Hope your crocs are in sports mode.

Welcome to another edition of the Fred & Dan Blog! Our mission with Fred&Dan Productions and this blog has always been to make people think in ways they’ve never done before - to spark creativity and facilitate conversation in unconventional ways. A place where you can open up your email and have a bit of creativity to take with you into your day or week! 

As you are used to by now, we have been giving weekly updates on the writer’s strike, and developments have happened over the past couple days so we wanted to dedicate a whole blog to it. The first big update is that yesterday, SAG-AFTRA (the actor’s union) joined the WGA on strike. Fran Drescher (yes, that Fran from The Nanny) is the president of SAG and gave an impassioned speech about why they are going on strike that you can watch here. This essentially means that all scripted productions or productions with SAG actors are suspended. This might work in the favor of writers, encouraging the AMPTP to come to the table quicker so productions can start again, but most likely, SAG will reach a deal sooner rather than later, and the writers will remain strong on the picket line. 

Second, this headline. 

The lack of self awareness of the AMPTP is so astounding it’s maybe impressive? Like, imagine working in movies and TV shows and saying that people losing their homes is a “cruel but necessary evil” and not recognize that you are in fact the villain in this whole situation? I am half expecting the scooby gang to roll up and reveal that it was a spooky skeleton doing this the whole time under the mask. 

We’ve been giving the play-by-play of the strike on a wide scale, but to bring it home, this is how it’s affected us - writing projects that were gaining a lot of momentum have come to a grinding halt, and now, with SAG on strike, even our indie production projects are hanging in the balance. It’s hard to plan for the future and figure out our place in the industry when the majority of people aren’t working, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. 

We just did an interview with CEO Bianca Turner from UPBasketball that we are releasing next week, and one of the things she talked about was the moments in your life or in your business when you’re faced with a challenge and you have to pivot. Being able to pivot is what makes a good business owner/entrepreneur. We’ve been using this seemingly “downtime” to focus more on how we want to grow our business, putting more intention behind this blog and our zine, and also polishing old scripts and coming up with new ones. Last weekend, we rewrote an entire script in less than 24 hours, totalling our third script since the strike started on May 2nd. 

We say this because it seems like the dark times keep coming -- two years in covid, a recession, nation-wide job layoffs, and now not one but TWO strikes -- and it’s easy to question everything you’re doing and want to give up. What if instead you saw this moment as an opportunity to think differently and get creative with your situation? These are the moments you will look back on and think, “I'm so happy I kept going” or “I’m so happy I pivoted and found my calling or my new passion.” Because like we said in our previous blog, our new selves lay waiting for us in the shadows, you just need to use your creativity to find it.

(btw - this is the studio lot where Dan usually works when her show isn’t on hiatus. Can’t beat the view of Henry Cavill on a billboard… c’mon guys this is serious!!! Stop looking at Henry Cavill!!)