I came to Hollywood from NY, unemployed, crashing on couches and certain that I was destined to become a successful writer-producer. Seventeen years later, my body of credits for writing and/or producing includes every format (multi-camera, single camera, half hours, hour longs and feature film polishes), and every tone - comedy, dramedy, dark drama, light drama; from ultra-realistic to over-the-top. It ranges from mainstream network productions like NBC's "Mad About You" (Paul Reiser, Helen Hunt) and CBS's "That's Life" (Paul Sorvino, Ellen Burstyn), to mainstream-edgy projects like Oxygen's "Campus Ladies", HBO's "Mind of the Married Man" to the extreeeemely edgy, like Richard Pryor's final two projects - Showtime's "Pryor Offenses" based on Richard's characters, and "The Richard Pryor 'I Ain't Dead Yet, Mutha#$%!' Comedy Special for Comedy Central. Currently, I'm writing this season's Emmy telecast (again) and just delivered Season 2 of "Exes & Ohs" - a single camera lesbian "Friends" for Viacom's gay network, LOGO (Season 1 was nominated for a GLAAD award. We lost.)

My reward for going from unemployable to all the above has been a career of creative and commercial satisfaction, large cash prizes and repeated emotional scarring.

I also have a lovely wife , two kids (6 and 4) with whom I'm stupid in love, two dogs, two cockatiels, and two live chickens (the kids hatched them).

So why, in the spare time I don't have, am I continuing to teach the writers' workshop I launched at UCLA?

Because I still love what I do. And I love writers (it's a love I learned from the first showrunner I worked for, and it's stuck). And I still care about improving what we writers do and the way we do it.

There have been so many times along the way that I have f----ed up because "nobody told me" to do that, or not do that. I've realized that nobody tells any of us that stuff - and somebody needs to. When (not if) you're hired to write a script, "they" will assume you know all these things that "nobody ever tells you." The folks who've taken my workshop know these things.

But in the end, I won't be giving you anything you don't already have - everything you need is already inside you. You just need to know where to look.

I hope you can join us for the next workshop.

Warm regards,

Bill Grundfest

Bel Air, CA