ONLY YOU, DICK DARING: or How to Write One Television Script And Make $50,000,000

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This will tell you how to skin a whale while committing artistic adultery. A genuinely respectable piece of work about a shoddy industry, deeply funny and perceptive, this does for quality TV what Lillian Ross Picture did for quality American movies in displaying their gang rape by executives. Miller here is the amus of network, Existentialism: his thesis is that Writer writes marvels, antithesis that Executives exec story ideas instead of money, and the synthesis is another gold streamer on the Bitch Goddess. Two years ago the author was approached by Robert Alan Authur (renegade writer) of CBS-TV to write a pilot film called alhoun about a county agent. A pilot film is used to sell the executives on a series, and county agent is hick honor personified, a knight errant of fertilizer and cow udder unguents. Miller rewrote, the pilot film 19 times during a tug-of-power between CBS-TV (the money), Jackie Coper (the star) and United Artists (the producers). These three, not Miller, have script say-so, and the inner machinations of the industry are shown with bursting bad humor that warms the reader. Jackie Cooper ends up as a beautiful louse, beautifully rendered, beautifully dense. And Miller, while not as outrageous as Henery or serious as Arthur, is gay and melancholy as Merle.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow-sloane

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION