How Phil Rosenthal, the creator behind “Everybody Loves Raymond,” found success—and realized his dream job a decade later.
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00:00I meet Ray Romano, so he had been struggling as a stand-up for 12 years trying to get on
00:04David Letterman, and then he gets on. And from that one six-minute appearance,
00:10Letterman says there should be a sitcom for that guy. So the way it works in Hollywood is
00:15writers are always looking for talent, and talent is always looking for writers.
00:19I got a meeting with him. I don't even think I was his first choice. I think
00:23he wanted somebody from Friends because that was the hot new show, and that didn't work out.
00:28And that's why I got the job creating the show for Ray. I went to school for theater. I thought
00:34I was going to be a comedic actor. Ten years in New York will beat that out of you. But I never
00:39gave up the dream. Some friends of mine and I wrote a show for ourselves to be in, and that
00:45was the transition. That, and at the same time, another friend of mine said, let's write a
00:50screenplay. And suddenly both those things, the play took off and the screenplay sold to HBO.
00:58So I transitioned to writing, and I moved to Hollywood, and I got jobs immediately working
01:04on sitcoms for people.