PERSKY: When you’re a writer on a sitcom, you’re always living in three tenses at once: You’re dealing with the show that you’ve done-you finish a show Friday so on Monday you’re editing that show-and you’re also putting finishing touches on a show you did two weeks ago. At the same time you’re working on the show you’re shooting that week, and you’re dealing with the rewrite of the show that’s coming up, plus probably having meetings with writers to work on the show for six, eight weeks down the line. So you never stop dealing with all of it all the time.

ON WRITING: And the entire time that the staff is working on the current show they also-individual people-are working on scripts for future shows.

PERSKY: That’s right.

MARKUS: Some of the scripts are from the staff and some of them are brought in from the outside, from people whose work you’re interested in and want to give a shot-to see how adept they are at capturing the tone of your show and writing a funny script. So you bring them in on a trial basis.

ON WRITING: And while this process of writing and rewriting is going on, the writer whose name is on the script, what is that person doing?

PERSKY: If they’re on the staff, they’re working on the script. If they’re not on the staff, they’re probably writing a show for somebody else.

MARKUS: The writer whose name is on the script has weeks ago been away alone somewhere, coming up with the first draft of a script that is brought into the machine of the show for its rewriting.

ON WRITING: And the show that goes on the air may or may not resemble the initial script.

MARKUS: Sometimes, because of the need for changes during a week, it can be totally different.

ON WRITING: So then how do you evaluate a good script? What does it matter if the whole thing is going to get rewritten anyway?

MARKUS: Well, you want the writer to contribute to the process so-it’s about the writer getting you to the 50-yard line with the script.

ON WRITING: Does the story stay the same?

MARKUS: It depends. Every week is different.

PERSKY: I’ll tell you this, if you took an episode that has already been shot, on The Cosby Show-on any show-and you did it again, you’d go through the same entire process and change it all over again. It’s just the nature of what happens.

MARKUS: It’s what feels right at the moment.

ON WRITING: Who edits the show? In film, it’s the director sitting down with the editor and putting the show together.

MARKUS: If you’re a writer/executive producer-

PERSKY: Jay [Sandrich] gave his notes, I’m sure.

MARKUS: If you have a director like Jay Sandrich, you just know he’s going to deliver an edited version that you put on the air. With the newer directors, the writer/executive producer looks at it and does the final edit.

PERSKY: But in the long run, multiple camera tape is a writer’s medium, it’s not a director’s medium, it’s not anybody’s medium. I mean, leave the stars aside-it’s the writer because that’s the all-important�

ON WRITING: Why aren’t there more writer/directors in TV sitcoms?

MARKUS: It’s a wonderful division of labor. If you don’t have somebody who does both, it is a wonderful collaboration because you have someone who becomes the friend of the actors, who protects them, and guides them through what these crazy writers are giving them to do. And it can be lovely. However, it can turn into an adversarial relationship where, when you’re going down to the set, you feel the coldness there because the actors are looking at you like: What are they going to do to us this time?

PERSKY: There’s an “us” and “them.”

ON WRITING: Between the actors and the writers sometimes?

PERSKY: Between the actors and the writers. I think it’s both ways. If anything, I think that-and this is something I try to eliminate by fixing things on the stage-I think very often when something doesn’t work, the easiest thing is to change it rather than to allow the time for the actor to find a way to make it work. Immediately stuff is changed. And actors resent that. Some of them are capable of making it work, some of them are not capable, but the machine is moving and the writer is the only one who knows the pressures from all sides. I mean, an actor finishes a show and it’s over for them until they see it on the air. But because of all the balls that are being juggled, the writers don’t have the time to be indulgent, an

d so the easiest thing is to rewrite and fix.

ON WRITING: What about working in L.A.? What is that like?

MARKUS: You’re in the soup of things when you’re out there. You go out to eat after your run-through and everyone at the restaurant also has pilots in production and you’re looking over at another table saying: You know, maybe theirs is going to get on the air and mine won’t. Maybe I’m not doing the right thing. It becomes the air you breathe every day.

ON WRITING: And what does that create?

PERSKY: It creates a lack of direction in what you want to do. If you go out to lunch there, you see 22 people and the network people stop at their table and they don’t stop at yours. And it’s about getting on the air. The fact is, look, if you want to express yourself, write a book.

MARKUS: Or a play.

PERSKY: Or a play. You don’t go into television to make a personal statement. It’s not fair. It’s not why it’s there. You can do good things, and many people do within the framework of it, but you can’t defend presenting your point of view of life. You can’t use their air-and the competition is so great to get on the air-and then expect to make your statement. It’s other people’s money you’re using to make it.

MARKUS: Sometimes I liken the television business now to the Gold Rush back in California, you know, “There’s gold in them thar hills.” People read every day about syndication profits and what you can make if you get a show happening, and that fever often fuels the ideas or it fuels your attempts to get one on. And I don’t want to take away from anyone that’s out there doing it, but it is fraught with a lot of dangers.

PERSKY: Now, let me ask you something. The Cosby Show. If you had done The Cosby Show in L.A.-

MARKUS: Which Bill [Cosby] refused to do.

PERSKY: Which Bill refused to do-which is the only reason it was done here in New York-would it have been the same show, do you think?

MARKUS: We asked ourselves this a lot, and I do not think it would have been the same show.

PERSKY: I don’t either.

ON WRITING: What do you think would have made a difference?

MARKUS: Well, for one thing, everyone would have gotten into their own cars in the morning and driven to work. So your whole mind-set-it’s your own world, your car is your own world, you get your parking spot, and you go into work. And when you’re done with work, you go and hang out with other people who do what you do. Doing a television show in Astoria, Queens, we would have to carpool because it’s impossibly expensive to get people to work. We have four or five of us squeezed in a car together. We’re stuck on the 59th Street Bridge for 45 minutes. We’re not talking about show business, we’re just talking about the damn traffic or New York or our lives, and we’re passing life with every block. You look out the windows and these are people who really don’t care that much about being on a TV show. And then you get to work and you do the job, and when you’re done you’re done, you’re out. So your whole mind-set is different.

PERSKY: But I think there’s another factor. There would have been three studio people and four network people at every running of the show.

MARKUS: That’s a big factor.

PERSKY: And here there was one young woman-

MARKUS: Actually, the first six years she wasn’t there at all. In other words, network representatives were nonexistent on our show. Had we been the same hit in L.A., they would have been there.

PERSKY: Now, when we did Kate & Allie we had some people from CBS. But they came, they made a couple of comments, and they went home. The normal thing is they come to the first run-through, to the second run-through. They come to the dress rehearsal, air show, they’re asking you to do pickups, they’re asking you to do this or that. You don’t get that here. It’s much more of a homogeneous show- your own show-here.

MARKUS: And the craftspeople who work on your show here, when they’re not working on your show, they’re working on sports or they’re working on-

PERSKY: They’re doing a movie with Martin Scorsese.

MARKUS: Yeah. Or Woody Allen. And that’s their

PERSKY: You know, it’s not the same. I had an experience here that you’re just never going to have in L.A. I took the subway one day. I got off at Lexington Avenue and 53rd and I came up that long escalator-the line I was on was two levels down and there’s like a 200 yard escalator. It was at rush hour, and I was one of the few people going up. And this panning shot of humanity came past me at around 5:30. And I looked at them and I said: Who am I to think I know anything about them? Who am I to think I can affect or make them laugh? They were dead, beaten, goddamn people. I was, you know, one, two, three feet away from them. In L.A., you’re never that close to anybody unless they’re stealing your car.

MARKUS: The expression that I’ve heard that galls me to no end is “the fly-over people,” and that is what network executives refer to as everyone who lives in between New York and L.A. I suppose the truth is that’s how they refer to anyone who lives outside of L.A.

PERSKY: You fly over these people.

MARKUS: You’ll see them from your airplane.

PERSKY: Yeah.

MARKUS: And I’ve also heard network executives who, I will admit, have a very difficult job but they sometimes are referred to as “hothouse programmers.” In other words, like a tomato that’s born and raised in one environment and stays there until you pluck it. That sometimes affects their lives, too. One place.

PERSKY: See, when you come to a network and you say you want your star to talk to the audience, they say: You mean like Seinfeld, right? No, not like Seinfeld. Like George Burns before Seinfeld, like Our Town before George Burns, like Shakespeare before that, and like the Greek chorus before that. There’s a tendency to think that you’re copying some latest hit. Before Seinfeld, if you’d gone, as I did, to sell a show with someone talking to the audience, they wouldn’t let you do it because no one did that.

MARKUS: Now they may say to you: Could you give us a little of that Seinfeld?

PERSKY: Yeah. Now everybody’s doing his show. Now the big thing is stand-up comics. Every show has to have a stand-up comic.

MARKUS: I have to plead partly guilty for that trend because The Cosby Show really started that.

PERSKY: And then Roseanne came on top of that.

MARKUS: That’s true. It’s actually-you have an already defined personality.

PERSKY: That’s right. You don’t have to write a character. But, you see, it’s also television. Everybody running television has only been exposed in their life to television. When television started, there were people from the theater, there were people from motion pictures, there were all kinds of places that they came from. Now, all the kids who saw those shows-and the world was what they saw on their television sets-are running television from that frame of reference. So everything is derivative of itself.

MARKUS: It’s like cousins getting married.

PERSKY: That’s right. Exactly.

MARKUS: And those offspring are not really people you want to show off. Bill, let me ask you. The legend is that some of the lowest testing shows in television-

PERSKY: The Mary Tyler Moore Show was the lowest, worst testing show ever done.

MARKUS: All in the Family tested low. M*A*S*H tested low.

PERSKY: But Mary, they didn’t show her the testing until three years after the show went on. And the only reason she saw it was that my partner, Sam Denoff, and I had done a pilot called The Boys with Tim Conway and Herb Edelman. Everybody who saw it considered it to be the funniest half hour that they’d ever seen. I mean, Grant Tinker-we were all at the same studio and Grant Tinker saw it and Jim Brooks and all those guys-and they just couldn’t believe what a great show. There was no question it was going on the air. It tested badly and it didn’t go on the air. It was a shock to everybody. I was walking around so morose. And Grant Tinker said: I want to show you something that no one has ever seen. And he showed us the test results from the Mary Tyler Moore pilot. You wouldn’t believe-they hated her. They hated Rhoda. They hated-everybody on the show they hated. Everything about the show. There was not one redeeming thing in the show. The fact is that CBS had committed to 26 weeks with her. They offered to buy her out. She never even knew this. They went to Grant and said: We’ll give you so many millions of dollars, and we don’t want to put the show on. And he knew at that stage of her career he couldn’t let that happen. So he said no, and the rest is, obviously, history.

MARKUS: You know, there are two kinds of television. You can give the public what they know and they will watch it and it’s fine. That’s one kind.

PERSKY: Yeah.

MARKUS: And then you can give the public something that they’ve never seen and don’t know and that’s when you’re going to get the low test results.

PERSKY: Right.

MARKUS: And those shows we mentioned are all shows the likes of which had never been seen before.

PERSKY: Right.

MARKUS: And for an audience to like people who are coming to them with new traits, it’s going to take time. And time, unfortunately, is what doesn’t exist now in television. It’s rare that a network will give a show two years to establish a base.

PERSKY: Oh, God, never.

MARKUS: It doesn’t happen.

PERSKY: You know, the Van Dyke show was canceled its first season. Off the air. Oh, you didn’t know that? The Dick Van Dyke Show was canceled after one season. Sheldon Leonard convinced the sponsor to give it another year, and they put it on again and it became what it became. But it was off, done. Somebody made a stand for it. Because, in those days, the sponsor paid for the show, owned the show, and had a lot to say. On the Van Dyke show, we got many more notes from Procter & Gamble than we did from the network because it was theirs.

MARKUS: It takes a lot of courage for a network executive now to say: I still believe in it. I know our audience isn’t responding. I know our test results are poor, but something in my gut tells me this is going to work. But that executive can be putting their head on the chopping block.

ON WRITING: Let’s talk a bit about getting started. You write a spec script of an existing show-

MARKUS: Well, the first thing a writer should be aware of is, odds are they will not place a spec script with the show itself because you’re handing in a script to the toughest critics of that kind of work. So your script will probably be recognized by another show, if it’s recognized at all.

PERSKY: Now, at the same time, I have to tell you I have hired, over the years, probably ten writers from sample scripts just because they went to the trouble. A lot of people won’t even read them. I have always read them and considered it flattering that someone would do the show. And, out of that, I found people that I hired. I was hired from a sample script on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sam and I. We wrote a sample script for Carl Reiner, and he thought the script was stupid but that we were funny and gave us an assignment. So I guess, also, that’s why I always look at them. Did you read sample scripts on Cosby?

MARKUS: Yeah.

PERSKY: Did you ever hire anybody?

MARKUS: Based on a sample Cosby script?

PERSKY: Yeah.

MARKUS: No.

PERSKY: No? Based on any sample script?

MARKUS: Yeah, based on other sample scripts or plays or movie scripts. Someone got hired on the basis of a movie script. But usually when people submitted our show to us, they sat down with the idea of: I’ll show them how they write their show. So we felt we were reading parodies of our show.

PERSKY: Right.

ON WRITING: How could they have done it correctly if somebody wrote a spec Cosby script?

MARKUS: I would say by sitting down and thinking about these characters and who they are and spending a lot of time dissecting the personalities of the people on the show, and then just sort of meditating on that and thinking: Well, what then could actually happen to these people?

ON WRITING: You didn’t think they had a grasp of who the characters really were?

MARKUS: They had a grasp of what the characters had been portrayed as. And so they kind of parroted that back to us.

PERSKY: And a lot of times when you get someone who writes a sample script, you’ll say to them: The characters wouldn’t do it. Then they say: They did it last week. Well, it looks like they did it last week, but they didn’t. Maybe it was a marginally different circumstance.

MARKUS: We often had the Huxtable couple teasing each other and so everyone felt there had to be teasing in their spec script. Often that’s all they would give us. But if there was a mutation of a character beyond what we ever thought could happen, we would take notice of that-any show would.

ON WRITING: So a person wanting to work on Cosby, your advice is: Don’t write a Cosby, write a different-

MARKUS: Don’t send us a Cosby. I would think, as we’re talking about this, the advice I’d give to a writer sitting down to write a spec script is make the first seven pages hilarious. That’s it. I don’t care if it’s an episode of The Donna Reed Show or if it’s a revision of The Merry Wives of Windsor or whatever. Just do it and make people take notice. Make them laugh out loud by the time they get to page seven.

PERSKY: Maybe not even write a whole script. Maybe write seven different seven pages or seven different teasers-do you know what I mean? That would be a different approach.

MARKUS: Yeah.

PERSKY: Because no one’s going to read the whole script, generally, because they’re not that intrigued with your story. They get a sense of how good you are within ten pages, whether they’re interested or not.

ON WRITING: Are they looking for somebody who is the funniest writer imaginable?

MARKUS: Funny helps. Funny’s good.

PERSKY: Yeah.

MARKUS: A grasp of character. A way of writing subtext. You look for an ability for a character to not say exactly what they mean but to say it in kind of an oblique way so that you could tell what they mean without them saying it. Something that’s not “on the nose.” Where we see behaviors and not hear words that really are just stand-ins for feelings or behaviors. And I think that’s a mistake that writers make in all fields, whether it’s movie or playwriting, they just write-they are just throwing the ball down the middle of the plate.

ON WRITING: Do you think that the best sitcom writers watch TV all the time?

PERSKY: No, I don’t.

MARKUS: I think that they read a lot, I would hope. Wouldn’t you say that reading is good?

PERSKY: Living is good.

MARKUS: Living is great.

ON WRITING: Bill, you once said: Get the character in trouble in the first 15 minutes, and get him out of trouble in the second 15 minutes.

PERSKY: Probably it’s moved up to 5 minutes to get him in trouble. You better state what it’s about fairly early so they know what they’re involved in. You can’t send in a script that’s hilariously funny and you don’t know what it’s about.

MARKUS: Let’s go to the basic laws of dramatic writing, which is having characters-having their wishes or desires blocked by some obstacle that they have to figure ways to get around or alter their behaviors in order to cope with the obstacle. That’s true of a movie like Terminator. It’s true of a sitcom script.

ON WRITING: And the obstacle better come pretty quickly.

MARKUS: The crisis should come quickly.

PERSKY: Yeah, what the problem is going to be about, if not the problem itself. Where your focus should be. So that, when you’re watching a show, you become involved with it and you’re not searching for why you’re watching this, aside from isolated laughs.

MARKUS: The question that we always ask at the end of a table reading is: What is the story about?

ON WRITING: What is a table reading?

MARKUS: When all the actors sit around for the first time and read the script aloud. The dialogue you were writing-it seemed so funny at the time-and, all of a sudden, when they’re reading it out loud there’s like, swamp sounds, we don’t hear any laughter. Funny banter is ultimately not going to come to anything if we don’t know what the story is underneath it. So, what is the crisis? What do these people want? What is the character trying to accomplish? And these are things that I think writers should have defined in their minds before they set words to paper. It’s hard to try to find it as you’re writing.

PERSKY: Another thing that, as a director, I find is missing in most writers-you must write action that the characters are involved in. Not pouring coffee, not dusting, not making the bed, but things that they are involved in that are important for them to be involved in, so that the things they’re talking about are almost an intrusion or done at the same time. It leads to much more vital dialogue because you’re talking about two different things. Most action written by situation comedy writers is: She’s pouring coffee. There isn’t enough. She starts to make another pot of coffee� That’s not good enough.

MARKUS: That’s what the director will give you on the stage.

PERSKY: Yeah, when there’s nothing there, that’s what they will do. But better that somebody spilled jelly-a jar of jelly-on the floor and you’re trying to get the jelly up and you’re talking-

MARKUS: And people are coming over�

PERSKY: -and people are coming in and stepping in the jelly-because that’s what happens in life. Most situation comedy is written so that if the particular problem of that episode didn’t come up, nobody really had to get out of bed that day because they didn’t have any other life. That was all that happened to them. I mean, you can have a character who walks out of the house with a hole in the back of their sock, and whatever else they’re involved in, that’s going to keep coming up and they’re going to keep tucking the hole under-you know, it’s his life going on. And very few writers bother to give the actors anything to play. They give them stuff to say but not stuff to play. That doesn’t mean long dissertations of description, but just give them something.

MARKUS: And to give them something, you also have to think about who they are. So, in other words, what is their greatest weakness? Is it a character’s vanity? Is it a character’s ego? Is it the weaknesses they have in life?

PERSKY: What does the performer do well? We did it with Van Dyke all the time.

MARKUS: Right. That’s why it’s great to let a series run for several episodes, because those are the clues you start to see.

PERSKY: And you write to that. You write to the strength. Dick Van Dyke was incredibly physical, so we put him in situations where he had to deal with stuff. We trapped him in an elevator and he had to climb up an elevator shaft. Mary [Tyler Moore] cried great. Carl Reiner wrote a show with her toe stuck in the faucet of a bathtub where you hardly saw her and she just cried a lot.

MARKUS: So it’s a creature that evolves. A writer can take it so far. I think we’re actually saying that we have limits.

PERSKY: Yes.

MARKUS: Because a performer will look at it and start to say: Well, I see what they want me to do here. I see what they think my character is. I bet if I did this it would take that even further. And you go down to the set to watch a rehearsal, and you’re stunned at what they’ve done with it, you’re laughing at places you never thought would be funny. There’s a great give-and-take there when it’s working.

ON WRITING: How does a beginning writer get started?

PERSKY: It’s very hard to get started but the one thing I’ve always said-and it never seems to fail: If you’re good, nothing can stop you. If you’re really good, you’re going to get discovered because the need for you-their need for good writers, or our need for good writers-is bigger than the writer’s need to be a writer. I mean, there are so few of them.

MARKUS: There are so few of them, and television is a ravenous animal. So a staff is sort of running out of steam at episode l8, and they’re just wishing there was some help somewhere. They would just shout, “Hallelujah!” for a strong spec script to come across the doorway.

ON WRITING: How do you know if you’re really good?

PERSKY: You’ll be told.

MARKUS: Someone will say: This joke on page eight, where the hell did that come from? That’s so hilarious. If you can deliver those, they’ll want you around.

PERSKY: There’s just no way to stop you.

MARKUS: Or if you crafted a story in a surprising way that takes a lot of turns that no one expected, they may overlook some jokes that fall flat and say: We could get help with story. We need someone to sit in the room when we’re breaking a story because we don’t know how to do it anymore. Or: We’ve done 150 of them, we’re getting tired.

ON WRITING: What is breaking a story?

MARKUS: Sitting down and plotting the points.

PERSKY: Breaking it down so that it works.

ON WRITING: Have you ever seen a script that you felt was pretty good and gone back to the writer and said: You know, I think you may have something here if you work a little harder?

PERSKY: I saw a script that was so good we didn’t make a change in it. It was a script for That Girl; it was written by Jim Brooks.

MARKUS: Knowing what I know about Bill Persky, he is a writer’s dream, because he’s a man that sees potential in people. He’s very good at that. It takes someone who is not harsh, who actually can say: I see where the promise is. There’s a phrase in Hollywood that really sends chills up and down my spine, and that is when you hand in a script and a producer says: Well, is it lightening in a jar? And you just want to drop dead because that means the guy, or the gal, wants to be bowled over, and you would rather they see the bottle half full so they can say: You got it, now come on in and we’ll take it all the way there. And it’s a very rare person that can be positive when they read.

ON WRITING: What is the thing for each of you that makes you really good writers in TV?

PERSKY: Open rigidity. It means I’m very positive about what I want but I’m open to suggestion.

MARKUS: Selfless determination. Which is that, as Bill says, I can hear a better idea.

PERSKY: Yeah, that’s essentially what you’re saying. You really believe that what you’ve got is there but you’re open to hearing something better.

MARKUS: Right. I’ve worked with playwrights who’ve adapted beautifully to television, and then others who can’t believe what you’re doing to their work. Can’t believe it. It’s just like in the movie business, a group really has to be responsible for that final product. And yet, if you have the conviction of your ideas, it helps a lot.

PERSKY: It’s a miracle that any of it ever happens.

MARKUS: Well, when you think about the great shows, there is so much accident to a lot of them. Whether it’s casting, where they wanted someone else and it worked out because they didn’t get that person. Or that the writers don’t kill each other.

PERSKY: Or somebody who is willing to lose. Someone who is willing to say: I just know this, and if it’s got to be any other way, I can’t do it. Like I remember on That Girl, we wrote Ted Bessell to be her boyfriend and her agent. So I kept thinking: Something’s wrong with this thing we’ve done. And I realized that we had written a schizophrenic character. The boyfriend should be asking her to do one thing, and the agent should be asking her to do another. Plus, the agent should be a total jerk so he can be a funny character, and the boyfriend should be funny but in a different kind of way. We had a guy playing two diametrically opposed things and he came off less than he should have been. So when they tested the show, the one thing they came back with was that we had to get rid of Ted Bessell because the audience didn’t like him. And I said: I know, I didn’t like him either but it’s not his fault. It’s our fault for what we did. They would not listen. They said: He’s gone and you’re on the air. And I said: I will not replace him because it’s not right. And Marlo, even then, had enough clout and she liked Ted and everything, so we finally won. And Ted Bessell went on for five years and was voted the most adored and loved co-star. So you say accidents. We could have replaced him.

MARKUS: And this story, too, is a real example of: All you have as a writer is your instinct.

PERSKY: That’s right.

MARKUS: You have your craft, but the bottom line is your instinct, and you have to be true to that. Jay Sandrich once took me aside and told me something I’ll never forget. He said: Be willing to fail doing it your way, because if you succeed doing it their way, it’s not going to be a success to you anyway. You have to really have the conviction.

PERSKY: Well, what I always said to people was: If I get lost following your directions, I won’t know how to get back. If I get lost by my own directions, I know where I made the turn. But if I’m listening to you, I’m not paying attention to where the signposts are and I’m going to be valueless in this thing. So I can’t do it your way.

ON WRITING: Do either of you see more shows coming to New York?

PERSKY: If some star who they’re dying to have won’t leave New York, then a show will come here. Or if a creator of a show who they’re dying to have won’t leave New York. You need something that says you either get it this way or you don’t get it at all.

MARKUS: What the network is most nervous about is, who is the show runner? Who can they find to put their life on hold and take tremendous amounts of grief from the stars and from the network? Who’ll eat it for big bucks? And that’s what they need more than anything. They need someone who will be in place week to week.

PERSKY: You take a mediocre show with a great show runner, as opposed to a great show with a bad show runner, and you have a better bet with the mediocre show.

MARKUS: Yeah.

ON WRITING: And the show runner is the person-

PERSKY: That’s the one who’s responsible for the whole thing.

MARKUS: Everything. Keeping the stars in line. Editing the show. Casting the show. Making sure the scripts get there on time. It’s a job that is inhuman.

PERSKY: It’s terrible.

ON WRITING: Is it one of the executive producers?

PERSKY: Well, not necessarily.

MARKUS: Sometimes they’re called co-executive producer.

PERSKY: The executive producer may be somebody’s agent.

MARKUS: Yeah, there are executive producers who are agents.

PERSKY: There are so many producers on shows now. There are more producers than people in the audience. It would be shorter to list: The audience was�

MARKUS: I remember watching our front credits with Cosby one day and he said: Who are all these people? Agents negotiate that title for people. Sometimes they extort the title out of the producers saying: Hey, this is a hot writer. This writer’s going to be gone unless they get that producer credit.

ON WRITING: Why don’t more television writers come to New York and say: I have to do it here?

PERSKY: They don’t want to be here. The work is in L.A.

MARKUS: No one’s going to let them do it. I often tell writers: Start writing where you’re happy, where your life is good or you feel it’s a fuller life. Start there. Nothing could be more depressing than to go out to Los Angeles and start from scratch.

PERSKY: Oh, yeah. If you’re here in New York, start writing here and let them bring you out there. You’re not going to get discovered faster out there.

MARKUS: One good script that comes out of you here will get you started as fast as the good script coming out of you there.

PERSKY: See, the one thing a writer has that no one else has is he or she doesn’t need anybody’s permission to write something. Actors need you to sit and listen to them doing it, and then they have to have something to do. Directors need countless attendants to help them do what they do. You can’t go in as a director and say: I want to show you my work, you go over here and you go over there. But writers, just any time they send in a page-

MARKUS: You know, your world is in your head. And you don’t have to write an existing TV show. You can write something that’s just totally out of nothing-like a play.

PERSKY: Jokes from what’s going on in the world.

MARKUS: Yeah. A sketch about two people meeting in the park. Anything. And that can be enough to get you started. Good work is the greatest calling card you can have.

PERSKY: Yeah. Listen, people break through all the time. John, how did you do it?

MARKUS: I sat in my one-room, subterranean apartment in Los Angeles and wrote three spec Taxi scripts, one after the other.

PERSKY: And sent them in.

MARKUS: And kept sending them.

ON WRITING: To where?

MARKUS: To various producers of various shows and, finally, the third one got to someone who I knew through another person-we went to the same college-and they had agreed to read it. And that was it. I was off and running.

PERSKY: What was the first show you wrote on?

MARKUS: Actually, my earlier spec Taxi’s got me assignments on Gimme a Break and The Facts of Life. And then I thought: I really want to write an even better show. So I tried to write a better Taxi script, and then that got me an assignment on Taxi itself.

PERSKY: I started out working in radio in New York and did a Christmas show, a spoof of the whole radio station. There was a guy there who was an agent. He said: That’s really terrific. Do you ever write comedy? That was with Sam Denoff, my partner. We were working in executive positions. He signed us and started fixing us up with comedians. Eventually we had written enough stuff for comedians that, when our agent went out to do The Steve Allen Show in California, he recommended us and we got on that. That got canceled, and we scrambled around for awhile. Then we wrote a sample Dick Van Dyke Show. Carl Reiner loved it, and that was it. Now, there was a lot of scary time between.

MARKUS: Yeah. And it’s tough to have a scary time and still be writing during that scary time. That’s the hardest thing. Can you imagine? You’re wondering how you’re going to feed a family or how you’re going to feed yourself, and you have to be funny.

PERSKY: There is no easy way to get started. It’s sitting and writing. When we got hired for The Steve Allen Show, we sent a package of 11 pounds of material to Steve Allen. Eleven pounds of stuff we had written up to that point. We worked at the radio station, went out to dinner, and worked until 11:30 every night, four nights a week, to write all that stuff. For two years. So, you know, there was no gift from anybody. Not only did we do it, but we learned along the way. So that when the time came, we knew what we were doing. But you just keep writing, and if you’re good, it’ll happen.