When Andrew Fried (98C) marched across the stage at commencement, he received an empty blue envelope. It felt like a charade, all of it — the cap and gown, the official envelope, the ceremony, the celebration — to go through the motions of graduation and hold that empty big blue envelope when everyone else had diplomas. But maybe there was something to celebrate. He had survived four of the hardest years of his life, and college, despite its complex web of friendships and good times, of failures and devastating lows, was finally behind him. He was free to move on.
That was almost 25 years ago, before the multiple Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards nomination, Netflix deals, legendary friendship with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Festival de Cannes, Sundance Film Festival and a megahit docuseries, “Cheer” (2020), that turned into a Netflix sensation. Now 47, Fried is an acclaimed producer, founder and CEO of Boardwalk Pictures who has made his mark on Hollywood for his storytelling style of combining entertainment with authenticity. As for Emory University? “It was definitely business that was left unfinished,” Fried said. Class of 2023’s graduation in May marks 25 years since Fried crossed that same stage.
Fried grew up in Long Beach (N.Y.), where not unlike today, lots of people flocked to Emory for college. All eyes were on Atlanta in 1994, the year he applied — the Olympics were coming in 1996, and the city was bursting with untapped potential.
“There were a lot of people who were gravitated or were pulled just to that feeling that the Olympics was going to happen,” Fried said. “The entire world was going to be looking at Atlanta, and I think we all wanted to be some part of it and most of us were. Being in Atlanta that summer as an Emory student was being at the center of the world.”
He visited the Atlanta campus over spring break his junior year of high school and remembers walking in front of the Woodruff Physical Education Center and standing at what was then nicknamed “the dock” and is now the Emory Student Center. There, he saw a student walking around the campus in their slippers.
“I remember just saying to myself right at that moment, ‘This is where I want to be; I feel really really comfortable here,’” Fried said.
It was that gut feeling — the one they always tell you to trust during the college selection process. So, he applied early decision. He still remembers the day he got accepted.
Fried’s friend had driven him home from school that day. When they reached his house, Fried opened the mailbox and saw the long-awaited mail from Emory. He didn’t even open the envelope.
“I just slid the address window down, and I saw the first line said, ‘We’re pleased to inform you,’ and I freaked out and [my friend] tackled me on the front lawn, he jumped out of his car,” Fried said. “It was the only place I applied, and it was the only place that I considered going, and so getting in was a huge deal for me.”
Maybe the Emory acceptance wasn’t all that surprising. Fried had always been an overachiever. He was editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper, got good grades and was voted “most likely to succeed” by his classmates. Then he got to Emory. During convocation,1,200 wide-eyed freshmen clustered in Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church. Fried recalled then-University President William Chace giving that classic “welcome to college” speech.
“President Chace got up, and he started speaking in these glowing terms about the statistics around the freshman class at Emory that year,” Fried said.
Fried recalled Chace telling the crowd about the hundreds of editors-in-chief, student body presidents and students with impossibly-high SAT scores in the incoming class. Nearly all had been top of the class in high school.
“He just rattled off the most impressive statistics about these 1,200 people that we were sitting with and in what was a bit — a joke, and not a terrible one — he just rattled off all of these statistics and he said, ‘And half of you will graduate in the bottom half of your graduating class here at Emory. And it – ’ Fried paused. “It killed me.”
Surrounded by 1,200 other smart, ambitious, “most likely to succeed” people, the punchline — “the bottom half of your graduating class” — felt intended for him.
“Him saying that in that moment, for whatever was going on, whatever anxiety I had about starting this new journey — it just felt like he was speaking directly to me,” Fried said.
Fried moved into the now-defunct McTyeire Hall. He pledged Pi Kappa Alpha (PIKE) his second semester and in subsequent years, came to live in the PIKE house at what is now 22 Eagle Row.
“I look back to living in that house and being in a group of 35 guys who lived in the house and other 100 guys who didn't live in the house,” Fried said. “We were incredibly vulnerable with each other and real with each other, and it was a community of people where we tackled a whole lot of real stuff.”
Jordan Wynn (00C) met Fried when he was a freshman and remembers him as a natural born leader: “poised, confident and a great public speaker.” When Wynn rushed PIKE, it was Fried that gave the official rush speech. “Fried is someone that was always very funny, charming, and really could talk his way into or out of anything,” Wynn said. “He really had a very convincing and persuasive way about him in a way that inspires confidence… He's really a mentor and a leader and that's why he's a great producer. ”
Fried was president of the radio station, WMRE, hosting a radio show on Thursday mornings called “Chewing the Fat” (“such a college radio name from 1995”) from the basement of Eagle Hall. He also did sports announcing for the basketball games.
“Everybody was like, ‘Nobody’s listening,’” Fried said. “There’s actually nobody listening.”
Maybe nobody was listening, but that didn’t keep Fried from trying. When Emory cable started up, he held campus meetings and advocated to get the audio from WMRE onto the information channel.
“I used to go around with my friends to all the TV screens around in the post office and in the computer lab and whatever else, and I would just turn up the volume on the information screens literally daily,” he laughed.
Fried remembers Emory and Atlanta on the brink of change.
“There was a lot of possibility,” Fried said. “Atlanta was growing. New buildings were going up. Now Emory is just like that, right? There are always new buildings going up.”
He’s not wrong. Some things about Emory never change.
“I remember somebody said that the Emory eagle is a crane because there were just six huge cranes on campus just building these buildings,” Fried said. “So it did feel like that possibility.”
In so much possibility and potential, it was easy to get lost. Fried realizes now that he came to Emory “not knowing how to be a student.” He recalls his friends and peers going to Candler Library. He didn’t understand the draw.
“Where are you going?” he’d ask, watching his friends tromp up the marble steps.
“We’re going to Candler,” they’d answer back without fail, books in hand.
“Everybody was going to Candler and I had no idea what anyone was doing in there,” Fried said. “I would go sit and open my books and not really know what to do once the books were open. Or I would go outside and stand in the quad and just sort of catch whoever was coming out or going in. It was just a mystery to me.”
Looking back, he realizes that he could have gone to class, could have done the work that was expected, actively participated and been rewarded with at least a B. He could have figured out the mystery of Candler. Instead, he struggled in school.
There’s one very funny, very entertaining, very cringeworthy anecdote Fried tells about his time at Goizueta Business School.
“Fried always had a love of Hollywood and drama,” said Wynn, smiling. “I could imagine him recounting the story as a scene right out of a movie.”
Fried does not disappoint. He recounts an epic story about the time he walked out of his financial accounting final. He remembers reading a story about TV producer Gary David Goldberg in the hippie days of the 60s, who had walked out of a college final, grabbed his guitar, and hitchhiked across the country from Massachusetts to California.
“These movies were playing in my head. I just always wanted to tap into that romantic life on some level,” he said.
Ironically, he’d actually walked into his financial accounting final ready to take the exam, a blue book, Twix bar and can of Coca-Cola in hand.
“At some point, this feeling came over me,” Fried remembered. “This is not the life that I want.”
“This is not my life,” Fried declared loudly mid-final. He gathered his things and walked out of the room (“which was crazy”). He went back to his fraternity house and packed up his Acura Integra.
“In my mind, it was just like music was playing and I was gonna hit the road and go follow my dreams,” he laughed.
He went back to his fraternity house and packed his Acura Integra with his things. It soon wore off, and the reality - that he had literally walked out of his final exam - set in.
Fried remembers the walk from Goizueta to Eagle Row like it was yesterday.
“I'm going to Los Angeles. I'm gonna live my dreams and you know, didn't quite play out that way,” he said.
Perhaps, the incident served as an unlikely foreshadow.
“I guess the destination ended up being the same,” he shrugged.
But in the meantime, surviving Emory only got more challenging. Fried changed majors many times with stints in political science and sociology, failed classes and ultimately left Emory after four years without a degree.
“There was a lot to do with mental health and emotional maturity and things that I’ve had to work through — things that we all have to work through over our late teens and early 20s and into adulthood,” he said. “I am not unique in that I had a wrestling match with a lot of things that were going on in my body and my brain.”
It’s been a major regret: one - not graduating from Emory, but two - the pretense of it all. “Graduating” without really graduating.
“It probably did damage to me for years after that, of just this sort of charade that I had pulled off on graduation day at Emory,” he said.
Looking back, he’s of two minds on the issue.
“I realized not to be quite so harsh with the decisions that were made at that time because for me, just surviving those four years and moving on to the next chapter of my life was something to celebrate, or at the very least commemorate,” Fried said.
Emory itself was an experience of duality for Fried — a place filled with connection and joy, but also a place where Fried felt like there was no end in sight.
“There were days that were really really hard when there was no future that I could imagine because I was struggling so much in my present,” Fried said.
He recently returned to visit campus for the first time in 25 years. He walked past the old PIKE house, paced Cox Hall Bridge and stood outside Candler Library. The pain came flooding back.
“It's very hard for me to have any real connection today with what those things were, that were so challenging for me, you know, the class I had flunked last semester, or the girlfriend I had broken up with,” he said. “But walking through campus now, I can connect with the pain that I felt. It’s instantly right there again for me. It is such a strong connection to how I felt on many days on that campus which was also so good to me and which gave me so much.”
After Emory, Fried moved back to New York. Things began looking up. He graduated from Adelphi University (N.Y.) in two years with an American Studies degree and a 4.0 GPA before heading to LA. There, he found Emory yet again through alumni in the LA entertainment industry, such as talent agent Alex Yarosh (98B), producer Jamie Patricof (98C), Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin (01C) and editor Jennifer Brooks (98C), with whom Fried was nominated for an Emmy for the TV miniseries “We Need to Talk About Cosby.”
“She bought me that banner,” he said, proudly gesturing to the Emory pennant on the bulletin board behind him.
Among the Emory alums in LA is Wynn. The two kept in touch and now work together at Boardwalk Pictures.
“When I first came out to LA, I remember Fried gave me a tour in his old green Acura and showed me all around LA,” he recalled. “He was one of the few people that were out here before us and was instrumental in convincing myself and a couple of other friends to move out here and to really give it a shot.”
Fried started Boardwalk Pictures 13 years ago. Back in New York, a group of his friends were launching a new Broadway musical. Fried chronicled their journey to the great white way and finding success with the smash-hit “In the Heights” (2008), producing the documentary “In The Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams” (2017). Watching that same group find success in “Hamilton” (2015), which was originally intended as a mixtape instead of a Broadway musical, he resonated with the idea of making art accessible to the masses. Working in documentary filmmaking at the time, he saw a gap in nonfiction storytelling.
“People are craving something that is authentic, and they are watching ‘The Kardashians,’ and I’m working on documentary projects that have such a limited audience but are so authentic,” Fried said. “How could we do that for the audience that is watching ‘The Amazing Race’ and ‘The Kardashians,’ [who are] craving authenticity but are settling for that? How can we close that gap?”
And so, Boardwalk Pictures was born. The company went on to produce smash-hits like the Netflix documentary “Chef’s Table” (2015) and “Cheer” which took home three Emmys in 2020. “We Are Freestyle Love Supreme” debuted at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and received a Grammy Nomination for Best Documentary Feature. What makes a documentary like “Cheer” break the box office?
“For me, the success of ‘Cheer’ has everything to do with this cast of characters, who never really found anywhere where they fit in until they had found this community,” Fried said. “It’s the story of ‘Chef’s Table,’ too. I think every one of them would say ‘I never really found my home until I was in the kitchen’ and I think the cheerleaders on Cheer would say ‘I had never found a family really until I found my cheer family.”
Where some storytellers and producers might have spun the story of a cheer team out of Corsicana, Texas as a reality TV show, Fried said that director Greg Whiteley and the team at Boardwalk Pictures “just did the other thing,” They told a story of vulnerability and honesty. A story of people fighting for another chance, falling down and dusting themselves off, getting back out there. It’s the story of people lucky enough to find a home.
“That’s the thing that thrills me — people who have finally found their home,” Fried said.
It’s not unlike the Fried’s story at Emory.
“It was a time that totally molded me into the man that I am today and I’m so proud of where I am today and so happy today,” Fried said. “But it was not easy.”
On his return to campus this year, Fried found himself standing near Cox Hall, not far from the spot he had seen that Emory student walking around in slippers all those years ago. There was something about that student in slippers, roaming through campus like it was his home. Or maybe it was something about Emory — that set of gleaming white marble buildings and red brick paths.
“I felt my blood pressure lower. I felt like there was a calm that comes through me,” he pauses, then says slowly. "just being in that patch of earth. And so, that was why I wanted to go to Emory.”
For Fried, Emory was painful and beautiful and unfinished. But something about it was home. And though he was free to move on after his four years, Emory kept finding its way back to him. In Atlanta, in Los Angeles, in storytelling, in memory. In that wide-eyed, “most likely to succeed,” Olympic dreaming, movie-making possibility.
