eCREATIVE
Sister, Sister
THE ROYAL FAMILY
THE WAYANS
avid Steven Simon never planned
to be a television comedy writer.
At age 4, he made the decision to
be an actor after appearing in a production
of Tommy and the Wishing Well. A native
New Yorker, Simon was raised in Hollis,
Queens, and attended Manhattan’s
prestigious High School of Performing Arts
as a drama major. By the time he
graduated from college, he had been an
actor for 20 years.
D
said. “I learned what would sell and
what wouldn’t.”
Simon began his entertainment career in
New York City as a publicist for United
Artists where he helped launch three
Academy Award winning films in a row:
Rocky, Network, and One Flew Over The
Cuckoo’s Nest, while working on Woody
Allen films, James Bond films, and Pink
Panther films. “I wrote captions and stories
based on information from the set,” he
Simon said access to Hollywood power
brokers at that time was easy. “We
used to creep on the studio lot and
chat up the really cute secretaries.
Eight out of 10 times when their bosses
came in, they’d say, ‘these guys are
cute and funny; you should talk to
them’. We got a lot of meetings that
way.”
After working in the Big Apple, David
Simon headed to California to connect
with a friend who told him to look him
up if he ever came to Los Angeles. “I
knew nothing about scripts, pitches, or
anything,” he noted. “He said we could
sell ideas for a living and we did. An
agent convinced us he could represent
us as a writing team.”