#mscully

[villanemm]

My biggest piece of advice for writers if they want a long career working on staff is pretty simple: "Don't be an asshole." If you're reasonably good at what you do and you're not a dick, there's a good chance people will want to work with you. It's not that complicated. If you pitch a joke and nobody laughs, don't keep pitching the same joke until everyone wants to kill you. Pitch a different joke. If some line of yours that you liked gets cut during a rewrite of your script, don't pout or storm out of the room. Pitch a different line. If it gets in, it's still your line. It's a small town and reputations get around. You don't want to be on that list of writers that people refer to as, "They're funny, but life is short."

Mike Scully

[villanemm]

95% of it was done by email. I was out here in LA and I think everybody else was in New York. We were just submitting things to Tina and Amy because they had the unenviable job of having to sift through a hundred Argo jokes. But it was a lot of fun. The weekend of the show a couple of the New York people flew out here. Seth Meyers was here and Robert Carlock, and it was a kick for me because I’ve never met them before and I’m a big fan of theirs. And I’ve never met Tina Fey. They have such a great shorthand from all of their years of SNL together, and there were times where I found myself just kind of in awe of how quickly they bounce stuff off of each other and then I would have to remind myself, “Oh wait, I’m being paid to work.” But it was hard not to just be a fan.

Mike Scully on writing for the Golden Globes with Seth Meyers, Robert Carlock, and Alex Baze