Terence Winter
speaker
107 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Terence Winter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And for anybody who's never done it, I mean, you know, it's funny if you think like they say, like one of the biggest fears people have is speaking in public. Yeah. Speaking in public with the agenda of also trying to get people to laugh. Yeah. Is like and it's funny you do a bit or you say a joke and people don't laugh. It's like getting punched in the face. Oh, yeah.
It is like it is no sound louder than people not laugh. Yeah. They say you think they're going to. Yeah.
I did not know a soul. I literally sold everything I had. I was not in a relationship at the time. And I just showed up here on May 8th, 1991. I got a room in a horrible SRO hotel. It was actually in MacArthur Park. And now I was like, all right, I have to figure out. So I went down to the Writers Guild and this was just complete luck.
They had a list of new agents or young agents who were actually looking for clients. And on that list was a guy I went to law school with who sat four seats away from me. Wow. And his name was Doug Viviani. He's not an agent, so don't call him. But I called him and I said, what are you doing? He said, are you an agent?
He said, no, I'm a real estate attorney and a client of mine wrote a book on real estate and I use the fee to get bonded as an agent. But I don't know anything about being an agent. I said, well, congratulations, you're my agent. What are you talking about? I'm in L.A. I'm writing. I'm trying to be a writer. I need an agent.
I said, so I'm going to create the Doug Viviani agency out of a mailbox, et cetera. And we're going to get letterhead and a phone mail. And I'm going to submit my work onto your letterhead. And if I get anything, you get 10% like an agent. And he said, great. So that's what I did.
He was like, you know, the guy on Charlie's Angels. So I did that and I photocopied all my scripts and this is back, you know, This is now like 1992. When you could do this, I would just pull up to the Warner Brothers lot, for example, and say, yeah, I'm the messenger from the Doug Viviani agency. I have some scripts I need to drop off. And I just hit every sitcom office in L.A.
And there was like 30 of them at the time. And I addressed, you know, here's my scripts to the showrunner from an agent. And now at least my scripts are in the building where theoretically, if lightning struck, I could at least have a shot.
And I don't know, about a week or so into it, I got a there's a phone message on the Doug Viviani voicemail line. And it's a woman said, yeah, hi, my name is Winifred Hervey Stallworth. I'm the executive producer of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I read Terry Winter's stuff. I'm interested in having him in maybe to pitch. So I said, oh, my God. So I called Doug in New York and it was a Friday.
He was gone for the weekend. I was like, shit, I got to wait till Monday now. And I was like, you know what? Doug doesn't really know anything about being an agent. I'll just be Doug. And I called her back.
This is so Donald Trump of you. Yeah. John Barron calling. So, yeah. And I have no idea what agents did or said. The only agent I ever saw was Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family. And he didn't seem to do much. But I figured, you know what? Let me just – I'm just going to wing it. And she said, yeah, yeah. We read his stuff. He's really, you know, talented. I said, oh, yeah. Kid's amazing.
So does he have like one more teenage oriented script? Because, you know, Fresh Prince is kind of a teenage show. I said, yeah, he just finished an incredible episode of The Wonder Years, but I don't have a copy of it. I won't have it until. So I'm trying to calculate in my head how long is it going to take me to write a Wonder Years episode. So it was Friday. I can get it to you two months later.
late Tuesday afternoon, if that works. She goes, yeah, fine, great. So hung up the phone and cranked out a Wonder Years episode, went in, gave it in. Now I was the messenger, I was the lawyer, I was everybody. And they had me in to pitch an idea and that became my foot in the door. I sold them on an idea that ultimately never went anywhere. But that was my first shot.
And a little after that, I got into a thing called the Warner Brothers Sitcom Writers Workshop, which they used to do. They would take 15 people from a pool of hundreds around the country and then put you through a program. At the end of it, they called me and they said, we have an interesting situation. We have a show we think you'd be great for. It's not a sitcom.
And this isn't a reflection of your sitcom writing. It's a drama that has comedy in it. And I said, well, why me? And they said, well, it's about a blue collar guy who's a lawyer who works for a big stuffy law firm. Do you think you could do that? And I was like, if I don't get this fucking job, I said, yes, basically my life story. So, yeah.
And that was my actual first staff job as a show called The Great Defender with Michael Rispoli, Peter Krause, Richard Kiley, who is man of La Mancha. And thank God that I've been working ever since that show. Wow. Incredible.
I was not taking no for an answer.
I mean, yeah. I mean, I grew up when I was 13. I started working for a butcher shop that was owned by Paul Castellano, who's the head of the Gambino family. When I was 16, I worked in an illegal card game run out of a synagogue in our neighborhood that was run by a guy named Roy DeMeo, who's the subject of a book called Murder Machine. He and his crew in the early 80s killed
more people than the Iraqi army at the time, I think was the, the statistic. He had a bar in my neighborhood. So by osmosis, I just kind of knew those guys. I also just became fascinated with crime and criminals. Actually, somebody asked me this, like, what was the first thing? And it sounds quaint now, but it was the movie Oliver.
I loved the idea of being part of that gang of pickpockets that was like, I wanted to be the, I wanted to be the awful Dodger. Oh, yeah. That looks so cool to me. And right around that time, I read Abby Hoffman had this book called Steal This Book. Of course. Yeah. Which was my Bible. And it was the first time I was like, oh, wow, you can scam shit. And then the sting came out.
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