If crimes are committed, they are committed by people; they are not committed by some free-floating entity. These companies and other entities don’t operate on automatic pilot. There are individuals that make decisions – and some make the right decisions, and some make the wrong decisions.
You read a million scripts during pilot season, and most of them are not very good, so the good ones really shine.
I landed the role of Bravo 5, the only female fighter pilot in ‘Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.’ I did my bit and fired my guns, but I haven’t a notion of which side I was on or who I was firing the guns at.
Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been, and will continue to be, life’s pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.
My father, a Vietnam War pilot, used to tell me that the only really bad decisions are the ones you stick to even when you get facts that support a change in the mission.
I wanted to do everything. I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to be a secret agent. I wanted to be a fireman and a doctor, all that. So I related that through movies and stuff.
I’m trying to be as green as I can. As an airline pilot, I have a carbon footprint that’s a size 10, so it’s pretty hard.
For ‘Orphan Black,’ all I got was the pilot script, and that was enough for me. I was daydreaming about this part. I kept thinking about how certain scenes were going to play out and how these interactions were going to take place.
Since the struggle for our nation’s independence, America has been a union of purpose: a union born from the belief that although each individual is the pilot of their own destiny, when we come together, we change the world. We are stronger as a woven rope than as unbound threads.
I have a TV show, a radio show. I’ve authored two books. I own a construction company, own a commercial fishing lodge, and am a pilot.
I was in the pilot for Spinal Tap before it was a movie.
My grandfather served as a pilot with the Army Air Corps, and he was shot down over Normandy in August 1944.
You may hate the pilot but you don’t want the plane to crash.
I did some commercials and a couple of B movies, then a few pilots that didn’t go anywhere. Eventually I did the pilot for Beverly Hills, 90210. The rest is history.
I am still a keen mountain walker and an enthusiastic glider pilot.
I was cast as the lead in a Warner Bros TV pilot and was immediately told I needed to lose weight. I got a bit weird about food for the first time in my life, and I thought, ‘You know, this just isn’t the life for me.’
I created ‘Dinner: Impossible’ with a guy named Bryan O’Reilly and I shot the pilot as a 30 minute show and we sold it.
Sometimes I hear the crowd cheering, and most of the time your body’s on auto pilot, so sometimes even after I do a floor routine, I’m like, ‘Did I really just do that?’
My mother was a stay-at-home mum and my father was an RAF pilot.
My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.
Years ago, Barry Diller asked me to be a judge on a pilot for an inventor show on USA, and when it was over, the producer, Ken Mok, took me out to dinner and really got me talking. It was a long dinner. Afterward, he said, ‘One day, I’m going to write your movie’.
I feel like if we can use the combination of basically data-driven hunches and bet on really first-class talent to deliver the shows, that I think we could do as well as the networks do, who basically have a 75 to 80 percent failure rate for new shows anyway – even after all that development and pilot work.
At the end of the day, it’s really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.
We’re not militant, but there are certain things that are absolutely secret. There was a pilot printed on red paper, and I read everything on my iPad and have a scanner on my desk for these purposes. I scanned in the script, and red paper script scans in perfectly fine.
Pilot season tends to be grueling, because you can be thrown all of these auditions at once – last-minute, always – and you’re going on three a day, especially back in the day.
The pilot came back and said he had just heard that Kennedy was shot.
Like the Spitfire it was immensely strong: a pilot had no need to fear the danger of pulling the wings off, no matter how desperate the situation became.
In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for ‘True Detective’ was one of them.
I dress like a 7-year-old space pilot. I have clothes that I still wear regularly from high school.
For ‘Breaking Bad,’ it was like, that’s one of the best pilots, probably the best pilot I have ever read.
The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.
I did a sitcom with Desi Arnaz Jr. in a pilot called ‘Whacked Out.’ We were bombing, and Lucille Ball grabbed the mic and started berating the audience.
I had CNN on in my hotel room every day while we were filming the pilot for ‘The Originals.’
I liked flying, when I got into it, loved it. And I found I was very good at it. I’m not modest about the fact that I was a good pilot.
I did a terrible television pilot that was so badly written and dumb that it became a turning point for me and I decided that I would never accept a job just because I needed the money.
I did a pilot for a show about community support officers, and all the community support officers were pleased that we didn’t portray them as idiots.
Pilot season in L.A. is just this blood bath. They make so many pilots, and such a small percentage are picked up. And then if you are picked up, there are so many variables. You have to get a good time slot, and you have to get promoted. And then you have to thrive in that time slot.
Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.
I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.
I did the ‘Gunsmoke’ pilot for $250. We were all so hungry, we would have done anything.
You know what it is, when I’m playing a role sometimes, I just tend to stay in that role. It’s easier to maintain. We just shot a pilot in a very thick American accent. I feel like the character lives in me. Of course, my family tease me about it.
When ‘Hung’ got canceled, I was available for pilot season, and ‘Arrow’ was the first thing I auditioned for. It wasn’t the first script that came to me, but it was my first audition.
After high school in 1969, I was appointed to the Air Force Academy. In ’73, I studied for my postgraduate degree and became a USAF pilot in 1974. After my discharge in 1980, I became a commercial pilot and flew my first airline flight at Pacific Southwest Airlines in 1980.
Every first episode of a season has been crafted like another pilot.
For me, I look at a pilot and go, ‘I see the landscape. I see the characters. I see the direction and the potential of the story.’ And I also go, ‘That didn’t work. I could change that. Maybe that works. I don’t know. We’ll see.’ For me, I look at it, as an actor, as what can I improve upon?
Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn’t enough, I forced myself to take lessons.
When you’re writing a pilot, unless you already have an actor attached to the project, you’re writing it with all the voices sort of in your head. Once you actually cast it, the actors become the voices of the characters, and you start to write for them and their strengths.
I had to think ahead. How much would I really enjoy committing five or seven years to working on this? When you’re an unemployed actor offered a TV pilot, no matter who you are you’re tempted by the good hunk of change to be made. It keeps you out of the unemployment line.
My 3-year-old daughter told my wife she doesn’t think I’m a pilot anymore because I don’t fly. That was crushing.
I’ve been enjoying ‘Life on the Mississippi’ by Mark Twain that I picked up at the airport randomly. It’s very witty and interesting to read about his time as a steamboat pilot.
My dad was a fighter pilot with the 210th Combat Aviation in Vietnam.
Pilot season can be maddening. You’re basically putting yourself and your talent out there to be scrutinized several times a day for months by network executives who have probably never acted in anything since their junior high school production of ‘The Wiz.’
When I read the ‘Ugly Betty’ pilot, I thought, ‘Oh, this part’s funny.’ I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to get it!’ But based on what? All my exquisite comedic work in a Nike commercial?
I don’t think any of us could have possibly anticipated how successful Mad Men has been. When we were working on the pilot, we loved it. We thought it was special. We hoped and prayed it’d be a success. But, we didn’t count on it.