On Getting People To Tell You More Than They Want To

In 1980 and 1981 I interviewed some one hundred of Hollywood’s TV movers and shakers as well as the moved and shaken—present and former network executives, studio heads, producers, writers, actors, agents, the works—for a book that eventually would be called Inside Prime Time. ¹ I was trying to riddle out how the television-industrial complex worked: roughly speaking, how it happened that every year during the heyday of the three-network oligopoly thousands of notions floated in formal pitch meetings and casual conversation would eventually be sifted down to hundreds of scripts from which, in turn, a few score pilots would be shot, from which, eventually, a few handfuls of shows would be chosen for the next season. I was trying to find the unwritten rules of the business. I started out knowing next to nothing about the mind of the industry, but with some theories and much ignorance, each of these both distracting and useful up to a point. Fortunately, I also arrived with some willingness to put aside what I thought I knew—a practical streak indispensable in research, as in much of the rest of life. ²