Boardwalk Pictures founder Andrew Fried on leaving what you love and finding your way back again.

I walk up to an unassuming brick building on a crisp, sunny, Santa Monica day; I pause in front of the glass double doors before opening them. I see myself reflected: high-waisted jeans, a striped shirt, platform Teva’s, and a large black backpack holding my laptop and clipboard, both carrying notes for the b-roll we need to shoot later today; after this, I’ll be walking a few blocks to a nearby painter’s studio where I’m producing an episode of a docuseries.

I wouldn’t be making films if it weren’t for the people in this building. Especially one person. I take a breath. I look up at the simple silver embossed sign:

Boardwalk Pictures.

I walk in but no one else is downstairs. It’s really early in the morning. I don’t mind. I sit on the small black couch and wait; I see editing rooms with “Chef’s Table” and “BookTube” on the door. At the reception desk is a small taped up printed page reminding everyone of “Theme Thursdays” – today is Thursday, and the theme is wearing swag from a previous show (next week is hat day).

Eventually someone comes downstairs to get coffee and spots me. He’s really kind. He goes up and gets the assistant of whom I’m here to see; she greets me warmly and walks me upstairs. We pass by more editing bays, and a few Emmys lined up on a shelf, and finally reach the corner office, lined with windows. The name on the door: Andrew Fried.

He’s dressed casually with white spiky-ish hair, blue-rimmed glasses, and a big smile. His office is large and open, light pouring in from every angle.

Of the five films that have changed the course of my life, Andrew Fried has directed three of them:

1. In The Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams

2. Episode 4 of Season 1 of Chef’s Table: Niki Nakayama

3. Episode 1 of Season 4 of Chef’s Table: Christina Tosi

Before Chef’s Table was picked up by Netflix to be their first original docuseries, no one wanted it. After many rejections, a well-meaning advisor took Andrew aside and said, “If you keep pitching this, you’re going to start to get a reputation around town that you don’t understand how the TV business works.” Netflix as a streaming service was still so new at the time that Andrew remembers his agent asking, “So how are those cooking ‘webisodes’ going?”

Andrew’s production company Boardwalk Pictures would help lead a new era of documentary storytelling – one that was beautiful, insightful, and entertaining, without having to rely on reality TV tropes, producing projects like Cheer, 7 Days Out, Last Chance U, Val, Street Food, Being: Mike Tyson, and We Are Freestyle Love Supreme.

Each production is led by a whole crew of talented people – just watch the credits. But what brought them all to Boardwalk Pictures? And who is Andrew Fried, the storyteller who started it all?

I’m about to find out.

“This is not my life.”

When Andrew was six years old, he stood tall on a chair to give a toast for his grandparents’ anniversary party: “I remember having confidence even at that age to tell a good story.”

He also had a natural sense of what made something a good story, like when he’d tell a few friends something that happened to him and his friend Craig and then Craig would say, “That wasn't really what happened.”

“Yeah,” Andrew would say, “but this is better."

We laugh now as he reflects: “Maybe an odd marriage for a documentary filmmaker.”

But it was really about making any story the best it could possibly be. Like when he was given an assignment to choose a biography to read aloud to the class: he chose David Letterman, and didn’t just dress up like him, but also had his friend dress up like David’s sidekick Paul Schaffer. They concluded the oral presentation with a top 10 list.

Andrew was editor for the school newspaper, performed in school plays, and was voted Most Likely to Succeed in his high school graduating class. In college, patterning himself after his entrepreneurial family, he majored in business. But he floundered.

He drifted in and out of classes, bored, and spent his creative energy on his college radio show and announcing live sporting events during his time at Emory University in Atlanta.

He couldn’t shake this feeling that he wanted to be an artist. So he told himself a story:

“I'm not succeeding in college because I really want to create art.”

He remembered reading a story about how TV creator Gary David Goldberg (whose brother also happened to be the head counselor at Andrew’s summer camp when he was a kid) walked out of class in the middle of his college finals, grabbed his guitar, and hitchhiked across the country to be a writer: “I was craving this romantic experience in my life.”

So one day, in the middle of his Financial Accounting final, Andrew put down his pencil and said, out loud, “This is not my life." He grabbed his Twix bar and walked out.

He laughs now of how dramatic it was in his head…when in reality he says, it was really “sort of lame” and anticlimactic. Because he didn’t actually leave college then. He just kept thinking about doing it.

And The Most Likely To Succeed designation haunted him. He felt like a college failure. So he thought:

“If I'm going to fail, I need to fail huge. And if I'm going to fail huge, it's going to be because I am an artist.”

“I really knew nothing about cooking.”

After college, Andrew moved from his hometown of Long Beach, New York to an apartment in Greenwich Village to enroll in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute: “I really wanted to explore that artist in me.”

Around that time his roommate, Jamie Patricof, who Andrew describes as a real foodie, had a TV show idea to teach people to cook inside their apartments, with whatever they had on hand, and on a budget. They shot a pilot with a cast of characters who would help young broke New Yorkers cook good food in tiny apartments. Andrew hosted the segment of the show called “Idiot’s Corner,” where he’d teach something basic like how to make peanut butter crackers. In the pilot episode, he shows the viewer how to make ice:

“It was like, ‘All right, tonight, we're going to make ice. You just want to pour water into the trays there and put it into the freezer. And in a little bit, you'll have some ice!’ I really knew nothing about cooking. Nothing.”

They figured not every New Yorker would know “nothing” about cooking, so Andrew would be the sidekick sous chef, always there to be the “idiot” Jamie could teach.

That ice-making pilot is on Andrew’s desk, all its potential held now in a faded VHS case.

The pilot never turned into anything more, but it did introduce him to RadicalMedia, the company that helped produce the pilot, what they called Urban Kitchen, and it’s how he met producer Jon Kamen.

Urban Kitchen is where Andrew first learned how important it was to act on ideas: “Just make it; get a camera and shoot it.”

After two years in New York, Andrew moved to LA where he spent the next three years acting, doing standup comedy, performing improv, writing spec scripts, going on auditions, and doing some voiceover work, scratching together a living doing odd jobs like selling ad space inside bathroom stalls.

Then 9/11 happened. He grieved and processed with his friends. He couldn’t help but notice everyone had a story about Where They Were When It Happened. They all had Somewhere To Be. They were all doing Something Important: big careers, taking care of kids. They had full adult lives. Andrew felt behind.

Being an artist all of a sudden felt frivolous, pointless, silly, inane. Especially since he hadn’t really gotten anywhere after five years of trying. That was it.

He was done being an artist.

He left LA, went back home to New York, and joined the family real estate business.

“Am I two people?”

Andrew bought a few Brooks Brothers suits and got off at Exit 49 South on the Long Island Expressway every day to learn the real estate business from his uncle Stuart.

He learned how to oversee construction jobs inside office buildings, and had a small office of his own.

He loved it in the beginning, how refreshing it was to have someplace to go, something to do, instead of waiting on the couch for someone to call him. He had fun, and learned so much about leadership and organization from his uncle and grandfather.

He’s not sure when it happened, but at some point, the novelty wore off and he felt unhappy. Like he was pretending.

He went to a new salon one day, a place his friend recommended, to get his hair cut.

He walked in wearing his sport jacket and tie, and sat down. He took off his jacket and the French stylist (English was her second language) asked Andrew questions in a clipped, direct manner, trying to get a sense of him so she could decide how to best cut and style his hair:

"Who are you?" she started.

Andrew looked at himself in the mirror: “When you get your haircut, you actually stare at yourself for longer than you ever do. Like, you really are looking at yourself. Even as you're talking to the stylist, you're looking at yourself.”

He didn’t answer at first. She continued: "So, who are you? Is this who you are?" referencing his clothes.

She draped the black cape over him, completely eclipsing his suit.

“Well,” Andrew began, “this is how I dress for work, but I wouldn't say this is who I am."

"So, you are two people?"

Andrew thought about her question for a moment. Then he broke down and sobbed, right there in the chair.

“She’s just trying to figure out what my hair should look like. And I'm staring at myself in the mirror and having this existential crisis: Am I two people? Who am I? What do I want? How should I wear my hair?”

He couldn’t bear being two people anymore. It turned out the artist inside him hadn’t died; it was begging to get out. That was the day Andrew decided he couldn’t ignore his real dreams any longer.

Now all he had to do was tell his grandfather.

“I need to live my own dream.”

He wasn’t too worried though. He loved his grandpa and his grandpa loved him. He could almost imagine the loving hug, the support.

Andrew walked in to his grandpa’s office the next morning and said:

“I'm so grateful and appreciative for this opportunity. But I realize now this isn't my dream. I need to live my own dream.” He told his grandpa he would be happy to stay another six months to help with the transition, but after that he needed to pursue his dream. Andrew readied himself for an embrace.

Instead, his grandpa replied: “I have never been more disappointed in anyone in my entire life. I'm 87 years old. I do not want to have a stroke over this. You have 10 minutes to get your stuff and get out of here. I don't ever want to see or hear from you again."

Andrew grabbed a white cardboard box and threw in his things and walked out. His uncle saw him in the hallway and incredulously asked, “What happened?” Andrew replied, shellshocked, “I’m done,” and kept on walking.

In the car, he took his tie off and put it in the box. When he got home, he sat on his bed in his tiny studio apartment to take off his dress shoes; he thought about the particular clip clop sound they’d make on construction sites, “the sound of a floor that hadn’t been built yet.”

As he removed his shoes, he caught himself in the bathroom mirror and thought: “I'm never going to wear these shoes again. There’s no safety net anymore. If I’m going to do something now, I have to really do it.”

He went all in, doing any gig he could to make money, like being an extra on Law and Order. He also got work at what was still a relatively new enterprise then, the TriBeCa film festival, where he came up with an idea to have a kids press corps. Jon Kamen of RadicalMedia had a film premiering that year, so when he walked by and saw Andrew, whom he hadn’t seen since the Urban Kitchen pilot, sitting on a red carpet supporting a 10-year-old reporter asking celebrities about their favorite movies as a kid, he stopped and asked:

"What are you doing here?"

Andrew looked up sheepishly and said, "Well, you know I'm just trying to get something going."

"Call me Monday,” Jon said.

And that’s how Andrew started freelancing for RadicalMedia.

“Be the f--- you."

At that same time, Jay-Z had given RadicalMedia a box of tapes that held hours of footage from the making of his latest album; he wanted them to cut it into short form videos they could use as bonus album content.

But when the team at RadicalMedia showed Jay-Z the rough cut, he was so inspired and said, “That's a movie. Let's make this a movie."

Andrew was a production assistant on that movie, in charge of film logs (aka, filing).

But he noticed how much work was piling up. There were people transcribing every word of footage and those words were printed and put into binders. The binders kept growing but no one seemed to have time to look through them. They were on a tight deadline; Andrew noticed most of the editors kept toothbrushes in the pen cups on their desks.

“There were four editors working on this movie because it was a big rush to finish; but there were no story producers, so there was no glue between the binders sitting on a shelf and the editors.”

Andrew became the glue.

Genuinely wanting to help the editors he admired, he took the binders home and started highlighting anything that looked interesting, like when Jay-Z said to Young Guru, “People want me to be this. People want me to be that.” And Young Guru said: “Be the f--- you."

Andrew wrote it all up into a summary sheet and gave it to the editors. They were floored, and the film’s director Michael John Warren was impressed; they set up a Final Cut station for Andrew to start pulling the footage he’d found. That’s how he got his first associate producer credit.

And how he got his first meeting with Tommy Kail and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

“Watch this space.”

A few years later, Andrew saw Lin’s freestyle rap group – Freestyle Love Supreme – perform at Ars Nova on a Thursday night.

Andrew admits his first thought was: “F--- those guys.”

He was jealous. Bitter. They were everything he’d tried to be and failed. It hit an old wound: “I wanted to create art and I wanted to be a part of this community. Giving it up was hard. And then going to that show and seeing how incredibly talented they were and how easy they made it look?” It hurt.

But his attraction to their talent and passion far outweighed his initial bad mood about it. He knew this was something special, and he wanted to meet them.

But would they take a meeting with him, an unknown freelancer?

But to them, he was the Associate Producer of their favorite Jay-Z documentary, Fade to Black.

Andrew asks me if I’ve ever seen those empty billboards that say “Watch this space.” He tells me that is almost literally what he saw above their heads when he met them: “It was just so clear to me.”

That’s the first time Andrew met Tommy Kail and Lin-Manuel Miranda, 10 years before Hamilton opened at The Public.

He was still freelancing for RadicalMedia and told Jon Kamen about Freestyle Love Supreme and asked for money and permission to film them during the fringe festival they were about to perform at in Scotland.

Andrew still isn’t sure why, but Jon gave him $5,000 and told him to go. But first, he gave Andrew this advice: “You're not going to shoot a TV show, you're just going to build a relationship with them." Andrew remembers internally scoffing at the time. He had a TV show in mind – a kind of Seinfeldian docuseries where you’d follow the group during the day and then watch them improv about what happened during the day each night.

He met with Freestyle Love Supreme one last time to ask them about the project; they arrived with suitcases in hand, just before their flight to Scotland. They said yes.

When Andrew gave his initial pitch to Jon he said: "I've just seen the most talented people I've ever been near and they're going to Scotland for a month. If we don't film them now, we will miss the opportunity because they will come back from Scotland being really, really famous."

Andrew was convinced the world would know their names in six months.

The world wouldn’t know their names for several years.

But he wasn’t wrong.

As he said to Greg Brunkalla whom he brought to Scotland with him to film:

“Do you want to film these people with me for the next year? I don't know where they're going, but I think they're going somewhere cool."

“What do I do now?”

Above Andrew’s desk behind us are three small cassette tapes, each labeled in handwritten marker: FLS01, FLS02, and FLS03. FLS01 has a date written on it: April 5, 2006.

Andrew flew to Scotland to film Freestyle Love Supreme, and he didn’t really know what he was doing. But he was making something again. And it felt good.

Andrew’s first day of filming in Scotland.

He slept on couches and followed the group everywhere. (The show he envisioned never came to be, but 15 years later that footage turned into the documentary We Are Freestyle Love Supreme, which premiered at The Sundance Film Festival and is available on Hulu.)

Because of the relationship Andrew built in Scotland, Lin and Tommy invited him to see an early reading of In The Heights at 37 Arts. It was just a small group of actors and very limited staging, but he does remember people waving flags over their heads during the "Carnival" song.

It was just a workshop.

But Andrew got the same feeling he got when he first saw Freestyle Love Supreme.

And this time without any anger or jealousy; it was pure awe.

This was something. And he needed to do something.

He called his mom on 37th street and said, in a kind of frenzy: “Mom, the songs that I just heard are going to be performed by high school kids for the next 50 years; what do I do now?”

She calmly replied: "You do what you do. You tell their story."

Andrew filmed the making of In The Heights for over two years, collecting about 1,000 hours of footage: “It was an incredibly special time. I remember Lin with his Nintendo backpack; it was just so pure.”

The footage turned into a PBS special and some footage was later incorporated into We Are Freestyle Love Supreme. But for Andrew, the proximity to the making of In The Heights was life changing. Being around that kind of energy rubbed off…you couldn’t help but start to wonder: What else is possible?

“People thought I was crazy.”

Andrew eventually was hired as a full-time producer at RadicalMedia (where he worked on projects like Sundance’s Iconoclasts and MTV’s 2008 Britney Spears documentary Britney: For The Record).

But after over four years at RadicalMedia, it was time to go. He’d always dreamed of having his own business one day.

In 2009, he walked into Jon Kamen’s office and said: "You have given me the opportunity of a lifetime here. And I feel like I have delivered some really good work for you. And I feel like we're even. If I stay any longer, it's not going to feel that way."

Boardwalk Pictures was born in January, 2010.

But it struggled – mostly because “Boardwalk Pictures” couldn’t get a credit. Most people wanted to hire “Andrew Fried” not “Boardwalk Pictures.” He could have made a good living as “Andrew Fried” the freelancer, but his dream was to have a company, to be able to do multiple projects at a time, and create something that wasn’t about him, but about good storytelling.

To make ends meet, he did a few gigs credited only as himself, not his company.

But when he was asked to be the showrunner for Back Of The Shop with Fox Sports One, he took a stand and said he would only do it if they credited Boardwalk Pictures and allowed the company to fully produce it in-house. In return, he said his partners could adjust the budget however they needed; it wasn’t about money for him. He wanted to establish his dream.

They agreed. And Back of The Shop is when Andrew was introduced to David Gelb, who’d already directed and produced Jiro Dreams of Sushi. David had an idea that what he did with Jiro Dreams of Sushi – featuring a dedicated chef’s journey – could be done in an episodic docuseries. He was speaking Andrew’s language; Andrew still didn’t know much about food then, but he was deeply passionate about creating “premium, high-end storytelling,” a dream that began shortly after he was fired from a reality TV show he produced for Bravo. People couldn’t get enough of reality TV. So why not find a way to show them how great real TV could be? Between cinematic documentaries and reality TV Andrew thought: “There’s got to be something in the middle...And people thought I was crazy.”

Everyone rejected Chef’s Table: “This is not a TV show,” they’d say.

But Andrew kept going:

“We just wanted to find somebody who would give us the money to make it. It wasn't like, ‘I know this is going to be the greatest thing ever.’ It was like, ‘I just want to make it.’”

But then it got picked up - by Netflix; it would be their first ever unscripted original series.

Andrew and David didn’t know if anyone would watch it – Netflix was just this DVD delivery service with red envelopes trying this new thing called “streaming.”

But they were just excited to be able to make the series.

Andrew directed episode 4, about Niki Nakayama, spending about two weeks filming with her.

“I felt like my responsibility there, even if nobody was ever going to pay attention to it, was to let the story of her feel like her; don't try to make her into Guy Fieri, let her be Niki Nakayama.”

I cried when I saw that episode for the first time, because of who Niki is, and because of the space she was given to be a combination of things I’d never seen a woman of color be on screen: ambitious, quiet, tenacious, unsure, bold, committed, happy, skilled, proud.

When Andrew got pushback about the way they were approaching storytelling on Chef’s Table – how antithetical it was to reality TV - he pushed back: “No. We can let these portraits be faithful to the people whose story we are amplifying through them. We're putting a lens on people and letting them tell their story.”

“Dream big dreams.”

But of course, not everything Andrew’s ever created, or wanted to create, worked out the way he hoped.

Like any art form, there’s been lots of rejection. Some ideas have never been made. Some were made but no one seemed to watch.

But what keeps him going is pursuing the things he “just wants to make.”

People ask him all the time what he looks for in stories; today, Boardwalk Pictures has gained such a reputation that celebrities are constantly approaching them with new show ideas. They pass on a lot of them.

Andrew doesn’t have one magic thing he’s looking for. When they know, they know. He likens it to that quiet feeling he got when he first saw Lin-Manuel Miranda freestyle on stage: a sense of magic and urgency; a curiosity to know more, get closer, bring a camera.

When I ask him about his greatest dream come true, it’s not his big window-filled corner office or the Emmys in the hall or the celebrities in his cell phone. It’s the people in the brick building:

Filming We Are Freestyle Love Supreme in 2019 with DP Bryant Fisher.

“This idea that there is this community of people who are storytellers here, and it continues to grow and get bigger - and not bigger for big's sake or money - bigger in that we have a greater platform to do things.”

There are a couple of new things he can’t talk about yet, but I can see the shine of excitement in his eyes when he alludes to them, something I’d guess Jon Kamen saw when he asked him for $5,000 to go to Scotland, something he hasn’t lost after all these years.

When Andrew tucks his kids in at night, he always says: “Dream big dreams.”

He knows they’ll have a head start, seeing their dad run a company.

He also knows that sometimes we can build our own ceilings, create even more limits.

There are some aspects of proximity and privilege we can’t control, but there are some we can. Like what we create.

“What we put out there is what we attract back to us. And the people we surround ourselves with make that even louder. When we build a posse of that energy, it amplifies exponentially.”

The more time Andrew spent with people whose ceilings were high, who dreamt big dreams and didn’t ask for permission, the higher his own ceiling rose. Like when he first met Chris Jackson: Andrew was in awe that he met the guy who played Simba on Broadway. But Chris wasn’t thinking about that – he was thinking about his next project, whatever was right in front of him. Andrew realized even those who’d reached great heights were still going higher, always growing, always dreaming.

Meeting people like that in-person is ideal – but film gets you close. I tell Andrew about how six years ago I saw In The Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams and then flew to New York to go to the basement of the Drama Bookshop where Lin worked on In The Heights, something I’d learned from watching his documentary.

A lot of Andrew’s work raised my own ceilings, and even directly led to me actually meeting Chris Jackson and Lin-Manuel Miranda myself.

Before I go, I ask Andrew what everyone he’s made stories about have in common – from Jay-Z to the chefs on Chef’s Table to Lin and Tommy and Oprah and the dozens of masters on the show Iconoclasts.

“I don't think one of those people started with a business plan and a way to make a whole lot of money. I don't think they really had ‘success’ as the thing they were trying to achieve.
“Everyone was just trying to do the thing that was in front of them and do it great.

“Tommy wanted to make theater. Lin wanted to write and compose theater that represented a voice he hadn't heard yet.

“They are all so authentically doing the thing that they want to be doing.
“And there’s always this feeling of, ‘We're just getting to the good part.’
“All of those people we look at as having ‘made it’ don't feel like they're there yet; because what they're doing next is the most exciting thing.”

For Andrew, that’s the newest show he’s making with Dan Levy. But for Boardwalk Pictures, it’s something he’s been thinking a lot about lately:

“The current version of Boardwalk Pictures is as big as I imagined it could be for a while. And in the last year I've spent a lot of time thinking, ‘How do I raise that ceiling for us as a company?
“I never imagined the company would make as much work as we do and reach as many people and be a part of the conversation. And so the real challenge over the last year has been, ‘Okay, I’ve got a lot of time left. I’ve got a lot left in me. And I have a lot of amazing people around me.
“So now what?”

He doesn’t pose that question with angst, or bravado. It’s all curiosity: a deep desire to keep making stuff, and keep raising the bar – not for ego, but for the sheer joy of being able to tell more stories, that kid standing on the chair giving a toast at his grandparents anniversary, longing to put on a show, tell you a story that makes you feel something.