In the latest entry in his Battlestar Galactica Blog, Thank you, Harlan Ellison, Ron Moore mentions an example of what it’s like to work in Hollywood:
I was working on “Roswell” as an executive producer, but I was deep into preproduction on the ill-fated pilot I’d written for a series based on Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” books. It had been a difficult and unhappy development process, but we were only five days away from the first day of principal photography. A major problem had arisen, however. The network had commissioned another writer to rewrite my draft over my objections and in my opinion, had eviscerated everything that I loved about the project.
Ron Moore took Harlan Ellison’s advice (to new writers) to heart: “Don’t be a whore!” So he skipped that project.