[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: How long had you been in Los Angeles before you sold your first script?
Andy Guerdat, Television Writer, Producer, Instructor, and Podcaster: Amazingly about a year and a half. I came out here from Birmingham, Alabama knowing no one. I don’t mean I didn’t know anybody in the business, I didn’t know anybody! I went to a little open enrollment film school called Sherwood Oaks Experimental College which doesn’t exist anymore. This was in the 70s. It was kind of a hippie-dippy film school and I met people there and I sort of got professionals and people like me were starting out.
One thing led to another, I partnered up with a fellow who I liked his work, he liked my work. We sort of needed emotional support at the time. We wrote some spec television scripts. I wrote a feature material on my own but we wrote some spec television stuff. We sent it out to agents. About a year after I’d gotten here, we got an agent which probably the way we did it you can’t do it anymore. Also I’m not sure agents are necessarily as important as they used to be for your success. I know plenty of writers who have had at least some modest success in television without an agent at all.
About six months after that, we sold an episode of The Jeffersons. That was my first professional script. Then we freelanced for two or three years after that just in those days (it’s not that way anymore) but in those days there was enough freelance material/work that if you sold two or three or four a year that was enough to live on. You can’t do that anymore. There’s no almost no freelance work outside of animation…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
About:
Andy Guerdat has been a working writer/producer in film and television for the past 45 years, with hundreds of credits in movies, half-hour comedies, hour-long dramas, theater, and animation. He is currently a consultant at Disney TV Animation.
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