Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was working for a Swedish TV show - I'm Swedish - who basically did kind of spectacular stories. It was almost like CBS '60 Minutes,' but a Swedish version where we actually did travel quite a lot. After a while, I realized that travel is the most fun part of this, so why not do it for a longer time and just go off and explore?
I had a brilliant drama teacher while I was at Roland Park: Ann Mainolfi. But the school was mostly rich in academics. It wasn't like I was prepping myself for a life in acting. There, you prepped yourself to have a stable future. The school's piece de resistance is college prep - it didn't teach you how to audition for a TV show.
Back in '96, I was on 'The Price Is Right' pointing at refrigerators, and 'Extra,' the TV show, came down. They were the first entertainment entity that put people up on the Internet, so they put my picture up, and America Online called the next day and said I got a zillion or whatever downloads. I didn't know what a download was!
It's really cool to know that you've put something together that isn't for a particular audience. It's so often that a TV show can really only speak to one sect of the population, and this really is something that appeals to a worldwide fan base. People who are into the pursuit of knowledge. Their reaction has meant the world to us.
I consider myself true, which, I know, some people look at as radical, but I enjoy the normalcies of life. I'm not out there trying to transform things, but somehow, by being easy to talk to, and easy to look at, and on a mainstream TV show, I think that I'm helping the public's opinions about transgendered people to change, slowly.
All I ever wanted to do was get a great job on a TV show. When I read 'Modern Family' and started looking at what was available - I obviously couldn't play Gloria; I couldn't play Claire. When I saw the character of Cam, I was like, 'I have to have a shot at this,' because I thought it was a character that would be really fun to play.
Writing a novel, when it's all going well, it's wonderful. You're lost in the world, and you have a relationship with your own mind. Also, as a novelist, you don't have to yell at anyone. But being an executive producer of a TV show, all you have is people coming at you with questions, and you're making decisions, decisions, decisions.
I always think that's really lazy, when I'm watching a TV show or a movie or something, and there's a flashback and the idea is, 'This one moment is the reason that everything happened. This character saw this guy, and this guy said this thing to him, and that's why he is this way.' Because I think in real life, it's not so one-to-one.
There are days I like going out, and days I like to sit naked with the remote control on my thigh, watching 'Breaking Bad.' I'm in love with that TV show. And 'Louie' on FX. And 'The Newsroom' - well, I don't know if I like it, but I'm obsessed with it. It's so Sorkin-y. But I've got some friends on there, so it's good to support them.
While the TV show 'Rizzoli & Isles' may have been inspired by my books, show runner Janet Tamaro has total control over where the TV characters go from there. As Janet once put it, I'm the birth mother, but she's the mother who adopted them, and now that Jane and Maura are living in her house, they have to do what she tells them to do.
I'm trying to write a TV show. Ideally it would be just a reality-TV show, getting the guy who played Eddie Winslow and Kirk Cameron to live in a house. The Jehovah's Witnesses would come to the house a lot or something like that. I kind of like the idea of Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses trying to convert Kirk Cameron.
The cool thing about 'Transparent' is that the show is funny but not like a sitcom is funny. It all comes down to the writing... The writers on that show are so good that you don't have to worry about anything. There are so many things that can go wrong making a TV show or a movie, but if the writing's good, that's, like, 95 percent of it.
You want to put out a TV show? If you have the money to do it on your own, by yourself, and you have a TV network, you can do it by yourself. But the nature of the beast is, art needs finance. That's how this industry works. So until the Internet becomes our source of entertainment - and watch it, I believe it will - this is how things go.
If you're watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals.
I am endlessly fascinated that playing football is considered a training ground for leadership, but raising children isn't. Hey, it made me a better leader: you have to take a lot of people's needs into account; you have to look down the road. Trying to negotiate getting a couple of kids to watch the same TV show requires serious diplomacy.
A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.
My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn't ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn't know if I would be able to keep my house.
I don't think that anyone was trying to keep me from writing the first album. It's just when you're on 'American Idol' or a TV show like that, you wanna capitalize on that momentum, and you want to use that to your advantage, obviously, so the best way to do that is to get the music out as fast as possible. And there's no time to create, really.
If I'm caught off guard or I'm not in a great mood, or if I'm feeling down or if I'm in my head and somebody comes up to me and I can't match the energy, I just have to think, 'Well, I did my job, which was to do the show or release the album or be in the TV show or write the joke. Beyond that, it's kind of a hit or miss what happens between us.'
