The dazzling light show that served as interplanetary communication in 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” helped win both cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and the film their only Oscar. Zsigmond was nominated three other times as well and won a lifetime achievement award from the ASC for a legendary career that has spanned decades and included multiple collaborations with such directors as Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino and Woody Allen. He’s the subject, along with his late friend, colleague and fellow Hungarian émigré Laszlo Kovacs, of “No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos,” a documentary airing nationwide Tuesday on PBS’ “Independent Lens” and Thursday on KCET in Los Angeles.  Zsigmond spoke with Eric Estrin about Communist Party bosses and Hollywood studio chiefs and how he managed to develop his own unique vision despite them all.    I lived under Communism, under repression, a dictatorship, and everybody is fearing for their life because in the middle of the night somebody can knock on your door and take you away. I went to work in a factory, and at one point I was complaining to the party secretary that I want to go to the university but they will not take me. 

She looked at my file and said, "Oh, you are in big trouble. Your father is in Morocco, in the West; he could be a spy ... the only way for you to succeed is to try to show something good for the working class, so that we are feeling that you are part of the working class and you want to help them." So I was thinking for months and months, "What can I do?" I was a sort of an amateur photographer; I liked to take pictures, so I went over there and said, "How about if I start actually a photography class for the workers and their family members?" And she loved the idea: "That’s great!" So they set me up with a camera and a developing machine in a little laboratory. So in a year or two I became a hero, and they forgot about my upbringing, you know, my bourgeois parents.  And then they gave me the idea that why don’t they send me up to the film school in Budapest. So I said I didn’t know anything about cinematography. I love movies but I didn’t know how it’s made, but I fell into it.  We had to go through some terrible, hard testing to see if we had talent for cinematography. But I was lucky. From Szeged, where I was born, they had really about 200 applicants, but I was the only one that they took up there. And then I became a cinematographer after four years of hard study and all that, and then came the Hungarian revolution in 1956, and we were on the streets taking movies, recording all the events. Of course the revolution was beaten down by the Russians in two weeks, and I had to flee from that because of my involvement in shooting the movies. So I decided to leave the country.  I wanted to go to Australia, because that was the furthest away from Communism. But my father came home from Morocco, and he said, "Son, you have to go to Hollywood. That’s the center of filmmaking. If you want to make it, you have to go there." I honestly didn’t know much about Hollywood at that time.  I knew a couple of great American movies like “Citizen Kane” and an English movie, Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet.” The real movies you could not see. They were blocked off totally from the public.    So I decided to go, basically with my friend Laszlo Kovacs, and that’s how I got into Hollywood -- to find out, really, that nobody wanted me. First of all, can you speak English? You have to speak English if you are in America. So I took all kinds of jobs, anything just to support my wife, because I got married to my girlfriend from film school. And then later on I started to speak English. And then I can make some connections. I can make some low-budget, educational films, you know, with students from UCLA and from USC. And I filmed some documentaries with Wolper Productions. And then slowly, I got more and more work with low-budget filmmakers. I got into making commercials. And then the break came about 10 years later.    I think the first break really was a short-subject film. It was a 30-minute film, 

and it was like a little love affair in a supermarket. It was a little story, but beautifully done, and it was nominated for an Academy Award.   By that time, Laszlo did a movie, “Easy Rider,” and that’s how he met Peter Fonda. And when Peter Fonda wanted to make his next movie, “Hired Hand,” Laszlo said, "I cannot do it, but I have a good friend and he’s better than I am." (If one of us was busy, we’d always say "I cannot do this, but the other one is better." And we never lied, because the other guy really did a good job. And that’s how we helped each other.) That was really the golden era: The late ’60s and ’70s.  We can never see that again because we had all these young directors coming up from nowhere and making these beautiful films with no interference by the studios.    Then I did “Red Sky at Morning,” which was sort of a commercial film. It was very difficult for me to get into it because my director was really a little bit stuffy. He had his own ways to do it; he didn’t really ask for any contribution from me. It started for me, really, with “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” My idea was the look of the movie. We were flashing the film and pushing the film. We destroyed the film to the point that it looked like old photographs. That was the whole idea. In those days, you know, Technicolor films were very bright, very colorful, very beautiful. And now we are dealing with a little Western, a Northwestern, and that should look rainy and murky and cold. So we decided to have a very different look than any other movie. The studio hated it. The studio wanted to fire me, because they said, "Who is this asshole who doesn’t know how to expose the film? It’s terrible! I’ll fire the guy!" And (Robert) Altman said, "No, no, no, you cannot fire the guy, because he’s very good. Don’t worry about the look of the film because the negative is fine; it’s the print that is bad. In Vancouver where we are, there’s a new lab and they don’t know how to print." So he cheated, you know? Beginning with that, I did many good films in a row: up and up and up, with better films and better directors.

Peter Facinelli had plenty of passion and determination but not much in the way of craft when, as a stiff New Yorker with a “My Cousin Vinny” accent, he enrolled at NYU and threw himself into a drama career. Now co-starring in Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” and heading up the Cullen vampire clan in the “Twilight” series -- his next film, “New Moon,” opens Nov. 20 -- Facinelli is a nonstop working actor with a wide range and a long resume in film and television. He spoke with Eric Estrin about how he lost his Queens swagger, the value of not having a Plan B, and Dick Wolf’s tradeoff. 
  When I was in third grade, I was in the school library and I picked up a picture biography book on Robert Redford. I started reading about him and the things he did, and I thought, "That’s a fun occupation to do." Then I saw “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” not too long after that, and I thought, "That’s what I want to do." So I told my parents when I got a little older that I want to be an actor, but to them it was like saying I wanted to go to Mars. They kind of just laughed at it.  The next time they asked, I said I wanted to be a lawyer, because I got a lot of oohs and aahs in the family. For a long time I kind of convinced myself I wanted to be a lawyer. I never did any plays in high school. I was quite shy actually. And then I went to one year at St. John's University, and I’m studying pre-law, and I take an acting 101 class and I love it. I remember there was a kid in the class and he said, "This is fun, but what are the chances of us actually ever being an actor?" I kind of got mad at that, and that’s when I made the decision that I was gonna be an actor, and I said, "I don’t care if it takes me six years to start getting work." I was just that passionate about actually doing it, and I didn’t like the fact that this kid said that we couldn’t. I knew a manager who kind of found me through friends, and his name is Mark Amitin. Mark steered me in the right direction. On his advice, I transferred into NYU to study acting.    For a whole year I was going up on stuff and I was probably really terrible. Every time I walked out of the room, I had this great high, like I was doing what I wanted to be doing, and I was really excited that I was able to go out on things. I was getting some really crappy feedback, but for some reason, my agent stuck with me.    I was horrible. They were saying, "This kid can’t act, he’s terrible." But you know, it was a great learning curve for me. I think I had natural instincts, but I was also stiff as a board when I first started out. I also had a really thick New York accent at the time. I was like “My Cousin Vinny,” so that was very limiting, but you know, NYU knocked that right out of me. When you’re studying acting, you’re studying every tool you need. I had speech classes, I had voice classes, I had movement classes, I had acting training classes. You’re reading plays … When you walk in, you have all these character traits, and what they do is, they neutralize you, so when you walk out, if you start in a neutral position you can play any character. So I kept training and I kept studying and then I booked a “Law & Order” episode and I took two weeks off from school to do that.  Then Dick Wolf liked me, so he put me in the guest lead of a short-lived series he had called “The Wright Verdict,” and I had to take another two weeks off from school to shoot that. I was off for about a month and I realized, now it’s too late to do the semester, so I thought, I’ll just take a semester off and go back. But then I started booking other work, and I never went back, 15 credits shy of graduating. People always ask me if I have any advice about going into acting, and I say, "Don’t have a backup plan, because you’ll use it." I didn’t have a backup plan. I was 15 credits shy of graduating college, so for me it was sink or swim. It’s funny because I saw Dick Wolf years later. I was up for a SAG Award for “Six Feet Under” for Ensemble, and I saw him there at the SAG Awards and I said, "Dick, you’re the reason I don’t have my diploma. But you’re also the reason why I got my SAG card, so it was a good tradeoff."

When Martin Lawrence needed someone to play the aptly named Hustle Man on his breakthrough ’90s sitcom “Martin,” he turned to Tracy Morgan, a brash young comic starting to make waves in African-American standup venues and on TV. Morgan, Emmy-nominated last season for his supporting role on “30 Rock” and author of the just-published memoir “I Am the New Black,” played the recurring character six times over a two-year period, using it as a launching pad for his career. Morgan spoke with Eric Estrin about the perfect audience, his in-utero obsession with comedy, and the night Chris Tucker didn’t show up.   I started in 1968 when the sperm hit the egg. Show business is not something that you can think about doing. I didn’t have a choice in this. I’ve been funny my whole life. I started performing being in the right place at the right time in Harlem. I was on the street corner making my friends laugh, and prior to that one of them went to a comedy club down on 125th Street and he said, "Yo, you ever heard about the Uptown Comedy Club?" I said, "I ain’t heard about no f---ing Uptown Comedy Club," and he took me there. And my career began from that point on, and I ain’t never looked back.  I was in there on a regular basis. I was mopping the floors, I was living in there. I would take time out to go home and see my wife and my kids, but I was obsessed with comedy. 
My start was no different than Bill Cosby or the “Ed Sullivan Show” and all those things. I went through channels like that -- “Def Jam,” “Uptown Comedy Club,” the Apollo, “Apollo Comedy Hour.” I guess people was watching the TV show. I could tell you the very first time I made an appearance. It was on the “Uptown Comedy Club.” Chris Tucker missed his plane coming to New York to do the show, and the producer looked around … I was one of the club favorites, and he looked around and he said, "Hey, yo, you got seven minutes, kid? You wanna be on TV?" And I said "Hell, yeah." And that was it. I did seven minutes of my best material. All I had was seven minutes. I started off getting $25 a gig, and that was enough for me to feed my family, buy some cereal and chill. And then more and more I started getting better and better. I was taking what I did very seriously. I knew it could be very lucrative. I knew there were people out there making zillions of dollars doing the same thing I was doing, and I wanted to be one of ‘em. The next step for me was Martin Lawrence calling me. One day he called me and he said, "Do you want to be on my TV show?" And I said, "This ain’t Martin Lawrence." And he said, "Hell yeah, it is!" Then that night, he flew me out.  Martin Lawrence was the first one to put me on the national stage, doing a character, and it was called Hustle Man. Yeah, it was pressure, but he taught me, Don’t focus on the 10 million people watching, focus on the people in here. Have fun with the people in here and then it will spread to the people at home.  It was some of the best times of my life. I got to work with one of my favorites, my dude. Martin Lawrence was the one who really mostly inspired me. And it just made my confidence go up. He taught me so much about stage direction. He taught me about acting. He taught me how to hit my marks, how to memorize my lines, he told me not to be afraid to make mistakes. Some of the mistakes are the funniest stuff that ever happened. To err is human. I err every day. People get caught up in trying to be perfect all the time and that’s when they fall apart. That’s when they crumble.  Most entertainers, they focus on trying to get the perfect audience. Nah, people in the seats is the perfect audience. That was it, from there. I just went all out.   Martin Lawrence had the funniest show on TV. That and “Married With Children” at the time. So he put me in front of the world. That was my first real time being on a TV show. And then people started to know me for Hustle Man. They would call me Hustle Man.  Then when I got onto to “Saturday Night Live,” it was an opportunity for me to be at the Update desk and say, "Hi this is Tracy Morgan." That’s how you become a household name. That’s how Chevy Chase did it.

That was a part of my decision of being Tracy Jordan on “30 Rock” instead of Booboo Jordan. I didn’t want to go through airports for the next two years and people are calling me Booboo.  

It sometimes seems that everyone knows Adam Goldberg’s work – but no two people know it from the same place. He’s played many strong, guest roles in TV dramas and comedies, including multi-episode arcs “Friends” and “Entourage”; made an impact in Academy Award winning films (“Saving Private Ryan,” “A Beautiful Mind”); and even starred in an offbeat Jew-sploitation movie, “The Hebrew Hammer.” Goldberg, an accomplished musician and songwriter, also stars in “(Untitled),” an art world satire opening this weekend in Los Angeles and New York. He spoke with Eric Estrin about false starts, a nervous breakdown and a very odd audition for Steven Spielberg.

I had a couple of false starts, including a couple of vain attempts at getting representation. I was represented by an agent for about a week when I was a teenager, but he eventually dropped me because I had braces, I was told.

 Shortly before I graduated from high school I was doing an equity-waiver play with a classmate of mine, and this young director saw me and asked me to come in for an independent film. I mean, I was basically cast, and so were some other people, but the producers wanted us to shoot a bunch of scenes to help them secure the financing.   I figured my life had changed, and I was a little over the moon about it. But by the end of that summer it became clear the film wasn’t gonna be made. So I just went about my business and went to college.   I went to Sarah Lawrence for a year, and I guess I had some version of a nervous breakdown. I just really couldn’t be in school anymore; I just couldn’t take it. I probably had like a genetic predisposition, coupled with being completely burned out and also being occupied with dreams of making films that tanked. Those three things in concurrence with each other were a volatile cocktail.   I basically dropped out and came back home to Los Angeles to try and go to film school at Cal Arts. In the year that intervened, I joined an acting class. And about six months or so into the class, this guy Steven Levy, who was sort of an assistant to the teacher, left to become an agent. And he said, you know, Give me a call at some point, and then when I finally did he said, Come on in.   So we met. And like within a day they sent me out on an audition for a guest star on a pilot called “Gabriel’s Fire,” which became a short-running TV series with James Earl Jones. I didn’t have a headshot or anything, so I sort of faked a resume and went in, and got called back, and I got this part.   I was playing a Southern john who has two scenes with a prostitute -- sort of an unlikely bit of casting. Ultimately I was cut from the final show, which was heartbreaking, as I recall.   Anyway, I started to get little, tiny things that year. By the time I got into Cal Arts, I decided it was just too late. It was like revisiting school in a dream and you don’t know how you got there. So after 10 days, I dropped out and I just kept pursuing acting.   So then I got a run on this sitcom on Fox. And then about a year later I got the audition for “Dazed and Confused.” I did the film and quit working at this bookstore where I’d been working -- though I was still completely broke. I just scraped together some little jobs until the movie came out in the hopes that it would facilitate some sort of career surge or whatever.   I’m still sort of waiting for that to kick in.   “Saving Private Ryan” definitely took things to the next place. I got sent the script and I went in. Everybody read a scene from “Midnight Clear,” the war film. It was kind of weird because my part and Vin Diesel’s role weren’t actually written yet, so I didn’t know why I was going in. I didn’t really know how to perform, what I should do, and if I should try to develop some sort of character.   I actually tried to cancel the audition, but my agent convinced me that was foolish and I should just go in.   I remember doing kind of a tough New York guy. That’s what I just sort of chose. Steven Spielberg wasn’t there; he was watching everything on tape. And, honestly, I didn’t think much about it.   About a month later I remember quite literally waking up to my manager standing over my bed, because I tend to sleep in and they couldn’t get a hold of me. He said, “Hey, you wanna go to England in July” or and I said, “Yeah, okay, why?”   And then he told me what it was -- that I got picked for “Private Ryan,” and I got very excited, but then I realized … what am I playing? For all I knew, I was playing somebody who had two little scenes in the movie.   And then after a while they had a script for me to read, and they brought me into the office to read secretly. That’s the first time I saw this role of Melish, and I finally knew this was a great part.  

Matthew Modine took movie audiences by storm in the 1980s with searing performances in such films as "Streamers," "Birdy" and "Full Metal Jacket." These days, in addition to gently mocking his image on the Geffen Playhouse stage, where "Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas" finishes its run Sunday night, he's promoting "Opa," a Tracy-and-Hepburn-style romantic comedy filmed in Greece and opening this weekend.

He spoke with Eric Estrin about making love to Rosanna Arquette in his first film role, how John Sayles directed the action, and what to do when the joint goes out.

My dad was a drive-in theater manager while we were living in Utah. I saw a documentary about the making of the movie "Oliver!" when I was young, and because I identified with those kids in the movie, I thought, "Oh, I should learn to sing and dance like that."

We moved all the time because they were tearing the drive-ins down, and I felt like those were the two things missing from my life.

So I started when I was about 11. In Provo there was a little school that taught tap dancing and tumbling. My dad told me that if I'm going to be an actor, I should learn how to fall down. And I think there's a great metaphor in that.

I joined the glee club and stuff like that when I was in seventh grade and took acting classes when I was in high school, and then moved to New York City when I was 18.

It wasn't a straight path; there were lots of diversions. But it was always a desire. And then when I got to New York City, I worked with a really wonderful acting teacher named Stella Adler.

Margie Simkin was casting "Baby It's You." She was the first casting director I met who ever said, "That was good; now try it this way." And then she said, "Great, I'd like you to come back tomorrow and meet the director John Sayles and the producer," who was Griffin Dunne. And I got the job.

John was huge in the New York film world. Bruce Springsteen was gonna give him music for the film. And every young actor in town that you'd bump into around town at auditions -- you know, Fisher Stevens, Robert Downey Jr., Tracy Pollan, Rosanna Arquette, Vincent Spano -- we all found ourselves in the same film with that opportunity that comes once in a lifetime.

On the first day of filming, John realized that the first meeting between me and Rosanna Arquette's character was too brief, and he was gonna have to open the role up a little bit, expand the part, because it was lopsided. The second scene we had together, we were making love.

So John added what was for me a huge monologue, which was a story I told, and he gave it to me about 45 minutes before we started filming.

It was crazy. What are the chances? What are the chances that some kid who grew up in Utah with a desire to go to New York would find himself in that position? It's like that great line in "Broadcast News," where Bill Hurt says to Albert Brooks, "What do you do when your life exceeds your dreams?" And Albert Brooks says to Bill Hurt, "You keep your mouth shut." That's how I felt.

John wasn't like so many directors today sitting behind a monitor or way far away. He was in as close as he could be to the edge of the frame and not be in the scene. He was probably two feet away from me when we were filming the love scene.

I was a young actor who was uncomfortable having to do something intimate in front of so many people. And so he got on the floor and was just sitting right at the edge of the frame. I could feel his hands going up in the air, and his eyes, like coaxing a performance out of a musician. It was fantastic.

Here you are, you're an actor, and you're trying to think of all the things that you're gonna do, when you're gonna do it and how you're gonna do it, and all this preparation, and then Rosanna passes me a joint in the scene, and I take a puff of it, but what's happened while we've been talking, the joint has gone out. And I thought, "Oh, do I pretend that the joint is burning? No, that would be stupid."

This is going through your head at a thousand miles an hour. And I picked up the matches and relit the joint, and that felt like the most dangerous, provocative thing in the world to do at that moment -- to do something that wasn't scripted and that you hadn't prepared.

But it's also just a great lesson about acting: S--t happens, and you have to deal with it.

The movie was very successful, and to this day, it opened the doors for all those actors that were involved. That was something that Harold Becker saw that got me the audition for "VisionQuest," that got me in the door to meet Robert Altman for "Streamers."

It was really so much fun to be given that gift.

With an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and a magnetic ear, Paul Shaffer broke into late-night television with "Saturday Night Live" in the mid-'70s and has been laying down our cultural soundtrack ever since.

David Letterman’s longtime musical director, and author of the new memoir “We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives,” refused comment, for legal reasons, on his boss' current troubles, but he did talk with Eric Estrin about touring topless bars and missile bases, hanging with the Canadian showbiz mafia, and the secret to playing rock ’n roll piano

I graduated from college at the University of Toronto, and I made a deal with my parents that I would take a year to try to get into the music business. They would rather that I had a real profession, but yet, they loved show business just as much as any other Jewish family, and they were secretly thrilled, I think, when I said I was gonna do this for a year. So I spent the year playing around Toronto -- weddings, topless bars ...

I had taken private piano lessons as a kid, which also involved the theory of music, but when I heard rock 'n' roll, it slayed me, and I started immediately trying to figure out things by ear. So while I was taking lessons I was also developing my ear, figuring out all these tunes by the Four Seasons and you know, the Ronettes … everything that I loved on the radio, and I loved it all.

I did a strange tour of Canadian missile bases once in the middle of winter, going up to northern Quebec. It was freezing, you know, and I'm playing these dance-show kind of things. I met a girl on that tour, a dancer who was going to audition for the Toronto company of "Godspell." I went with her to accompany her at the audition.

Stephen Schwartz, who was the composer, heard me play a tune from his show, and he said, "Hey, let me talk to that piano player," and he asked me to play the rest of the audition for him because he liked the way I played. At the end of the day he said, "Could you get a band together and conduct the show?" And I was in show business!

That was certainly my big break, and it absolutely came just because of my piano playing. It's not like I had much style at that time. I had one pair of jeans and I didn't even wash them, I just wore them. It was just the fact that I was a rock piano player, and the music he wrote was rock, so it was a perfect fit.

I hit the keys hard. That's what he liked.

The company up there, the Toronto "Godspell," was quite phenomenal and a marvelous confluence of talent, all of whom are still my close and dear friends. They included Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin. They became Second City, but this is before there was a Second City in Toronto. This was their first professional job, as it was mine.

I started to hang heavily with them. I loved funny people, and they were really nice as well. We were young, excited kids. Sometimes Marty would turn on a tape recorder and say, Let's just be funny. This was before VCRs or video cameras or anything like that. We'd make audio tapes of us playing each other, and we had a lot of fun. I started to realize that just to have laughs, there isn't anything better.

Stephen Schwartz, the composer, always said to me, "When 'Godspell' is over, I'm gonna bring you into New York,'" and that's what he did. I played a Broadway show for him called "The Magic Show," starring Doug Henning, the late hippie magician.

While I was doing that, a number of other Canadians came down to start "Saturday Night Live" -- Lorne Michaels and his friend Howard Shore, who's now an Oscar-winning film score guy. He became the musical director and he hired me on piano for the "Saturday Night Live" band. And now it was '75, and I was in TV; I was in a TV band.

One other funny thing happened while I was doing "The Magic Show." I auditioned, sort of on a lark, for a TV pilot. Don Kirshner and Normal Lear did a pilot together that they hoped would be "The Monkees" for the '70s. It eventually was called "A Year at the Top," and it was about rock performers who had sold their souls to the devil.

If it succeeded, they thought it would be a recording group that would do live dates as well, so they thought maybe one guy who was actually a musician would be good to have in the thing, and I could read lines a little bit too. I'd picked up some stuff from my friends in Toronto.

So I went in there and read, and I got this part. And I made the pilot, which was then shelved. But in the second season of "Saturday Night Live," I got a call that they'd sold it. It was three years later!

So I left "Saturday Night Live" in the second season and moved to Hollywood and did "A Year at the Top." It took a whole year to make five episodes that played in that summer of '77. It kind of dwindled down from a group to just a duo -- myself and Greg Evigan, who went on to star in "B.J. and the Bear."

We made these five episodes that didn't fly. It played in the summer; no one picked it up, and I went back to "Saturday Night Live." But I brought back with me an impression of Don Kirshner. I was there the first time he went on the air to do his intros, and he was a real character. So I got him down, and when I returned to "Saturday Night Live," I started doing him. And from there I started doing the odd sketch here and there, and by the fifth season I was a featured player.

Elayne Boosler crashed comedy's boys' club in 1986 when her first Showtime special, "Party of One," opened the door for women comics to headline their own cable shows and earn club fees equal to the guys. Boosler still works regularly, doing mainly corporate gigs, while running her non-profit animal rescue, Tails of Joy, and polishing a book about the New York and Los Angeles club scene when she was coming up.

She spoke with Eric Estrin about the strength she gained through one-time boyfriend Andy Kaufman, the push she got from superstar Bill Cosby, and the recognition she finally earned from gatekeeper Peter Chernin.

I started standup, by accident, in New York. I had no direction at all in life. I just knew that I needed to be able to get an apartment and live. I tried everything; answering phones, booking escort services, receptionist, hostess, waitress. I was fired from every restaurant in New York City. I kept forgetting the forks.

I was beaten down and intimidated. I ended up backing into comedy as a singing waitress in a New York club. Andy Kaufman was a regular there, and we fell in love. He heard me sing and said, "You're the only person who makes me laugh in life; you're so funny. Just go up and tell those stories. And you should never sing publicly again."

We lived in Greenwich Village for two and a half years. Then we came out to California and split up but remained very close friends. He's the reason I'm still in it. For those 12 years, every time I was lost onstage, his voice would pop out from the back of the room in some city where you'd never expect he even knew I was. He'd save my show and then we'd go eat. It was like having an angel.

In the early '80s I was playing the same clubs for the same money and selling them out over and over again. At that point cable TV was your only shot for survival and expansion. All the guys by then were already on their second cable specials, and there still hadn't been any women.

I kept pitching to HBO and Showtime and they kept saying, "People aren't interested in seeing a woman do an hour." And I would say, I do two hours in clubs; they pay for that! But no, they wouldn't hear it. They were probably using the same market research that says women aren't interested in seeing gorgeous naked men in movies.

By then I had a boyfriend, Steve Gerbson, who was a really good cameraman, DP, producer, director. He said, How much money do you have? I had exactly $30,000 -- no credit cards, nothing else. He said, "Okay, we'll do a special." I said, "These specials are like hundreds of thousands of dollars." He said, "Don't worry, we'll do a really good special, but you'll have to learn to produce and direct and edit because we can't afford extra people." Andy had just died at that time, and I was feeling fearless. I said, "Let's go, let's do it."

So we went back to New York, and Steve got all his movie-making friends to work for deferred pay. Then he said, "You're gonna have to get some other stars on the show to do a little opening to help sell it," so I contacted Bill Cosby in Las Vegas. This was before faxes, email and bagged lettuce ... but we had Fed Ex, so that's what I used.

I knew Cosby a little bit from standup. This was his year -- his new show was number one, cover of Time magazine. My friends thought I was insane, but he said yes.

And then Letterman and Dr. Ruth and all these great people agreed to be on it. My good friend Tom Waits gave me a song. I had the greatest opening. And I had an act that had been honed for 13 years. You know, that's like a diamond cutter who takes 12 years to cut every facet on one bracelet. It's as good as you can make it.

Then I had to learn to edit. I learned how to put a show together from the ground up, because we had no money. We put together the best show ever; I took it up to both HBO and Showtime in L.A., and they both said no.

I had always said to Steve, "They don't like women, and they certainly don't like me." And he always said, "You're just crazy." But when I came home and told him what happened, he said, "You're right, I believe you now. It's women, and it's personal. What do you want to do now?"

I said, "I'm done." I wanted to go on the road for one more year to earn enough to pay everyone who had worked on the special, and that was gonna be it. So that was our plan.

I was on the road for 10 months. My special was collecting dust on my living room shelf next to a copy of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." And then Steve heard that Showtime had a regime change. We always knew if younger hipper guys came in, they'd get me.

The new head of programming was Peter Chernin. We showed him what we had done, and he said, "Oh my God, have three specials, please!"

We paid everyone. Got the most amazing reviews about how great it was to finally see a woman do an hour. HBO then announced their "Women of the Night" comedy series, which of course they still had to name after hookers.

Because no one had wanted me, I ended up owning my shows and also not being exclusive to anyone. So I was the only comic to work for Showtime, Cinemax and HBO, and my shows still make money for me.

And I have only 20 years left washing Bill Cosby's cars before my debt is paid.

Melissa Rosenberg has been on a seven-day-a-week work schedule for two years now, a time crunch about which she has no complaints. The executive producer of “Dexter,” whose fourth Showtime season premieres Sunday, is also writing the third “Twilight” movie, after finishing her script for the second film, “New Moon,” in time for its Nov. 20 release. Her screenplay for the original “Twilight” helped turn the then-obscure series of novels into a runaway smash hit for Summit Entertainment.

Rosenberg spoke with Eric Estrin about kismet, misguided nepotism and the easiest job she ever got. 
 

I went to USC’s Stark Program for producing, knowing that what I wanted to do was write but feeling like if I got some producing chops behind me as well, I would probably be pushed around a little bit less.

While I was at USC I was also spec’ing material, and I spec’ed a feature. So I thought, I have to get this feature to someone; I need an agent. So I found that in the list of alumni of the Stark program were four people who happened also to go to my undergraduate, Bennington College.

This was strikingly unusual because Bennington has a very small student body, and the Stark program graduates only 25 a year. So it was very odd that from these two very small schools, four people had crossed over.

One of them was Liz Glotzer, who was and is an executive at Castle Rock. So I contacted Liz, never having met her before, and I said, I’m an alumna from Bennington and Stark; would you read my material? She agreed to read it, and then I met with her. She said, I love this; we’re not gonna make it but let me help you get an agent.  

Then “Misery” was opening and she got even busier than usual and completely dropped the ball. But her assistant called and said, Look, I read it too and I love it, and I know we’re not gonna make it but let me help you get an agent.   

So her assistant calls some producer she knows and she sends it to someone from her office for coverage -- I cannot remember the woman’s name -- and I meet with her, and she says, I love this; we’re not gonna make it, but let me help you get an agent. So then finally that woman sends it to like four or five of her favorite boutique agents, and I call them to say I’m going to send the script, and before I’m even able to send it, they’re going, Get me that script, get it to me right away, I need you to send it this weekend, hurry, hurry! 

I’m like, Wow, what did she tell them? This is fantastic! I send them the script, and then I go in to meet with one of them. Everyone in the agency wants to meet with me, and I’m going, This is amazing. And one of them says, Yeah, we just made a deal with your mother. And I’m going, Okay, my mother’s been dead 10 years, so you guys are great!

As it turned out, they thought I was Joan Rivers’ daughter, because her name was Melissa Rosenberg also. I had this nepotism going for me without being related to anyone. 

Liz Glotzer knew I wasn’t Joan’s daughter, but her assistant didn’t, and her assistant told the other person, who told all the agents and that’s why they wanted to read me. But some of them actually did read the script, including someone over at the Irv Schechter Company, and they called.

I said, I’ve gotta tell you right away, I’m not Joan Rivers’ daughter, but they read it anyway and that was how I got my first agent.

The spec I had written was pretty good for the level I was at back then. It had a voice. It didn’t have a lot of craft, but it had a voice.

From there, I got out, and got my first writing assignment which was a dance movie for Paramount. I got that job partly because of my prior background as a dancer. That was at one point what I thought I was going to do with my life -- become a dancer, but I wasn’t good enough to justify starving to death. But that one broken dream, if you want to be melodramatic, led to another one, which was this movie, which got me my very first credit and my entrée into the Writers Guild.

The movie unfortunately never got produced, but I was able to get work in television, and I worked steadily in television for a long time. At one point I was a co-executive producer on “The O.C.,” and it was while I was on that show that Erik Feig of Summit Entertainment called the executive producers, who he had a relationship with, and said, Hey, I’m looking for a writer who has “The O.C.” voice, and Dave Bartis with that company said, Well, give Melissa Rosenberg a try.

Whether I have “The O.C.” voice is debatable, but I went into that meeting, and it was kismet right away, because the movie they were talking about was another dance movie, “Step Up.” They didn’t know that I had previously been a dancer, and I didn’t know that I was going in to meet on a dance movie.

I wrote that movie for them, and it was a very successful experience. It was a very creative experience primarily. So when they got a hold of those “Twilight” properties, because of that previous experience, Erik called me -- and it was basically the easiest job I ever got.