. I think everything's much cheaper and the stats are smaller and they don't make as many. We made 26, sometimes 28 a year. If you say that to a young writer now, maybe they make six for Hulu or something.
- [11:23]
B
What changed the industry? Did it change before streaming?
- [11:25]
A
I think streaming did it, or at least it amplified it. I think streaming or just the idea of unlimited store width, unlimited bandwidth just changed everything and changed everything in all areas of the entertainment business. I mean, the music business completely Its upheaval was unlimited store with unlimited bandwidth. In the old days, you had to choose what store, what record you were going to hear, what CD you're going to put in the CD changer, even. And so new music had a priority because you just bought it and you put it in the thing and you listen to your new music, and then you put it on a CD shelf that you bought at Ikea, and unless you were a total weirdo, you never listened to it again. Or maybe once or twice, you listen to new music. So new music used to compete only with new music for your attention, and now it competes with everything ever recorded in the history of the recording industry. It is as easy for you to listen to the most recent Taylor Swift album as it is for you to listen to Evgeny Kissin's chopin concerto from 19. Whatever. It's the same process. It doesn't require you to go to your stupid rack and find the thing. It doesn't require anything of you other than just actually speaking now into Siri, play that thing. And that's great. But it also means that everything is chaotic. And I think we're seeing that in TV now, which is a thousand shows on Netflix servers no one's ever gonna watch.
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B
It seems a paradox where there are more episodes before streaming and then fewer episodes, even though it's much more unlimited, the amount of storage that you can have. The limited storage created a discipline and the actual medium created constraints on the actual production of content.
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A
Yeah. Also, the money's not there. I just told somebody this. I think I made a thousand dollars on a bet with a friend of mine who said that at no point will Netflix have ads. It's just absolutely not. It's anathema. The minute they have ads, I'm quitting. And I said, they're going to have ads and you're not going to quit. He said, I'll bet you $1,000. And of course they have ads now. And he didn't quit, because there is no way to run a business like that. You cannot pay as you go. The subscription business does not work. And I don't know why they all said it did, but it absolutely doesn't. No entertainment business has ever had only one gate, only one way in, only one profit center and survived. They all have to have two or three or four. And TVs got to have two or three or four ancillary stuff that can sell the show to someplace else. Syndication or foreign advertising, and then the network license fee. All the costs are based on that. This is the weed stuff. But the people in show business and in certainly the Silicon Valley, people who've joined the business, they believe that if they just tune the algorithm, right, or they just tune their audience research, right, they'll de risk the whole thing. They'll figure out what, exactly what you want to watch and give you that. Which bizarre because of course they don't act that way because if you really believe that, then you wouldn't order five episodes of a series. You say, I know I want 50 because I know I'm going to want it. But they continually fail at it because they don't order enough. They don't really know and you never can know because there is no way to know. It's a risk business and if you don't like it, you should be in something else.
- [14:09]
B
The William Goldman line, nobody knows anything.
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Yeah, yeah, he's right. He said it as a hilarious, sardonic way of looking at all these people making these terrible mistakes. I happen to think that's fantastic. That is incredibly fun chaos. And you'll eventually, if you keep trying new stuff, you're gonna eventually get a hit. What could be better than that? But if you step on the hose thinking that you can figure stuff out or your automatic brain is going to reverse engineer a hit, you're just going to continually lose money and get more and more cautious until suddenly you're not even ordering two episodes, you're going to order one. And I just think that's where we are now. We're in a terrified, terrified business that needs to shrink. And half of the people who are working at these studios need to do something else like you need. They need all the supervision needs to go away.
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B
Was it just quantitative easing which made a lot of money floating around? Everything was exorbitant spending and eventually there's going to be a contraction.
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A
That's what's happening now.
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B
Did the LA fire at all add to that?
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A
I don't know, actually. I think the LA fire was the physical embodiment of what needed to happen. But I don't think it's happened, which is we need less, we don't know how to get less. We need fewer people in LA trying to be in the entertainment business. The personnel and the footprint needs to shrink by 25, 30%.
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B
Would that make it leaner and produce more hits? Maybe.
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A
Well, it'll make it leaner and produce more projects that people haven't supervised to death because they're terrified that it might fail.
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B
Fewer people means less risk averse.
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A
Fewer people Means there's only so much they can do. At some point they just have to let something go. I don't know, maybe it'll work, who knows? I should say this after I do, when I start a project or like do a pitch with somebody and they want it, what? I go, yeah, what if it works? It would be great. But what if it works? I have no idea. And that's one part. And the second part is that because you have so many younger people and untested people running TV shows, which is also can be great, they don't have the skills, the craft yet to make 25 episodes. So I was ranting to a friend of mine who runs one of these streamers who foolishly bought me dinner to hear my rant. And then I gave it to him, which is never the most generous way to handle a free dinner, but whatever. And I complained, all these short orders, how you have no way of knowing that this thing could have been a big hit. I was complaining about one show I liked, I think that they canceled. And he said, what you don't know is that have we ordered 20 more of them? Those people doing that show couldn't have done it. They barely made the five because they didn't have any experience. And when you're new and you do something that big and remember these are $100 million business units and the showrunner's in charge of everything. And you don't know if the showrunner can do it these days until after it's all falling apart. And he said they're all really great, but they were exhausted. Had we come to them and said we want 20 more, they would have jumped off a bridge. So there's also that a friend of
- [16:40]
B
mine, Joe Joyce, once pointed out that the writers room, the way it works at Netflix, they broke it down. So move everyone around. There's rarely time to develop as a group and sharpen your tools that way. A stand up comedian, he sharpens his tools, going from nightclub to stand up nightclub, interacting with people, dealing with hecklers and sharpening that over a course of a year for one routine. But in the writers room, you guys don't have direct access to the audience. You just have to each other's taste.
- [17:03]
A
Yeah. And like in a comedy, you have a rehearsal, you have a cast, if the cast is great. I've been incredibly lucky in my career. I've only worked with amazingly great people. We'd go to the stage on Thursday morning to watch a run through at Cheers and then these incredibly funny people would be Doing the thing we wrote, the little play we wrote.
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B
Who are your favorite people you've worked with?
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A
Definitely the entire cast of Cheers was fantastic. But then I'd done a bunch of other shows. I worked with Bob Newhart. Judd Hirsch was great. Judd Hirsch was also this incredibly intuitive actor who when something wasn't working, which happens, that's why you have rehearsals a little like Ted Danson. He would try to help you by explaining what wasn't working for him. And it was always nonsense, it's always just gibberish. But it didn't matter because that's not. His job is to tell me how to fix it or what's wrong. His job is to be super authentic and just to say, I can't, I don't know how to do this. Ted was also that guy. Ted is an incredibly intuitive actor. It's one of the great things is to see the sheer diversity of the parts that he's playing. Other people realizing just how great he is. He is a great actor. Those guys I loved, I loved Swissy Kurtz was fantastic. I worked with a woman named Jody Long. Brian Murray, and these are just great performers. And Christine Ebersol. Sometimes you come in and a real pro will at the run through, maybe they've been working all morning and they're tired and they'll blow something at a run through and they'll stop and they'll turn to the writers and say, don't cut this, this is great. I just messed it up. Please don't let me have one more day at this. And then every now and then you give it another day. And if it's somebody who's really. They take it personally when you cut it. And so you have to say to them, look, you could not sell this material. The material didn't work. We needed to write you better material. And it's a great feeling when you have this kind of relationship with your cast and your team where they don't think that you made a mistake. You think they think they made a mistake. And you are trying to explain to them, no, no, no. Thank you for respecting us, but boy, we just gave you a stinker of a scene and we gotta fix it. And that was the joy of it. I'm not sure that there's that time anymore. Most people don't like the multi camera processes to rehearse. It's like a play and then you put it on on shoot night in front of an audience. That's real. That's not a tape. It's real. It's not a laugh track, it's an audience track. We record the audience and the cameras are zooming around and trying to capture that performance. And it's the sum total of your week's work. The script starts in one place and ends in another place because you keep making it better each time. If you actually read these scripts for us anyway, cheers definitely was the case. If you read the script we brought to the table the first day, the table reading script in which all the dialogue's worked out and reads like a play. And then you read the shooting script. So the script we actually shot, the dialogue that actually lasted, sometimes it reads like an insane person wrote it. It's just brittle stuff missing. Well, that's the show, right? You don't need as many words when you have a cast like we had or a cast like I've had since then. You overwrite because you're writing it. But you take to the table a script, but the minute the table reading is over becomes a show. And I used to say this to people, even executives, when they come to run through and they'd be sitting there reading the script along with a pencil, reading the script. And their head would naturally, writers do this too. Go down to the script. So they're reading the lines and, like, they're hearing the actors in front of them reading the lines. And I would actually stop, all right, stop, stop. Let's just do it again. And then turn to the people in the chairs and say, you need to watch. We don't send the script to the audience. They don't get that. They're not allowed to read the script. They just watch the show. So this is either gonna work or not work based on what we all are watching. And they'll go, oh, yeah, yeah. But it's just human nature. Like, you're just naturally gonna look down at the book you have in front of you, which is usually when things go bad.
- [20:16]
B
What about the element of serendipity? You've written a script, you have the cast together. It's a pilot or it's already a number of episodes have been ordered for season one. What happens then? Do things alter?
- [20:27]
A
If you're smart, they change. If you're paying attention, they change. Because you don't know. Sort of the problem of living life is that you must have some certainty. You must believe in certain things just to get out of bed in the morning. But you also have to know also that none of these things that you plan for are true or real are going to happen, that everything's Going to be an improvisation. And so you are constantly batting up against your idea of what should be or what you had planned for and then what really is. And I think for this, what you do is you write a script, you have a very clear vision and you start casting it. And then everybody kind of pitches in on casting and just say, somebody comes in who's fantastic but completely wrong for the part. Then you have to decide, okay, was the part right? This person's great. Maybe we just have to adjust the part. Or maybe you have the first table reading and you discover that, oh my gosh, this other person that we cast who's just the mailman comes in or the postman or whatever, that person's great at getting huge laughs more of that person. You have to have the flexibility to do that and the awareness to not throw everything away because they're chasing whatever. I don't know, it's kind of like life, right? You make plans and God laughs, as they say. But you have to have some kind of structure and you have to be willing to throw it out. But you're always wondering whether you're throwing it out too soon or you should dig in. That's show business in a nutshell, because we have to work with other people. I have to get the actors to say the lines and make them real. So their input is really crucial. And if you don't like them or they're not good, or you don't trust them, or they don't trust you, you're in trouble. You're gonna have some trouble.
- [21:44]
B
So you've had the career working as a TV writer and producer in Hollywood, but you've also had a career taking the business side, production side of Hollywood, both from personal experience and also famous Hollywood anecdotes. Putting them together in syndication, you might say, yeah, in books and columns.
- [22:01]
A
Yeah. Always monetize, always monetize content. That's our rule.
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B
Also in the martini shot, your podcast, your first book, Conversations with My Agent. It's a coming of age story of a TV writer who's had great success, then the show ends, has to come up with a new show and how he's having to relearn the business out in the wilderness for a bit. And the mentor throughout the first book is your agent. Now, a lot of this seems drawn from some personal experience, but everything's made very anonymous. It's just my agent. Even when you're telling a story about a, a TV network executive or some film or some show, was that a self protective strategy?
- [22:35]
A
Listen, I was 30. I didn't work in this town. But also, it allows you then to blend people together. It allows you to say, it wasn't this one executive. It was actually these three. And now they're one person in this anecdote. The irony is that the truest portrait was of my agent. A lot of that was real dialogue, which people are like, no, and yeah,
- [22:53]
B
actually, who knew the business very well inside and out, but was never able to make it, was able to help people make it.
- [22:58]
A
I don't know how it is now, but I think back then, an agent like that, that was their goal. She asked us one question in our first meeting. She said, what do you guys want? What do you want in this business? What do you want to do? I don't think we even talked about it. We just said, oh, we want to have our own show. And she said, that's the right answer. So now she knows, okay, they want to have their own show. So I job is to get them to that point and to tell them not to do stupid stuff and tell them not to chase more money, because after the first year of Cheers, we could have gone somewhere else and probably get paid a lot more. But you want to stay and learn, right? And if I was an agent and two young writers came and I said, what do you want? And they said, well, I don't think they would say, we want to have our own show, because I don't know if that's the pinnacle. I think they just want a job. And at the time, of course, I was 23. Maybe the real answer was, I just want a job. But we knew enough to know that, no, I think what she wants and what we want is eventually to have our own show. Hard to believe, but in show business, they really believe their mission is to get you that in many ways, it's a very supportive place.
- [23:45]
B
In preparation for this interview, this was the second time going through your book.
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A
What struck me, wow, that's more than me.
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B
The audiobook helped.
- [23:51]
A
Okay. That's right. Read it. Do you know that I read it? Yeah. The interesting thing about audiobooks, when you read them, it changed them stuff.
- [23:56]
B
I thought your voice sounded a little familiar.
- [23:58]
A
Yeah.
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B
Yeah. I was wondering why the humor was working. Even though it was lacking specific names, it was stripped down. While it was a protective thing for you while you're working in this business, and also to blend things gives you more creative room to somewhat violate EB White's dictum for a second. Why do you think a joke works like that? Where you have just the archetype versus this particular person with this specific name, and they're at this place and working at this company and so on.
- [24:21]
A
First of all, when you're telling a joke, you don't want them to be thinking about anything that is unimportant to the joke. So you don't want anybody's mind distracted from moving from the setup to the punchline. Audience management and attention management is the most important thing in humor and I think the most important thing in everything. But also, once you give somebody a name, well, now they have a character. And now it's not an anecdote. Now it's not a story I'm telling. It's a story that's unfolding and I'm just narrating a story. Whereas I wanted it to feel like I am telling you a story and that I'm going to tell you what's important. Sat down and I handed you a drink. And now I'm going at it. And part of that's just laziness. I don't really want to create a character now. I got to get the character dimension. No, it's just a guy. This is an executive I know. And part of it was cowardice. Right? I don't want to name the person because if I name the person, then that person's going to read it and they'll be really mad or they'll be really flattered or the person I don't mention will be really mad or really flattered, whatever.
- [25:09]
B
And you can always end up working with someone at any given point in Hollywood.
- [25:13]
A
Oh, yeah. I had a deal at a studio once. This is after the books. And there was a delay in it. It was just dumb. I was hopping on a project that was already going on and they needed me started working while we hadn't settled on the deal, but I know we're out going find to fine, and there's a strange delay. And my attorney called me because people are like, why has your deal not closed? It's getting awkward. You've been here two weeks. And so I called my attorney, said, what's going on? She said, everything's fine, except they are digging in on this one thing. They want you to sign a piece of paper that says that you will not use anything that happens, any conversation you have with anybody in any of your writing. And I say, okay, I'm fine. I'll sign it. And my attorney was like, then I'm not your lawyer, because that is a violation of your First Amendment rights. And I'm not going to do that. No. I told them that under no circumstances would you ever even dream of signing that. I'm like, yeah, but I'm here two weeks. It's fine. Everything's gonna be fine. She's like, no, my job is to remind you that everything is not gonna be fine. So there's absolutely no way you're giving that guarantee. You'll have to find somebody else to make this deal. I was like, okay, all right. But in the meantime, I'm working, so let's wrap it up. So eventually, she made it clear to them that I was never gonna. I think I said to her, oh, I'll sign it. It's fine. And then later, if I want to write about it, write about it. They don't care. She's like, no, no, that is not how the world works. You sign a contract and you make a promise, and then while you're signing it, you're plan. And I thought. I don't think of it as lying, but that's exactly what it was. So she's a great lawyer, so she got them to back down. And I think it was like a month later. Very typical in Hollywood that you won't make a deal, close a deal, and then start working. You just agree that we're gonna make a deal here, and then you start working in a position like that.
- [26:40]
B
Are there a group of your friends who find a second layer to the humor in your columns or your podcasts or your books where they know who you're talking about?
- [26:49]
A
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They're. Yes. And then occasionally they'll correct me. They're like, actually, that's not how it unfolded. And then occasionally, I've had usually good friends of mine, because only your good friends can be honest and cruel to you. If somebody says something stupid or wrong, and I attribute it to somebody, not often, but every now and then I'll get a text from somebody. I'm just listening to this. You know, you were that person. I was listening to your martini shot. And you talk about a guy. Oh, you're that guy. Just so you know, in the story, as it really happened, you were the jerk. And I think, oh, wow, I remember it differently. But that's also what people do. And I think they're right and I'm wrong, but I'm the one with a much better.
- [27:22]
B
You host podcasts with a microphone, but you've also been a purveyor of helping other people create podcasts through ricochet. I believe there was an Atlantic piece back in 2010 where it said this was the attempt to make conservatism or the conservative movement fun again through the Ricochet Network.
- [27:36]
A
Oh, wow. Really? That's interesting.
- [27:38]
B
How did you get into being one of the people who would be in Hollywood of Reed Rarer than Bigfoot, which is a Republican? And how did you get into the conservative movement while being a Hollywood writer? And how did you get into wanting to start Ricochet, the podcast network?
- [27:52]
A
I wish I could say the podcast network was a goal all along for us, but it really wasn't. I was starting this thing with Peter Robinson, who's this wonderful writer and thinker and interviewer. Probably the best interviewer, I think one of the best interviewers, serious interviewers alive.
- [28:06]
B
Host of Uncommon Knowledge with the Hoover Institution.
- [28:08]
A
If it's anybody interesting in your world that you think is interesting, first thing you should do is Google Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson and that person's name name. Because if that. That comes up, which it does often, that's gold. That conversation is going to be riveting. He's really great at it. It's an incredible legacy. The culture wasn't so dumb. It would be a hit on French television, is what I always tell him. He thinks it's an insult.
- [28:27]
B
It would have been bigger than Charlie Rose.
- [28:28]
A
Oh, yeah, much better than Charlie Rose. Unbelievable. Anyway, so we didn't have that plan and then. But we started it because our friend who now produces Uncommon Knowledge, Scott Immergut, who does also a lot with us, he was like a liberal Democrat. I knew him from show business. He was a friend of mine from Holland, and he kept saying over and over again, you guys, what are you doing? It's so dumb. Make a podcast. Do a podcast. So we did a podcast as a companion to the site. And then we discovered that actually people like podcasts, and as long as they're conversational, these are hard. Just because you can do it and it's easy and you can buy two really great mics at Best Buy, doesn't mean that you're a podcaster. It does, but it doesn't mean you are. Because most people turn out homework right, and nobody wants homework. The audience does not pay for homework. They want it to be interesting. So that was part of it. And then the Hollywood, the conservative Hollywood thing was just like generationally, the schools I went to were all very progressive and liberal, and Reagan was president and he was terrible and he was ruining everything. And then suddenly the Berlin Wall comes down and. Okay, now you gotta figure that out. I had this theory, and then this Other thing happened which wasn't supposed to happen. And then everybody who was behind the Iron Curtain was thrilled and they all wanted to put up statues to Ronald Reagan. So maybe I'm wrong. And then if you're wrong about that, what else are you wrong about? And then you suddenly notice that there are people who are in very good faith are looking at other progressive shibboleths and making thoughtful critiques of them. I was like, okay, these guys were right. So I'm gonna give these guys my vote for now. And that's kind of how it happened. That can't speak to what it is now. And I think certain people had bad experiences. I never did. Everybody cheers. Knew the minute they know that you were Republican, they're like, hey, what does the Republican think? Hey, get over here. What do you. I remember like being called to the set urgently because Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson were having an argument about the first Iraq war. And they want to know my perspective as somebody who's pro the Iraq war. What do you think? And I'm like, well, I'm not really proud, but okay, well, we can. But entertainment business in my experience was incredibly open and like absolutely willing to have the argument. Had I been a associate professor of English literature at Yale University, I would have been fired. Without a doubt, Hollywood is much more open minded and diverse and thoughtful than any American university. Absolutely.
- [30:23]
B
Except Princeton University.
- [30:25]
A
Oh, sure. Speaking as an individual, I can say that Princeton University has like inculcated this weird rare orchid and that's great. But if I was teaching Chaucer and I said something like, as a wise Milton Friedman would say, or you know, I was just reading the Thomas Sowell column, I'd have a show trial, I'd be arrested and carried out and shot at dawn.
- [30:43]
B
So it was never an encumbrance while in Hollywood.
- [30:45]
A
Not that I know. I heard one dark moment, someone told me, well, you say that, but I heard somebody say this about you. But you know, we don't want you, we don't want that guy around. But I've never experienced it. I never knew about it. I mean, if anything, they're curious. You're in a zoo animal, like, hey, what is that guy think? Let's throw this at him, see what he does with this. Everything's now irretrievably toxified. But back then it wasn't quite the way it was in the 60s and 70s or maybe even the 80s. But it was essentially non confrontational politics. They were all reflexively liberal, but they weren't Maoists. And I think there was a period where they were. I missed that period or at that point I already had a career. And so people were like, yeah, you know, the guy's kind of a right wing kook, but he knows how to run a show.
- [31:23]
B
Now, during your time co founding Ricochet with Peter Robinson, you also walked into a church in New York called St. James Episcopal Church.
- [31:32]
A
I had been there many times before, but it's the church you go to when your friends get married. They get married there. And I was a cradle Episcopalian, we say, which is meaningless, but Episcopalians think it's meaningful. But I had been there a bunch of times, and I think Maybe it was 2010, maybe 2011, and I just walked up the steps on New Year's Day, which was the Feast of the Holy Name, which was a Sunday, which only happens every. So maybe it's 2012, because you can kind of tell when that day is. Sunday. Yeah. And I'm just like, oh, this is interesting. This is kind of wild. This thing I've really given no thought to my whole life. Now I'm thinking about. I think it happens when you get to be a certain age. We've been running an experiment in the country and in the culture since I'm 60, so I was born in 65. To see what happens if you raise people in an entirely secular world. What is that like? What is it like? If all popular culture is secular, which it is. There's only one family in America that goes to church. That's the Simpsons.
- [32:19]
B
Presbylutherians.
- [32:21]
A
Presbylutherians, right. It's great, right?
- [32:22]
B
Reverend Lovejoy.
- [32:23]
A
Reverend Lovejoy. But they go every Sunday. It's fantastic, right? They go every Sunday.
- [32:27]
B
They don't believe in infant baptism only. Homer's the only one baptized.
- [32:30]
A
Yeah. But you know what? I shouldn't say this. I'm an Episcopalian on the ordination track, but I kind of get it. I get the argument.
- [32:36]
B
And Homer was baptized by accident.
- [32:39]
A
But even to have that, like, even to be able to have those conversations, it's rare, right? It didn't used to be. People used to like, oh, you go to church. It wasn't whether you had faith or not. The world was not secular. And I went to fancy schools. Nobody made me go to chapel or read the Bible. And I think I was the first generation not to have to. We live in a hundred percent secular society. And all of that would be fine, except that the human life is not secular. It is the least secular thing you can imagine. Every Big event in your life, your whole life, the span of it, the highs, the lows, the joys, the sorrows, the pain, the heartbreak, the victory, the illness, the health, the marriage, the love, the death, all that. Those are the least secular things that you can ever imagine. And so I think that this is my Pollyanna view. There's a whole generation of Americans who are not babies and are not cradle Episcopalians, who are not cradle anything, who are 30, 40, 50, 60 years old.
- [33:31]
B
The nuns.
- [33:32]
A
The nuns, they call them, but you don't have an opinion on it. But they still are living a life that is not secular because your life isn't secular. And they're still having experiences with whatever tools we have in the world right now are not enough. There are not enough yoga classes or Burning man events, psychedelics. Yeah, well, there's plenty of those. There's not enough of that to get you through just something else. Right. There's a reason why people have had faith since the very beginning. And those are people who are going to walk into a church at some point.
- [33:59]
B
And you walk into a church and you find your own life isn't very secular or that you can't explain moments in it through a godless lens. What specifically happened when you were in that church?
- [34:10]
A
Well, I was reacquainted, depending on how woo woo you are, with the. The baptism of my infancy, where you're sealed as Christ's sound forever. And then you walk into a church and somebody says, oh, basically what you feel. What I felt was, huh, been waiting for you, Table's all set, ready to go. And they say something in St. James, which is not liturgy. I mean, it's liturgical, but it's not in the Book of Common Prayer. It's the invitation to the table. And the Episcopalians are really good at keeping difficult concepts a little vague so you can kind of fill it in. And so the invitation to the table is kind of not written in the Book of Common Prayer, but everybody does more and some make it up. I worked for a year here at this great church, Trinity Episcopal. It's a fantastic place. And the rector, who's retiring now is wonderful. And the associate rector was a professor of mine. She's great. And it's a really great place. And they have their own invitation. And I don't know where it comes from, but it's beautiful. But at St. James, they say this is after the eucharistic prayer. So this is the call to the table. They say the table is ready. So come those of you who come Often those of you who've not been for a long time, those of you who have faith, those of you who would like to have more, those of you who have followed Jesus, and those of you who have faith come because it is Christ who invites you to meet him here. It's a very succinct theological statement. And if you're in the right frame of mind and you're willing to hear it, it's kind of mind blowing. So I thought I should keep coming back. It wasn't like I had a big moment. I said, oh, I like hearing that, so I should just keep coming back. And I did. And then you keep coming back. And then you get a little more deep into it. You're like, oh, what is this? What else do we believe? That I forgot that we believed. And then I went to Jerusalem with the people in my church on a pilgrimage. And then you think, oh, this is wild. Why do I care about any of this? This? And I always say the story about, like, when you go to Jerusalem, I spent like the first three or four days just being a normal tourist. They're like, okay, well. And when they take you around, they go, this is where this happened. Well, not here, here or near. We don't really know where, but it's probably here. And if it happened here, it didn't happen right here. It happened like 20ft below. And so you're always kind of like, looking around for clues. It's like CSI Jesus, you know, like, you're gonna find the thing. Oh, wait, I found the thing that proves that this thing happened. I was lucky enough, I knew some people and they said, oh, you got to go to the Dome of the Rock, which is a very complicated political thing. You're going to get cleared off. You go up there and you can't pray because that's what they're always fighting about. But if you say the right things and you're polite, you can't go to the mosque, but you go in the dome. And you go in the dome, and it's the dome over the rock. And depending on what you believe, the rock is where Abraham took Isaac for the. The binding of Isaac, which is the euphemism we use for he was going to murder him, right? And then if you're Muslim, it's where on Muhammad's night ride, he flew and hit the rock and then went up into and got more of the copy
- [36:29]
B
Quran and where Solomon built the temple.
- [36:32]
A
And yeah, then there's a temple there. That's the other thing, right? So there's no more temple there since A.D. 70. And you go into the Dome of the Rock, and it's a nice room, but it's an empty room. You come, you have to do a lot. You have to go through the metal detectors and stuff. You have to get people signing things. And finally go in and they open the room, and it's just an empty room. And then you come down the hill, and then you're right there by the western wall, and there's these people praying against the wall. Praying against the wall.
- [36:53]
B
The wailing wall.
- [36:54]
A
Yeah, it's a wailing wall, but a PC way, a woke way. We say it's the western wall. Okay. So they're praying, but they're praying against a wall that is a retaining wall holding up nothing because there hasn't been a temple there since the year 70. So somehow they're praying against nothing. And the Muslims are going and protecting a room that's empty. And then if you walk a little bit farther and you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church of the Resurrection, one part of it is where Jesus was crucified. The other part is where his tomb is. And you go into the tomb that's also an empty room. So it's three empty places. Now, obviously, the empty tomb is the foundational thing for us, for Christians, of course it's empty because that's the whole thing. But it come a long way to be in empty rooms. And then what for me was I realized, oh, the rooms aren't really empty because I'm in them. And that's maybe why I came here, to be in that room. To be not empty in an empty room, but to fill the room also.
- [37:40]
B
God would be present, right?
- [37:41]
A
Yeah. Yeah, okay. He's also there. He's also outside. But if you have that faith, you believe that God wanted you to come here not to see him, but to see you. And you know, the College for Purity in the Episcopal faith is a God to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hidden. So he already knows you fully. The only person who doesn't know you fully is you.
- [38:01]
B
But you didn't just come back to Episcopalianism. You also have a calling to the priesthood. Tell me how that got started. How did you find that you were being called?
- [38:08]
A
They ask you that when you're going through your discernment committee process. When did you hear the call? It's like, well, I don't know if I heard it. I think I just agreed to hear it. Agreed to hear what I was already playing. Partly I wanted to do something different with my life and different with my writing. Not because I didn't like Hollywood or show business, but also I had been doing it for 30 years. So I wanted to do something different. Different. I started when I was very young. So it helps that when you start working at 24, then when you're 50 something, you're like, I've done this. Now, if I was a cop, I'd be on a boat. I'd be retired with my boat. So I don't know if I heard a specific call. I just found myself drawn more and more to thinking and writing about this stuff and more and more to seeing it being applied in my life and seeing it either present or not present in my life. And more and more to serving that need, I think, in other people. So when people ask, I'll answer them. So at a certain point, well, maybe I should just study this a little bit. Which would be an unusual thing for me to do the research first, right? Mostly I'll wing it. So then I decided to go, okay, I'll get it. I'm going to get an mdif, right? Because then I'll learn everything and I'll know all this stuff. And so last year I did it and I thought, okay, well, now I know because I still want to do this. Despite the fact that there's all this boring reading. Much of it is really incredibly impenetrable prose written by theologians. I mean, that's the worst thing about theology, is that theologians do it. And once you're done with that, like, okay, what do I think about most of the. What am I drawn to? Mostly? And it's this. So partly you just have to get out of your own way. Instead of coming up with reasons why I can't do this, coming up with reasons the way I can do it. And the reaction from my friends has been really interesting because some people have been, what are you? What? What? But then other people said, uh huh, I see it. Oh, totally. So it's funny to me. I thought all my friends would say, what? But a lot of them were like, oh, no, I can see that.
- [39:45]
B
What about it has surprised you now that you've done formal studies? And also why Princeton Theological Seminary specifically?
- [39:50]
A
I love Princeton because it was Princeton. It's close to New York, and I was an undergraduate at Yale. It also seemed very academic. Princeton tends to be a little bit more nerdy and academic than anywhere else. Mostly because it's Presbyterian. The Presbyterian started it. So it has a very flinty Scottish Presbyterian, like, well, you're gonna read hard books.
- [40:07]
B
We had Reverend Kevin DeYoung talking about John Witherspoon start off season five.
- [40:11]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They love that stuff. And we Episcopalians are like, oh, please, relax, have a drink. You know, life's not that hard. What has surprised me the most about, and this is a stranger maybe looking at it from the other side of the telescope from your traditional audience is that what has surprised me is the willingness of people who are coming from a very strong, very doctrinaire faith tradition, whether it was non denominational or denominational. But the young people, their willingness to come to this place knowing that it's going to get a little weird for them, that they're going to be reading theology that they would have never imagined. And the bravery of that, I think I really admire, admire. When you're my age, everything seems confusing. But when you're young and you actively place yourself in a position to be studying something that you care about and you've always cared about your whole life, knowing full well that some of you, the cherished givens of your faith and your background and maybe your family's faith and faith tradition, are going to be irreverocably changed. I think it's pretty amazing. I don't even know if they notice it because most of my classmates are in their late 20s, but I notice it. I'm always blown away.
- [41:12]
B
Have you noticed any deep concord between writing comedy and studying God?
- [41:18]
A
Yeah, I have, but I'm not sure everybody sees it my way.
- [41:21]
B
What is. What is your way?
- [41:23]
A
My way is that it's funny. It's a comedy. Life is a comedy. Right? A comedy is a thing that happens and has a happy ending at the end where you go home. Not that you don't suffer heartbreak in it, but it's also surprising. More surprising. I mean, tragedy. We know how tragedy ends. Everybody's dead on stage and they all die, and half of them die and they shouldn't have. They just die because they're dumb or they're in the wrong place at the wrong time or they're holding on to tight. Comedy is more like your life. If you're listening to this podcast and you're not lying yet on stage, I got bad news for you. You're in a comedy. And I also think that Jesus is funny. I think with all the red print, which is all his dialogue, if you say it in a certain way, it just sounds like he's just wandering around stentorians. He's like, I will tell you, it sounds like Charlton Heston, but if you read it, some of it's funny. A lot of it's funny. He'll say two things back to back that are contradictory, and it isn't because he's trying to be obscure. I think it's trying to impress upon you just how hard it is, how all the rules you believe in, you got bigger rules to follow. Every one of your more conservative fundamentalist listeners is now ready to throw this podcast out the window. But I think that's what he says. There's a great scene when in John, he meets a Samaritan woman at the well. And Samaritans are great because they're in there all the time. The New Testament writers, they love the Samaritans. They represented everything because they were the original Jews. They were like. They were a little bit even more Orthodox than the Orthodox, right? They believe in just in the Pentateuch. They still are. Apparently. There's 1200 left somewhere. And they have a incredibly wild Passover Seder. One of my life's bucket list is to go two things. I want to see the Orthodox Easter celebration in Jerusalem, which is bananas. Oh, the fire. And the whole place is on fire. I'm surprised that people don't burn to death in this thing. My idea of hell is to like to write their umbrella policy. And then there's the Samaritans, right? And even in English, when we say, oh, it's the Good Samaritan, but actually, the way we should be pronouncing it for the story is the Good Samaritan, because most Samaritans are terrible. Everybody hated the Samaritans, but he's always with Samaritans for some reason. They're always around. And the Samaritan at the well, he meets this woman at the well. And there are huge forests that have been cut down to print the pages that had been written about this. And so it is utterly disrespectful for me to tell them that they're all wrong and I'm right because I've been writing comedy my whole life. And I'm telling you, that is a funny scene. It's comedy. And that's the only way to read the dialogue that he and this woman are having a very wise, very witty conversation that gets serious but doesn't start serious. And if you read it with spooky music behind it, then I guess you miss it. But if you just read it, and this one scene, he's talking to this woman and then he says, where's your husband? And she says, I don't have a husband. And his next line is, I know you don't have a husband. You've had five husbands. And the guy you're living with right now is not your husband. All right, they're joking with each other. And then her next line is, oh,
- [43:46]
B
you're a prophet, like everyone knows.
- [43:48]
A
Right. And if you read it like a human being talks, which is, he was very good at talking like a human being. I don't see how it's not interesting interlude with him. And it's very written because there's nobody there. It's just him and her. To me, they actually think that's fine. One of the essences of Christianity is that in its embodied, human, real presence of God. And he's gonna say some funny stuff.
- [44:09]
B
Did Jesus just tell funny things or do you think he also partook?
- [44:12]
A
Did he laugh?
- [44:12]
B
That's a controversy among the fathers, whether he did or didn't.
- [44:15]
A
Of course he did. He's a human. He's one of the God of three persons.
- [44:18]
B
Right.
- [44:19]
A
It makes no sense that he suffers but doesn't have joy.
- [44:21]
B
My star card says the Son is
- [44:23]
A
the laughter of the Father.
- [44:24]
B
But is there something that you found when you're trying to teach people theology or when you're trying to apply the Word to the people of God, that you've drawn from some of your comedy
- [44:35]
A
writing when you write sermons and stuff? Absolutely. You gotta have a very firm, especially in Episcopal Church, 10 minutes, 12 minutes. Basically, my martini shots are 10 or less. And if you're doing a homily, a weekday Eucharist for a Tuesday or five minutes, people want to hear it, but they don't want to hear a speech. They want to hear a five minute homily on the weekday. And then on Sundays you got about 10 minutes, maybe 15. But if you do 15 full minutes, there better be some laughs in there. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So I do them just the way I do a martini shot. I start with a story. And this is what happened to me. And people. Oh, yeah, sorry. I got. Get it. I preached on the first Sunday after easter. So Easter 1, I guess they call it Easter 2. I can't remember what they call it. And I was about the word hallelujah because we can bring him back now. We don't say hallelujah during Lent. And then I said, listen, the way I sit, I hear people almost say it. It comes right out, I think the line I said was, when I do it, too, every now and then, I just. During Lent, I'll just come right out. And I'm not. It's not supposed to. You're supposed to know hallelujahs during Lent. That's the rule. And I said, I always feel bad about it. I feel like I've violated. I've committed a crime, you know, the Episcopalian crime of expressing unauthorized joy. And people in the audience laugh. People in the pews laugh. Audience like it. That's right. That's what it feels like. And they laugh because I do that. I have said that. And you try not to during Lent, remember, don't say hallelujah. And then you kind of have them because they're like, oh, okay. But I think preaching should be that. And I think to the extent that I would adjust, the preaching ethos in general, especially in the Episcopal Church, is I would remind the people preaching is that it is an invitation and a sharing. It is not a lecture.
- [45:57]
B
If you look at something like Michelangelo's Piero, right. The crucifixion is fundamentally tragic. You can't look at that artwork and not feel the pathos of it. But the crucifixion itself, the action is an act of humiliation. Right. The first depiction of a crucifixion is, I think, in the Roman catacombs, where it was a donkey that's put on a cross.
- [46:13]
A
Yeah. It was like, here is so and so worshiping his God.
- [46:15]
B
And Christians didn't really start depicting it until centuries later. They would only talk about the cross. Is the crucifixion in itself comical, or is it tragic? Or does the resurrection take something that's comical and make it tragic, and then it becomes comedy again once he's risen?
- [46:28]
A
I don't know if those categories are complicated. The crucifixion is human idea is that if you believe that the world is about achievement and being in charge and being the richest person and the most powerful person, you have a hard time understanding why God let this happen. It's the ultimate theodicy question, right? Not just how does God allow bad things to happen. How does God allow bad things to happen to him? And when he's partly in two minds of it, you know, depending on which gospel you're reading, he's either like, oh, my God, get me out of here. And I think all of those things are at play. So I don't actually think you have to choose. Look, we are all going to die. Every single one of us is going to Die. Our lives are not our most precious possession. They're just not. It's what we do with them. It's the hours that we're not dead that are the most precious possession. And we have an incredible neurotic buildup of attempts to circumvent that. But I really think that one of the lessons, million things you can take from the crucifixion and then the resurrection is this is not the worst thing. Don't be afraid of this. And I, I think that's hard. It's hard, hard to accept because we want to hold on to everything really tightly and this is not getting super woo woo. We have switched from believing that life is precious, which I think is true, but now what we believe is that death is the end and it's to be avoided at all costs. And there's a great roomy poem where he says, all the sorrows come. And the idea is like, you have to welcome all of these things, these terrible things, all of your shame and your whatever and your fears and welcome them at the door. See them in laughing and smiling.
- [47:50]
B
I want to talk to future Father Long, as well as Hollywood writer Mr. Long. For someone who is a writer or any person who is in the creative arts and they're looking at how their craft has been automated with AI, it's not just that show business has changed, not that streaming has been here, it's that the technology itself is making human input dispensable. Absolutely. From someone who's worked that craft for a long time and someone who has a theological perspective on what it's like for us to be sub creators, to use Tolkien, Fraser, to make things, to produce things as we're meant to be. Like in the garden. What is your advice to people when they're facing this sort of technological oblivion?
- [48:28]
A
I think two things. One is that there is probably a way that AI, or any kind of language model in the future, and maybe even the present, can write a pretty good Law and Order episode, or csi probably right now they call it a procedural for that reason. Right. There's a process and you're following it and it doesn't deviate. If you're on the treadmill at the gym watching Law and Order, that's where most people see it. Because all you know what time it is by what's happening on screen. You don't even need dialogue like, oh, if they're in the court, I better wrap this up because that means we're at the top of the hour, almost the end of the show. So I think that could happen and I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe that's fine. Look, people don't like Thomas Kincaid, painter of light. If there was ever an AI painter, that's Thomas Kincaid, painter of light.
- [49:06]
B
Wasn't just one person, but it was just a bunch of people basically working like cogs in a machine, just churning these out.
- [49:11]
A
Well, you know, now we don't need those people because we have AI doing probably doing pretty good job. When I was a kid, I read all the Hardy Boys, right, written by Franklin W. Dixon, who was nine writers. And sometimes they were Carolyn Keene writing Nancy Dream books. Sometimes they're writing Tom Swift and whatever, right? There's that. There's always going to be that. And maybe a computer can do that
- [49:26]
B
at some point, as you're saying, like a generic template generator.
- [49:29]
A
You know what I want? I just want to sit and watch a Law and Order. I don't want to think too hard, but I think for people who are creating and want to create, or they want to create just for themselves, the, the idea is to be spontaneous and surprising, which I think is very hard to build into any system, any algorithm, but also to be true that the one thing that the AI code can never get is to how you really feel. Your truth, how you really feel. That's something that a computer can't know. And same way I can't know how you really feel. You have to tell me how you really feel and what you're really thinking and what your real insight is, and maybe we'll just listen to each other more. I have this theory, which is my own Pollyanna theory, that imagine a graph, right? There was a time in my life, and your life too, this is very recent stuff, where I didn't know anything about my neighbor, but I liked him. So social media came up and now I know a lot about my neighbor and what his idiotic beliefs are and what his stupid political choices have been and what his ridiculous opinions are and stuff. And I don't like him because I know him, you know, my neighbors and not like him. So now we're at this like trough. If you plot it out on the axis of like knowledge high, like bad low. And I think that we have to then keep. Instead of going back to why I don't know my neighbor, because I don't think we can. I think we go forward. And now I know I need to know more about. About him because the more you know about somebody, the harder it is. There's a point at which I think the curve goes back up and you start to like that guy. I know he's a jerk and I know he believes this and that, but he's a nice guy. And he was nice to the dog and he said nice thing to me. And all this other stuff isn't as important as the fact that I know he had a tough life or his parents were this or that. All those things seem extremely Pollyanna. And I know there are people rolling their eyes, but I actually feel the only way through this weird, uncanny valley, unlikey valley I would call it, where we know just enough to get mad, is to know more.
- [51:06]
B
So you're saying we need to have more use the technology to know what it's actually going to be doing?
- [51:11]
A
Yeah, I think so. And I think we probably need to be a little bit more careful about who we let into our mood regulator. So we have to accept the fact that there are people who are going to enrage our politics will enrage us, but get over it.
- [51:22]
B
Religion teaches us to think about our souls and modern society often forgets the fact that we have them. Does art require some metaphysical vision to justify its own existence and its continuation? That we have to put deliberate effort into this thing, not just as an economic function that's gone now, but because we, as the kind of creatures we are, need it. I want something from someone who has a soul, who's a divine icon. Right. Even if it's bad. The guy who asks you in your book, I know you hire great old
- [51:48]
A
writers, but you hire hack writers. Oh, those guys are great. He said. Or normal ones. Yeah. I think that the goal of the artist is to do something that you can't really do any other way, that if you explained it, it wouldn't make any sense. You mentioned the Pieta. That's an incredibly powerful work of art. Right. It's Mary, weirdly sculpted as a young,
- [52:07]
B
as a girl, as the age she would have been when she gave birth to Christ, holding the body of the
- [52:12]
A
33 year old Christ. So it's a weird kind of time
- [52:14]
B
thing, a physical impossibility.
- [52:15]
A
Physical impossibility. But also it's not in the Bible. That's not a scene in the Bible. And there's a great book out called How Catholics Encounter the Bible by a guy, last name is Pepphard and I heard him speak. And the book is fantastic, by the way, I love it. And he makes a point about that. He goes like, this image is seen by 10 million people a year because it's right there. You walk in the Vatican, right into St. Peter's it's right there. And that's how many people see it every year. They all see this famous Michelangelo. And more people than read the Gospels, right? Probably. So what do you make of that? That's somebody's imagination, someone's theological imagination. Thank God it was Michelangelo, right, Because he's a genius. But he imagined that moment and he imagined it in a certain way. And he imagined it as a teaching of moment. So where are you? Are you on Good Friday or are you at Candlemas when Simeon says, your heart will be broken by the way to Mary and you too will suffer and you're gonna have a heartbreak turd will pierce your heart? Yeah. So that's where you are. You're at the beginning and you're at the end and you're all around. And that's. That's a imaginative theological moment that isn't in the text but is in the reception of the text. If you read it, you can't unknow it. No one reads Luke and says, I wonder what he's talking about. I wonder what he thinks. I wonder what Simeon is saying. I gotta keep reading and find out, like, you know, you know, what happens at the end. That's the whole point. So the more honest we are with ourselves and with each other, I think the easier it will be to distinguish between pretty good Law and Order scripts and maybe even pretty good comedy scripts. Maybe. Although I think jokes are much harder. And something that's really truthful, I think, I hope.
- [53:39]
B
Like the Piano.
- [53:40]
A
Like the Piano, yeah. Or a great novel. Something that takes a little more time and it's hard to evaluate weight.
- [53:44]
B
There's also something to be said about mistakes and things where it gives them a certain kind of quality. Bonus round.
- [53:49]
A
Okay.
- [53:50]
B
Which sitcoms were the biggest influence on your comedy writing?
- [53:52]
A
Mary Tyler Moore, definitely. Taxi. Without a doubt. Brilliant show, though. I was devoted as a kid to reruns of the Honeymooners and Ticket Show. Although I think one of the unsung brilliant shows that people just keep forgetting about is the Andy Griffith show, which is this incredibly slow, quiet, single camera, rural show that is lovely and funny and also kind of sad. So that I think that's a great one.
- [54:13]
B
Greatest writers of farce of all time. Or at least your favorites.
- [54:16]
A
Oh, farce. Moliere. Because it lasts forever. That's as pretentious as I'm going to get.
- [54:21]
B
Please.
- [54:21]
A
Now it's a Moliere, I think, pretty much started it for me anyway. Kaufman and Hart, the great American Playwrights Kaufman and Hart. I read Act 1, which is Moss Hart's autobiography, before I even knew I wanted to be a writer. And that's how I think, oh, I want to do this. I want to do this. They're super technical and it's great.
- [54:35]
B
Any Woodhouse.
- [54:36]
A
Woodhouse, of course. I was thinking more about on the stage, but, yeah, Woodhouse manages to create weird thing. He absolutely disappears as a narrator. You just have no idea whose point of view these hilarious stories are written in. They're not written in the Jeeves point of view. And they're not written. Certainly the Birdie point of view. It's some other weird point of view that kind of just disappears until you're there. He's one of these guys who's so brilliant you don't even notice it. Not only do you not see the strings, you don't even believe there are any strings.
- [55:03]
B
It's just effortless, the kind of language he creates.
- [55:05]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And just the way you just hear it, it's like he's sitting down and telling you a story. It's amazing.
- [55:11]
B
Favorite comedy films?
- [55:12]
A
The In Laws. Brilliant. I love Night at the Opera, which is hard for younger people to get into. 20th century. John Barrymore and Carol Lombard is fantastic movie. Really funny movie. So I'm moving up in Midnight Run. De Niro and Charles Grod. An unbelievably great movie.
- [55:28]
B
Not a single joke is ever made and yet there's not a gag. But it's the funniest.
- [55:32]
A
Oh, my God. It's a great movie. It's a great movie.
- [55:34]
B
When he's afraid of flying.
- [55:35]
A
Yeah, exactly, right. So many choices. And it's got a sweet feeling to it, too. It's a buddy picture. One of the great American movies, which is not. Not a comedy, but has great moments in it is Paper Moon. Peter Bogdanovich and Tatum O' Neal was like, 12, and she got an Oscar for it. And Madeline Khan has the kind of monologue she does in the theater. You would stand up and applaud. And then when she stood up to do it in the theater, everyone would be quiet and then would wake because she knew she was going to. And Ryan o' Neill's great in it, too. It's a really great movie. It's a great, great movie.
- [56:04]
B
Favorite theologian.
- [56:05]
A
Oh, God. Well, I'm at Princeton, so you gotta say Karl Barth. I don't know. I have a hard time with theology. Some of it's really hard.
- [56:11]
B
Augustine.
- [56:12]
A
Oh, okay. I wanna do that. I didn't know you wanna go fancy. I was thinking, like, Rowan Williams. But yeah, Augustine's a great example of that. Because Augustine's text is himself for the Confessions. That's fundamental. I mean, the rest of it is great, but that honesty point earns him a lot. Origen, I think Origen. 2nd, 3rd century. Origen's pretty amazing, you know, Paid a price for it, but he's the first groovy hit hippie theology. The Gospels are reading you. He didn't say it, but that's what he meant.
- [56:37]
B
Favorite religion joker or funniest thing in the Bible?
- [56:40]
A
Oh, that's harping. There's a great joke in a synagogue. I think maybe it's in Yom Kippur, where the rabbi prays and says, I am worthless. I am a worthless person. God, please forgive me. I'm worthless. I'm nothing. And then the cantor hears that. And so moved, the cantor comes up, stands up next to him, says, God, I am worthless. I am nothing. I'm a worm. I'm nothing. I'm worthless. Please forgive me. I'm worthless. I'm not. And then the janitor who's there in the hallway hears this, and he's also moved, and he comes up and says, I am worthless. I am nothing. I'm a worm. I'm nothing. God, forgive me. I'm nothing. And the cantor turns to the rabbi and says, look who thinks he's nothing. Just it all in one place.
- [57:15]
B
There's the bit that Aristotle wrote on comedy. We don't actually have the comedics because his book on tragedy, it's incomplete.
- [57:23]
A
I'm glad we don't have it, though. I bet it's wrong.
- [57:26]
B
Umberto ICO had a little reconstruction of it in the Name of the Rose. It's just a little line. Just as tragedy is the catharsis derived from the purging and purifying of our emotions of pity and fear, that comedy is catharsis derived from the purging and the purifying of our feelings of the ridiculous and ridiculousness. That's his idea of what Aristotle's theory about comedy would be. What do you think of that?
- [57:48]
A
Well, probably because Aristotle's about categories and have to think of these two things as two separate categories that are equal, and then like, it's a hot and cold tap on the faucet. I just don't think that's true. I think comedy's everything, and in a subset of comedy is tragedy. But look, the thing about laughter is it is utterly involuntary. You are laughing before you know you're laughing. I'm making you laugh in a way that you're completely taken a surprise by, and you can't not laugh. That's one reason why laughter is a thing that culture police really hate, because you laugh. What if I'm laughing at something and I'm not supposed to be laughing at it? Which is, I think, the thing that a lot of people feel. Right. I don't want any comedy in my life because I may end up laughing at something that's not okay. But you're laughing, so it's involuntary. I make you do it. And it's a form of weird choking, right? Because I'm making you breathe funny breathing in a weird way. And sometimes your face turns red and stuff. You can choke back tears. You can't take back laughter. And also, we look incredibly ugly when we're laughing. And if you actually see yourself laughing, you're like, oh, my God, I look. Our face is all contorted, all squinched up. Nobody ever looks good when they're laughing. And so this involuntary, weird breathing practice that we do, where we look at our absolute ugliest, is something that we should do every day itself.
- [58:54]
B
Being an object you could laugh at is laughing at yourself laugh.
- [58:57]
A
And we should do it every single day because it's a very good practice.
- [59:00]
B
And thus we will always have a need to hire comedy writers to make us laugh.
- [59:04]
A
Let's hope. Yes, right, exactly. Claude can't make you laugh.
- [59:08]
B
One great comedy writer was the late P.J.
- [59:10]
A
o'. Rourke. Yeah.
- [59:11]
B
You were friends with him. Can you tell me a bit about him and your relationship with him?
- [59:14]
A
I just knew him a little bit. And then we met. We were working on a book together. Not together, but we contributed to a book or a couple of books, I think. And then I met him at the book party and so we hung out. He had this idea that one of his books called Holidays in Hell would be a great TV show. So we ended up talking. That was the foundation of our conversations for many, many, many years, was like, how do we do that? He was a great writer, and he was a very funny guy and very witty writer. But I think where his writing and where his stuff was not just funny little essays, but something really seriously important was that he managed to be funny, but also tell the truth. He was a incredibly good reporter. He really wrote stuff down. I don't do that. And I think that's. I think what makes his writing so amazing is that it's incredibly well observed. He writes about in Parliament of Horrors, which is like a masterpiece of American political writing. One chapter goes into the attic of his mom's house or something. Or he finds a bunch of receipts, tries to recreate from her tax records their financial picture when he was a kid. And he realizes how poor they were. And he said, I had no idea how poor we were. We were broke all the time. I had no idea. And somehow my mother did all this, and somehow it all worked. And he said, think. It's not because of what we had, it's because of what we didn't have. What we didn't have was help. There was no sort of argument against welfare. Right. None of this that they had. And it's a funny essay, and it's witty and sharp, but it's also incredibly moving, but it's still funny. And I think that was him at his best.
- [60:32]
B
Very last question In Otto Domini, 2026, what makes you hopeful?
- [60:36]
A
You mean 2026 C.E.
- [60:38]
B
well, this is a podcast.
- [60:40]
A
Before the Common Era. I don't know.
- [60:42]
B
Before the Common Event.
- [60:43]
A
Yeah, whatever that was. Right. Well, I'm hopeful about a lot of things. I actually feel like despair is a sin in general. It's a very Catholic thing to think, but I'm not Catholic. But I think it is mostly because we tend to focus on years and dates. Right. So if you're reading the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, you're convinced that they're all talking about one thing that happened in 86. The end of Jerusalem destroyed. Right. And Babylonians come and cart them all away. And they weren't really talking about that date. These things are happening for hundreds of years before they're slow things that happen. And somebody is writing about trying to put them all in perspective. So you see them as more urgent. And so I think what I'm hopeful about 2026 is that people are either exhausted by the distractions they've come up with for themselves and just willing to be quiet. I hope. I. I think I'm interested in this idea. I don't know if I really believe it, but I'm interested in the idea that people are finding places to think about faith. And some of those people are young. I think that's really interesting. I heard a great story the other night about these young people in Tbilisi in Georgia who wrote who? I guess a bunch of years ago, they wrote a letter to a bishop, Episcopal bishop, I think the one in Europe, and said, hey, we're using your Book of Common Prayer in our worship. Can we be Episcopalians? And their response, we have no way of doing that. We don't even know. No one's ever written to us that way. We don't to know how. And so then they wrote another saying. We have some questions about your catechism. And half the Episcopalians listening now are like, wait, we have a catechism? It's like, yeah, we do. Book of Common Prayer, 1979, new. It wasn't there before it was put in. It was scattered around, but now it's there. And then the third question was like super weirdly specific. And then finally the church said, okay, you know what? Okay, we're going to send you a couple priests and we'll just show you how to do it. And so now this rotating four or five month a year, rotating rector, your priest in charge, who goes there, intervals in a basement, right. Where it's actually considered enemies of the state. Right. Georgia's changed a lot since I was there in 22,000, in the year 2000. It's very different now. I don't know. That's kind of nice, right? It's amazing. Young people who are. And they're all young who are like, look, how many ways can you distract yourself until you think, okay, all the things I'm doing aren't doing it for me. So maybe I'll give this ancient 2000 year old practice, controversial schismatic faith a try.
- [62:45]
B
Excellent. And on that note, we shall end Mr. Robert Long. Father.
- [62:50]
A
No, not yet. Don't rush me.
- [62:52]
B
With one year left. Thank you for joining us on Madison's Notes.
- [62:56]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [62:57]
B
A transcript for this interview will be made available on the new Madison's Notes substack page along with a copy of the audio recording. If you desire further Madison's Notes content, please check our episode catalog and subscribe to receive future ones. We are always grateful for any likes and positive ratings. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on the Madison's Notes podcast.