For all of you who didn't read my Episode One blog on Bravo's site. Here it is in it's entirety.
DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS?
What a difference a year makes. Last August, I was on my honeymoon in Italy with my beautiful wife Mindy, (whom, the reality crew said on repeated occasions, deserved her own show), when I got an email from Shoe. He sent an application from Situation: Comedy, asking me "Do you want to do this?"
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a television writer. (Apologies to "Goodfellas"). Back in elementary school, every day, under my desk, I'd write a comedy cantata, (or as I called it, The Piñata Cantata) entitled: "The Eighth Grade Sails The Love Boat" where my classmates boarded the Pacific Princess and set sail with Captain Stubing, Doc, Isaac the Bartender and Gopher. (In my scripted adventure, the Pacific Princess ended up in revolutionary Cuba - don't ask.) In my summers off from Tufts University, as a camp counselor, I'd written, directed and performed a play "TV or Not TV", where I parodied such classics as "Brady Bunch", "Gilligan's Island", "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood" and "America's Most Wanted." It was surreal, because a killer clown bumped off our beloved characters and the play was written in Hebrew. At Cardozo Law School in New York City, I wrote numerous Law Revue shows, parodying classic Broadway shows -- "Lawyer on the Roof", "West Side Statutory" and "Law Misérables" (which I co-wrote with Jeff Marx, of Broadway's "Avenue Q" fame.)
After law school, I knew I wanted to be a working comedy writer more than anything, so I made the tumultuous move to Los Angeles. One of the first people I met was a well-renowned sitcom Executive Producer, who had come off a friendly #1 television show. He basically said to me, "you're smart, funny and talented, you'll have no problem making it here." Well, that was almost ten years ago. In that time, I've played my own personal version of Chutes & Ladders, as I've seen numerous friends and colleagues climb the sitcom rungs, each year, while I have landed flat on my ass on more than one occasion. And I tried everything, going to seminars, networking, applying to contests, working as a writer's assistant, putting on stage presentations and most importantly writing.
Solo and with Shoe, I have written about twenty sitcom specs (sitcom sample scripts). Everything from "Seinfeld" to "Curb Your Enthusiasm" to "Happy Days." Every staffing season, you'd write the new "hot" show and hope to get a job. Obviously, that never happened. In fact, the reason we wrote "The Sperm Donor" was because we wanted to accentuate our own comic voice and there were no more shows that were the "hot" spec. All of our writing friends, working and non-working, loved Sperm Donor. Of course, when we tried to get a job "in the system" with our beloved script guess what happened… nada, zip, bupkus. Did we gripe, groan and grimace? No, it was business as usual. Just another day where you start to believe that maybe, no matter how talented you are, you will never accomplish your dreams.
You see, no matter how bad things get there are only two things that can keep you going. You need to believe in yourself (and have someone that also believes in you). And you have to keep writing. Without writing, it's like expecting to win the jackpot without ever buying a lottery ticket. No one is going to give you something you didn't deserve and work hard for. You have to keep generating ideas and product. If Shoe and I had listened to what the universe was telling us, we would have given up a long, long time ago. It's too easy to give up in the face of mounting bills, countless rejection letters and phones that don't ring.
So when Shoe asked me that fateful day, "Do I want to do this?" There was only one answer: "Hell yeah, I want to do this!"
Besides the application fee was free.
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