Welcome to Fred&Dan!
Us at our first movie premiere for our short MGirls!
Hey hi hello!
If you’re reading this, you’ve either supported Fred & Dan in the past or have subscribed to our newsletter!
If you’re new here, welcome! We’re Fred & Dan AKA Giovana & Janette, best friends and writing and producing partners. Fred & Dan is our LLC that we started in 2016. That’s right, we are BUSINESS BITCHES.
A quick overview of us: we met in college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The actual date of our meeting is much contested because the first two years of college are… fuzzy to say the least. But by junior year we were good friends and by senior year, inseparable! We had an internship together at a production company called Good Universe, and it was those long commutes in the car that really brought us together. That and IPA Mondays at the campus bar. (side note: IPA Mondays at a college bar??? They were giving us $1 IPAS!! They have the highest alcohol content of all beers! What were they thinking??)
Post college, we were living our best (and broke) early 20s life in a townhouse in North Hollywood with two other roommates and noisy DJ neighbors. It was during this magical year of post graduation anxiety that Giovana approached me (Janette!) about helping her write a screenplay - a true life story of her mom and friend’s experiences growing up in the Mission, San Francisco in the 1970s. San Francisco in the ‘70s?? Say less! After going through a couple drafts together Giovana made me the happiest woman alive by asking me if I wanted to be her writing partner. And I, of course, said yes. Imo, they should make registries for business partners, not just romantic partners.
The following year we completed our first production together, a proof of concept of the aforementioned script called MGirls. We contributed $11,000 of our own money and raised an extra $6,000 to recreate a 1970s San Francisco night club in the heart of Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. It was the most intense, and most rewarding experience we’ve ever had.
So much has happened in our lives since then. We both left LA and moved back home to the Bay Area, I have since moved back to LA while Gio resides in Oakland. We’ve written four feature films and one TV pilot (with three scripts currently in development). We came up with the name of Fred & Dan - a combination of our last names Frediani & Danielson. We launched our LLC and produced smaller productions in the Bay, including a proof of concept for our script Mean Streak, yoga videos for Giovana’s business Fire & Flow , and social media/online videos for other women-run, Oakland based companies and creators. Our script Mean Streak has won and made it to the finals of big deal screenwriting competitions. We’ve had and lost managers, we’ve come close to deals to have them fall through, we’ve entered SO MANY screenwriting contests. There have been a lot of tears, laughter, and so much wine and coffee.
We wanted to start a blog to bring people into our lives as screenwriters as we continue to grow our business and chase our dreams. You’ll hear from both of us here about our journey as a long-distance partnership, our experiences on set in different roles, the process of writing our new script, The Fox and The Moon, and hopefully explain to our parents why we aren’t famous YET.
We hope you stick around as we continue our shenanigans through life and this crazy career path! Make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter to get our new posts every Friday!
Fred & Dan doing what we do best…drinking coffee and/or wine!