TV Writers On Surviving "The Room" Or Prison, Take Your Pick
There's a very good reason that TV staffers use the term "gang bang" to describe a bunch of writers "collaborating" on a script. Sopranos writer Matt Weiner's description of how to survive the endless, soul-negating rewrites in a television writers' room sounds suspiciously like advice on how to ride out a prison rape:
"I can close my eyes and tell you what's written by one person and what's written by a team," Weiner said. "When scripts are put together by a committee like that, you can hear it — there's a hollowness to it. And the worst thing you can do professionally when your script is being gone over in a room is to fight for anything. You must lay down and go limp."
However, one shouldn't confuse all of this rape imagery with the things the writers on Friends used to like to chat about. That stuff was just for fun.
