“When we came to the network, it was a very interesting time where Portlandia had just come on the air and had been very, very successful. I think people had Portlandia-sized expectations for Comedy Bang! Bang!, especially after the first episode was sampled by quite a large number of people. I remember getting the ratings after the first episode, and the network was over the moon about it. And then the second episode tanked so hard. Like, no one watched it. It was a resounding, "Hey, a bunch of people tried your show, and they all hate it!"” PeopleThinkingRememberHateInterestingSuccessfulComedyMoonExpectationsVery Interesting Author:Scott Aukerman
“You don't get a lot of life milestones in show business. It's really difficult to make things, and a lot of times you don't know you're at the end of something. With Mr. Show, I was only a writer and we knew we were going into the movie, and we thought, "Okay, like Monty Python, we're going to make five movies." And we didn't know it was the end. So it ended up being a bummer and such a terrible ending for Mr. Show. We never got to feel like, "Wow, we did it! We did something."” DifficultTerribleOkayShow BusinessMilestoneMonty Author:Scott Aukerman
“It really was a unique experience to me to have a television show, Comedy Bang! Bang!, that I really cared about so much, and to know that it was the end, and know that that was the ending of it. We had a wrap party, and we thanked everybody. You don't get that a lot, especially in comedy.” PartyComedyUnique Author:Scott Aukerman
“The political vibe of late-'40s Hollywood through the mid-'50s is something we're seeing a lot of echoes of right now, and in a scary way, where I'm wishing for an Edward R. Murrow to stand up and start somehow calling people on stuff. But as far as the way the industry works, I feel like we're in a place where you see companies slowly moving back to only doing their own stuff.” PeopleMovingPoliticalWishScary Author:Ed Brubaker
“It's a lot easier to make a living as a writer in Hollywood than it was probably 10 years ago, though there's still just as many unemployed people in Hollywood as there ever has been, but there's so many more avenues to sell things, because of digital, and Amazon, and Netflix, and all these different platforms. That's crazy and exciting in a creative way, and we'll see where that all stands five years from now. But on the corporate side, I still see that pendulum swinging back in that other direction, which is a little not comforting.” PeopleDifferentCreativeCrazyExcitingComforting Author:Ed Brubaker
“I have a little bit of a belly, a tiny bit of pooch. It's the one thing I don't want to lose. I just like having some softness. If I lose that, then Tom might leave me.” IfsWantLittlesMightBitsLosesOne ThingLittle BitTinyTomsBellyLeaving MeSoftness Author:Nicole Kidman
“I vividly remember being in my mid- to late-20s. That part of life is very emotional, and exciting, and dramatic in a way that your late 40s are not. That's different and dramatic in other ways, but I wanted to tap into that angry youth vibe in Kill Or Be Killed that I remember feeling at that time, instead of my angry middle-aged vibe that I've been churning out for a few years.” DifferentFeelingsRememberYouthEmotionalExcitingDramatic Author:Ed Brubaker
“If you don't have that empty white space around everything in the comics, the border of the page, then it feels like you're a little claustrophobic.” Like YouEmpty Author:Ed Brubaker
“The good part of what comics trains you to do is it trains you - especially if you've worked in mainstream comics like Marvel and DC, or if you're just doing your own independent comics - to compartmentalize things and work on multiple things at the same time. And that's a skill that is incredibly handy in Hollywood, because within the first year that you get here, you realize there's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point.” ReasonRealizingSuccessfulIndependentTrainSevenMultipleHandy Author:Ed Brubaker
“I had done a couple TV pilots, and a friend of mine wanted to leave comics and come work in Hollywood, and I said, "Well, you've got to understand that when you sell a TV pilot, imagine if you turned in the best issue of Batman ever, and DC was like, 'Well we love this, but we can't publish it because we have to publish this other thing by this other person." The odds are really long on getting anything made, so if you come from comics and you're still making a living in comics, that really helps because you're not desperate for someone's permission to write for a living.” WritingLongDoneHelpingImagineCoupleDesperatePublishReally Long Author:Ed Brubaker