I want to tell you a story about the media business, but before I do, I need to explain a term of art.
A "first look" deal is a deal between a producer or writer-producer and a studio or network that stipulates, essentially, that in exchange for a certain sum of money, the producer or writer-producer guarantees the counter-party (in this case, the studio or network) that they'll have dibs - or "first look" - on any project or script that the other side comes up with. What it doesn't specify, of course, is what a "look" is, or what "first" means.
Back in the days before e-mail and mobile phones - that is, back before the entertainment industry was as transparent as it is - and I'm not saying it's transparent, I'm just saying that these days, deal points and salaries and on-set behaviour and fairly arcane financial details are out there, reported on, posted on the internet minutes after they've been decided upon.
Before that was true, not too long ago, it was possible - and, frankly, easy - to get away with a lot of stuff - to lie, in other words, to pretty much everyone you met.
For instance, if you pitched a project to a network or studio and they didn't buy it right then and there, in the room, you got in your car and you drove across town to another potential buyer. And for most of time spent in transit, you were in a little car capsule, totally cut off from anyone else.
Now, of course, it's a lot more efficient. We have mobile phones and e-mail, and better (or worse, depending on how you see things) everyone in the business has the cell phone number or email address of everyone else, which means no more capsule, no more bubble, no more being unreachable or out of touch or out to lunch or in the canyon. So when you leave the studio or network after the pitch and head to your next sales call, the combined cell and internet networks hum and throb and crackle with activity.
E-mail traffic between the next place and the first place and the assistant to the vice president at the place after the next place, and your agent and agent's assistant's instant message to the assistant to the vice president at the studio who is listening in on a conference call between you and your studio partner - well, it's an off-key symphony of information being exchanged.
It's a huge electric tangle of lines and cross-traffic information and everyone knows everything there is to know in seconds.
Which is sort of efficient, if you're in the commodities trading business or the cancer curing business, but in show business, all of the old inefficiencies - phone tag, lunch hour, late-day call returns, the unreachable hours spent in traffic - all of that added up to a foggy, confusing atmosphere of ignorance and delay.
In other words, opportunity. We're in the sales business, after all. All of us. I don't care how expensive your outfit or haircut or car is, you're a salesman. And the enemy of every salesman, no matter what it is he or she is peddling, is a fully informed customer.
Back in the golden days of show business - before e-mail and cell phones - one of the most successful television producers in history - really, a legend of the business - somehow managed to maintain a first look deal with two networks. At the same time. While having a production deal at a third network. All three assuming, naturally, that everyone agreed on what "first" and "look" meant.
And because in those days everyone spent half their day in the car or at lunch or otherwise unavailable, and because assistants didn't have computers and e-mail and Instant Messenger, nobody ever found out.
Years later, when the producer had been enjoying his insanely rich retirement, someone once asked him about all of those mutually-exclusive deals. What was the plan, he was asked, if, you know, he somehow managed to sell the same project twice? Or worse, three times? He shrugged.
"I was worried about that for a while," he said. "But I just kept kicking that can down the road. I'd worry about it when it came along. And it never came along."
Worry about it later. Kick the can down the road. Not bad advice, for this business and probably a lot of other ones, too.
We're all so in touch, so fully-informed, we've forgotten just how easier this business was when we glided around town in our car capsules, when we didn't know the very last pitch the network bought, the talent deal that a studio just signed. We've forgotten just how efficient inefficiency was.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood