Who invented TV?

A lesson in writing romantic dialogue

The scandal in my life, quite frankly, is that I don’t go to the movies too often and I rarely watch TV.

Hey, I already have tenure.

In my book Essentials fo Screenwriting, I bore everybody with my theory that only one out of six works of creative expression, including movies and TV shows, is worthy. I’ll discuss that issue, and reveal how I came up with that figure, in another column.

For now, though, let’s talk about TV.

I travel a good deal, especially these days, appearing at bookstores, colleges, and universities, flogging the aforementioned book. For this reason, I log time in too, too many hotels. And it is in hotels where I’m most likely — or least unlikely — to turn on the TV, perhaps only because it makes the room seem a tad less lonely.

In August 2010 I checked into the legendary Claremont Hotel, Resort, and Spa in Berkeley. The flight from Burbank to the Bay Area was smooth as silk and took barely an hour.

The downside was that when I finally picked up my car from the rental outfit, far more time had passed since landing than for the entire flight.

At Oakland airport it used to be possible to walk out of the terminal directly onto the car rental lots. Now you have to wait for three packed shuttle buses to go by, and then Dollar takes its sweet, sweet time before the minimum-wage morbidly-obese clinically schizophrenic nitwit behind the counter manages to get you into a car.

They offer an optional ‘special deal’ that covers expenses should you have a dead battery. They rent you a car and then sell you insurance to cover a dead battery? To be fair, they do provide at no extra cost a steering wheel.

When I finally got to my room at the Claremont, I turned on the TV just in time to catch scream-outs on Maury Povich’s knockoff of Jerry Springer’s classic show, with mentally ill people howling at each other, and family members physically assaulting one another.

Springer launched this contribution to American public and popular culture now twenty years ago.

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