The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 31 – Rick Ros, Rick Loss (2)
January 1, 2019
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: He and I had a show plot that was set in the future; he came up with an idea and I helped him. We called it Albuquerque 2029, which would be like a high school show like Riverdale or like 90210. We started pitching.
It was 2029. Now, it would have to be like 2036 or 2038. It is set among a bunch of high school aged students though high school by 2038s changed drastically. And one of the themes of high school based shows which are aimed at teens or people who want to be teens is that the teens have as much agency and clues as the adults and often more so.
But the teens are the star of the show and the adults are there to sometimes be helpful but often to be jerks who fuck things up for the teens and even more so in the future because in our future technology has become so powerful.
Well, actually technologies have changed so fast, the adults haven’t been able to keep up and the only ones with any clues at all are the teens and technology is super dangerous, but it is powerful by this time and when people who make bad life decisions with regard to technology can die.
For instance, there’s one kid who chose between being a natural athlete football player or an augmented modified football player by 20 years from now. Athletic technology is such that the way you have in bodybuilding today, where there are natural competitions; where they test you thoroughly to make sure, you’re not on steroids.
Then the other competitions where roughly anything goes, whatever you can get away with, then the natural bodybuilders probably weigh 20 pounds less than ones who are using steroids. So, in the future, even at the high school level, there are two sets of teams: Nats and Mods, the modifieds.
And this kid has to choose between them and his dad, who’s a dick, pressures him into becoming a modified guy; and all the therapies he starts undergoing make him crazy.
There’s a girl whose parents have her take a meeting with the family lawyer where she is told that the mom, the dad, and the dog are going into cryonic suspension for five years to increase their odds of living longer; because by going to sleep for five years, they will wake up to five years of advances in medicine and might buy themselves a decade on the other end.
And then this turns out to be a scam between the mom and the lawyer who was having an affair; and it is only the dad who’s going to stay frozen, except that the lawyer is doing a double scam. He is going to leave the mom frozen too, while he embezzles all the family’s money.
And the daughter, who’s a good girl, a smart studious girl, finds all this out and has to embrace high-tech methods to become a seductress, so she can seduce the lawyer and rescue her family.
We had all these characters. We had a whole first episode. We had a Bible, which is the story arc across five seasons. My brother was going to be a Fox News guy, where he had an agent. He has been on Fox.
He is conservative. He has been on Fox News commenting on issues. Now, that he is out of the military is freer to talk about stuff. He was going to be all over. He had an agent for talking about this stuff. I think he had a book agent because we pitched the Albuquerque 2029 as a TV show.
The deal is to sell the show or to pitch the show dozens of dozens, maybe even like a hundred, times before he gets somebody to buy it. Unless you have much more, I mean it is a regret that we don’t have Jews in entertainment to get stuff made. But if you don’t have Jews, if you’re just a couple of schmucks with a decent idea, it takes a lot of pitches. He wasn’t in LA enough and I don’t have Jews enough that we could get it made based on the eight pitches we did of it.
And so, he decided to turn it into a book and then sell the book, and then once the book is out then we could pitch it much more effectively. So, he had a literary agent. He had an agent. He had all these plans. He had a girlfriend.
All he wanted was to get some sleep. He was having trouble sleeping. I will find out more, but he was a hell of a guy. He was adventuresome. He managed to get out of Albuquerque; Albuquerque is a tough town to get out of because it is not a rich town. It is not a particularly sophisticated town, but he got out.
When he was in eighth or ninth grade, he asked to be sent away to military school because he wanted structure in his life. This is back in the 70s when people born after the 70s don’t know or have little idea that life was like dazed and confused; there was just a lot of just people running wild including people’s parents.
He was wild, but he also wanted structure; so, he could he got himself sent to New Mexico Military Institute, which is this hellacious, fucking tough, fucking school in Roswell, New Mexico.
This is the sun-baked city in southeastern New Mexico, where every infraction is met with an hour worth of barging with a rifle. He would tell stories about how hellacious the place was. He put in a year or two and then he is like, “Well alright, maybe not.”
Then he went back to public high school for a year and he is like, “Alright, I’m going back to military school.” So, he was a tough guy, a patriotic guy, and an adventuresome guy. He belonged to the Friars Club, which is the professional comedians’ organization in New York, in LA.
He would not hesitate to approach people he thought were interesting and just reach out like even though Gloria Allred is the lawyer you go to if you’re a woman who’s suffered sexual harassment.
Dave Rosner, even though he is politically on the other side from her, thought she was interesting. He called her up and said, “Let’s go out to lunch,” and she did.
He would do shit like that all the time. He was a brave, funny, adventurous guy, a determined guy; a guy who built a varied life for himself and experienced a lot of unlikely success given that he is just a kid in Albuquerque. And that’s it.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 