TV WRITER TO DISCUSS INS, OUTS AT BOOK CELLAR

LAKE WORTH — When Book Cellar opened late last year, Hal Cantor was really excited.

“We were worshipping at their feet,” he said. “Lake Worth needs more places like Book Cellar.”

Cantor, a 53-year-old television and film writer, also saw an opportunity for himself.

“I met the owner of the store and said I’d love to do a talk (about) TV,” Cantor said. “They said, ‘pick a date.’ ”

That date is today at 6 p.m. at 801 Lake Ave., where Cantor will talk about how to get a project sold to a network.

“It’s going to be ... a little bit about everything,” he said. “How the TV landscape has changed dramatically, how comedy has been a dead zone for a while and how hard it is to sell a pilot.”

Cantor moved to Lake Worth four years ago. “It’s a really unusual town for South Florida,” he said. “It’s a throwback beach town and it’s really quirky .... I find that really cool.”

Cantor is developing “To Hal & Back,” a comedy about a guy from Los Angeles who moves to Berlin, a strange, artistic city. “It’s a coming-ofmiddle-age comedy,” he said.

Cantor worked in advertising for many years, but he became disillusioned with it.

He wrote a play in Chicago that was a satire of the ad business. That’s when he knew he was on the right track. He moved to the Big Apple to attend New York University in 1993, then to Los Angeles after an agent expressed interest in his spec samples for NBC hits “Frasier” and “NewsRadio.”

But when “Six Feet Under” premiered on HBO in June 2001, Cantor’s life changed. “I found the show so transformative and I just said, ‘I want to do that,’ ” he said.

By “that,” he meant drama. He joined the Writers Guild and started selling ideas. “I got some meetings, but there are so few staff writer jobs, there wasn’t really anything for me,” he said.

Cantor wrote for Fusion channel’s special, “The Naked Truth: Dirty Little Secrets.” Before that, his drama pilot “Mouthpiece,” was bought by Fox Television Studios.

The toughest part of being a writer, Cantor said, is rejection. “You face constant rejection,” he said. “But you never stop writing and you always have to be working on something.”