"An old whore once told me, when you start coming with the customers, it's time to quit"--when you get too close to the material and you begin to believe that mediocre writing is good. I worked at Saturday Night Live for several years, from 2010 to 2013. The writing was awful in the skits, two minutes of genius and seven minutes of filler. When we read the scripts, we'd think they weren't that bad, when they really were. We had gotten too close to the material, hoping that it could be better than it was. A stagehand has to keep his/her mercenary distance. I thought of the old Bill Macy line from the David Mamet movie "Homicide," where one cop tells another, "An old whore once told me, when you start coming with the customers, it's time to quit."
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