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!  

First an update on the writer’s strike! Things are looking cautiously optimistic as the negotiators for the WGA and the AMPTP meet for the third day in a row today. They also released a joint statement, which makes it seem like things are moving in a direction to end the strike. If the strike continues for another 11 days it will become the longest writing strike in history. While this may be a good step in negotiations, by the time there are actual contracts written and ratified by voting members we could be well into December or January. 

On a more exciting note we’re still on set of Big Oops! We are just finishing up our first week of shooting!! Last week we were in our longest location - an office space next LAX- it was such a funny place to film. We swear that building had an entire brain of its own, but we all had a great time laughing at its quirks. This week we’re all over town! Fred&Dan directed the first part of our episode yesterday at a local pet store. It was so much fun (and smelly)  and we got to work with a live vulture on set, which was insanely cool. 

Even though we are so busy on set making a whole show, we didn’t want you to forget that our Zine Subliminal is coming out next month on Halloween! We have some amazing contributing artists and are so excited. Thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered a copy of the zine already, and if you haven’t - go do it now HERE! 

Here is Dan’s sentiments about the zine and what it means to her: 

Sometimes when you work in entertainment, it can feel like your contribution to society is very little. On a day to day basis, I’m not fighting for social change, lobbying politicians, or providing services that are necessary for human survival. At my day job (working in court TV) we frequently say to each other, “it’s not brain surgery” to try to stress to each other that in the grand scheme of things what we are doing…. It’s not that important. 

This has always been hard for me and feels counterintuitive to what I was taught and practiced growing up. I always knew I was going to end up in the arts somehow, and I always knew that I felt incredibly passionate about social change. But as I grew up and got more into the entertainment business I saw these two interests diverge away from each other. 

That’s why our mission at Fred&Dan, the art we put out and our values, is so important to us. Entertainment and art can co-exist and make a change. Some of the greatest art in the world was created in response to social issues of the day, and social change arrived in response to that art. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair or the movie Get Out are immediate examples that come to mind. 

This zine collaboration with Access Reproductive Justice finally feels like the marriage of what I care about most in the world coming together. Reproductive justice is about more than women having access to safe abortions, but about the human right to bodily autonomy and the right to raise our children in safe and sustainable communities. The messaging we see in the media mainly focuses on just one aspect of reproductive justice, abortion, but doesn’t zoom out to look at the whole picture. While the content of this zine won’t necessarily seem directly related to this cause, the subliminal messaging we receive every day directly relates to how we feel about reproductive justice. 

I hope with the pieces our artists and myself contribute to the zine, we can literally and figuratively pull back the images and messaging we receive constantly to reveal the truth of this issue.