Book Thoughts: "'Hello,' Lied the Agent" and "Artistic Differences"

"'Hello,' Lied the Agent" is a diary of a couple of years in the TV development cycle by a TV writer with a deal at a studio.  This is the kind of book that I feel pretty uncompelled to blog about.  I read all of these books.  Phil Rosenthal's book about his experiences creating/producing Everybody Loves Raymond is waiting for me at the library.  The executive producer of pretty much anything could write a book and I'm going to read it out of professional interest, just in case there's anything in there that can make me smarter about how this stuff works.  There's nothing wrong with "'Hello,' Lied the Agent" except that the title is annoying to type because of the quotation marks.  I think the author probably spends a little too much energy writing about how worried he is that this tell-all book will ruin any chance he has to continue working in the business, because I didn't think he wrote anything so terrible that anyone would be surprised by.   Lots of conference calls, lots of rewrites, it's a perfectly worthwhile book if this is something you want to do for a living.  I could have done without the reprints of Variety articles and newspaper pieces about the most recent television season and which pilots got picked up, but too much sidebar material isn't a fatal flaw.  His experiences tracked the kinds of things I can imagine from my limited exposure with the Anonymous Lawyer stuff.

There's a footnote early in the book about two other books by TV writers that are worth reading:  Conversations With My Agent, by Rob Long, which I blogged about a couple of years ago and enjoyed a lot, enough that I bought another copy and gave it as a gift to a TV-writer friend; and Artistic Differences, a novel by Charlie Hauck, who wrote for Frasier and Home Improvement.  Just finished reading Hauck's book, which was written in 1993 but still seems pretty relevant to today.  The novel elements aren't the reason to read -- it's just another book about this TV writing stuff.  I enjoyed it, but if you don't care about this stuff, I don't know that you have to read it.  But it was good, and I got into it in a way I usually can't with novels.  So there's a recommendation for you.