Tragedy + Time = Comedy 54 – Things Guys Like (Part 4)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
June 15, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: That’s generally the way to go. If you want to be in the industry and then work your way up, you want to have a bunch of friends in the industry who know your work and know what you can do because that is a much surer way of getting staffed than going through the pile of submissions because the pile can be a hundred or more submissions thick.
And out of that pile, one or two or three people will be picked. So the odds are brutal, especially if you have nothing to set you apart. I left my late night job almost 3 years ago now. I haven’t tried – I have met with one agent – to get staffed again because I am kind of screwed because nothing sets me apart.
I have personal things that set me apart like the IQ thing, and I’ve got all of this experience, but none of that gives me a reputation as an indispensable late night writer. Without it, it will be a lot of flailing.
What I have been hoping to do is get a book deal and then parlay that into further work, and hoping the book is popular, building up my social media following to get a decent book deal; so far for 3 years, there’s been 24,000 tweets.
I’ve got a lot of followers. Some of them actually real. It hasn’t necessarily led anywhere. But we can look at what I got for having been employed a TV comedy write for 20 years because there are sweet aspects to it.
One thing is if you are working under the Guild, the Writers’ Guild, then you get health insurance. For every year you make the minimum of about $40,000, you get really sweet health coverage.
You also get a pension, which is crazy. America used to the land of unions, where – I don’t know – 40% or more of the population was in a union and many, if not most, unions had a pension and you retired.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Endnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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Rick Rosner 