#eli attie

[tv-moments]

The Diplomat

Season 3, “The Riderless Horse”

Director: Tucker Gates

DoP: Julian Court

[nothingunrealistic]

some fun details from the imdb 7x12 cast list:

scott wapner and josh brown, the guys who host cnbc’s halftime report, aka the finance show that taylor and axe both went on to talk shit about each other in 4x08, appear as themselves. perhaps someone will go on halftime report to talk shit about prince!

eli attie, a member of the billions writers room for seasons 5-7, also appears as himself. kind of a wild choice, though less wild when you know he was a speechwriter for al gore during gore’s vice presidency and presidential run. and much less wild than one of my Never Gonna Happen But Wouldn’t It Be Crazy imagined endings wherein taylor decides to walk away from finance and the last scene is them getting in an uber to go to the airport and their uber driver is brian koppelman.

[donnajosh]

@EliAttie: in honor of the final taping of @WestWingWeekly tonight, here’s our President, being applauded after the show’s final scene is shot. @EliAttie: and a few more shots from the final moments of the West Wing... @EliAttie: a great run, and it kinda sorta happened twice. thanks all. ⁦

[elliebartlets]

3.04 Ways and Means

Episode:

• ok, the beginning scene with the car driving up to the courthouse could also belong in like a legal show or something. It’s the dramatic piano music in the background that does it.

• Donna still taking to Josh as she keeps getting lower to the ground 😂

• “Leo, Giselle...”

• “You really think we have a secret handshake don’t you?”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

Lmao

• and then Ainsley repeating “I can’t believe the president can wave executive privilege....” while CJ gives her instructions “nod your head, you don’t have to nod the whole time” is so funny

• aww Bartlet has no pens cause Mrs. Landingham used to put them in his pocket ladksjsj 😭

• now whenever Connie has a scene with Sam, I can’t not think about how they were almost love interests

• ok but Ainsley wasn’t lying, Cliff actually is cute...did I just not notice that before?

• “You were leaving.

“No I was just stretching my legs.”

“You shouted for a cab.”

“I like to test them.”

• the pennnnnsssss 😩

• ahh I feel so bad for Donna when Cliff leaves the date. It was the right thing to do, but she looks so confused and hurt.

• Sam speaking Spanish always throws me off

Podcast:

• guest star: Eli Attie

• If a scene or a storyline was cut due to length, Aaron would find a way to get it into another episode.

• Eli found a binder of plots/scenes that weren't in the episode. One involved an argument between Babish and Ainsley, after she goes on TV for CJ.

• I also paused and tried to read the list of names on the subpoena paper! I couldn’t read any though. There probably was a lot of fake names.

Another page from the binder explaining the difference between the Special Prosecutor vs Congress

• Eli pitched an idea for this episode based on an experience from his time in the White House, but it didn’t get put in. There was something called ‘subpoena envy’, where staff members were jealous of those who received subpoenas, so in relation to the beginning scene where they’re reading off names on the subpoena he came up with:

• the joke about Josh wanting to be a ballerina is ironic cause Rahm Immanuel, the former CoS Josh was based on, studied ballet in college.

[kelseyridge13]

Everybody should have a kind of an all-consuming sort of mind-blowing job, and then work on a TV show about that exact job.

Eli Attie (Slow News Day (With Eli Attie and Nancy Altman))

[twwcast]

[michonnegrimes]

They’re so great together. The interesting thing about Josh and Donna, and there’s no question there’s some episodes very early in the series- there’s a great line of Aaron’s, the line about “I wouldn’t have stopped for red lights,” -that were definitely sign posts put there very deliberately... with those actors, you could just write assistant and boss banter, and they would layer it with emotional, romantic, flirty subtext. That was so good. If you really looked at those lines, had you given them to some extra, as the assistant to another character, you wouldn’t have even thought about it. That’s what you want as a writer: you write A, B, and C, and then you want the actors to also give you D and E... things you don’t even know are there sometimes. We all loved writing them together. I think those were always just instantly classic West Wing-type scenes. It was just irresistible to put them together, and they had that great chemistry as actors. I certainly was a fan of it.

Eli Attie on writing Josh and Donna

[nothingunrealistic]

thanks to the writers guild of america directory, we have the first six billions s6 episode titles! and their writers! the list, and thoughts on what they might mean:

6x01 “Cannonade” (by Brian Koppelman & David Levien): a cannonade = a period of continuous bombardment / heavy gunfire. someone’s under attack. (or maybe it refers to the racehorse of the same name.)

6x02 “Lying Eyes” (by Emily Hornsby): “lyin’ eyes” is a song by the eagles about a young woman who marries a rich older man and cheats on him with a younger man. trouble in paradise for senior and roxanne? or wags and chelz? or ira and taiga, again? or maybe it’s a metaphorical application. in any case, that’s one likely music cue for the season.

6x03 “STD” (by Theo Travers): wikipedia gives many definitions for the initialism “STD,” including but not limited to: sexually transmitted disease (unsurprisingly), internet standards such as STD 68, short term disability, and star trek: discovery.

6x04 “Burn Rate” (by Brian Koppelman & David Levien & Lio Sigerson): in finance, the burn rate is the rate at which a company spends money, particularly the rate at which venture capital is spent before a company starts generating income. finance-specific episode titles tend to be literal, so someone’s burning through cash, perhaps unsustainably.

6x05 “Rock of Eye” (by Eli Attie): “rock of eye” is a tailoring term, meaning an approach to tailoring that’s artistic, instinctual, and guided solely by the eye, rather than a scientific, measurement-based approach. will we get a literal tailor? a figurative tailor? some play on taylor’s name? (they don’t trust instinct, but maybe they’ll have to learn to trust it.)

6x06 “Hostis Humani Generis” (by Beth Schacter): “hosti humani generis” (latin for “enemy of mankind”) is a legal term, designating a person or group of people as beyond legal protection and subject to violence from anyone. this first, and most often, applied to pirates. remember prince calling axe a pirate in 5x11? or dollar bill’s nostalgia for the days of outlaws — literally people to whom the law didn’t apply, who could be killed by anyone — in 2x09? prince might find himself on the wrong side of that designation.