 When I was seven years old, I started being a cashier, and my dad's store, Radio Electric Company, started without TV because it was in the 40s. We didn't have TV in Tuscaloosa until 1949, I think, and he had a TV set in his store and he could pick up little glimmerings of the Memphis station, but there was not one in Birmingham at that point, as I recall. When I graduated from high school, I went to the University of Alabama for two years and my girlfriend's father ran the public television station here, so I got a job at the television station. I took a cut in salary, I went from 75 cents an hour to 40 cents an hour, and the long run that paid off. I got married and we wanted to go to New Mexico. I had been to New Mexico when I was a boy scout to the Philmont Scout Ranch and I liked it out there and I was accepted to the University of New Mexico and finished in newspaper journalism, was my major, and then was drafted, joined the Navy and was a naval officer for four years, and then my mother died and I decided because I had the GI Bill, I might as well go to graduate school, I might as well go to Alabama and be here with my dad, who had lost his wife. So I came back here in 66 and got the master's degree in communications, and then I continued in public television after that. In 1975, moved to Hollywood to see if I could make it out there and my first job was as a production manager at the ABC Television Network. From there I got a job as a producer and continued and assigned myself a job of directing an episode one time, and continued in producing and directing. George was scarfing shrimp at this meeting and this guy says, hey George, the ocean call, they're running out of shrimp. The last producing I did was with Seinfeld, I was also the director for five years, and then after that I only wanted to direct, so I directed Ellen DeGeneres' television show, I did a short series of Mary Tyler Moore and that was good, and News Radio was a lot of fun. The cast was good and Seinfeld was terrific too. In 2002, Lloyd Singleton, the dean of the School of Communications, had asked me if I would come teach a class here, and so for 12 years I taught a film class at the University of Alabama. There are a number of people in the very first class that we taught here that are working in Hollywood. Joe Borden is a writer and Kate Turnip seeds a producer out there, and Alan McLeod is an actor and a director, and others were working in Hollywood in various and sundry types of jobs. I enjoyed the teaching very well. It was rewarding and doing the job I was doing in Hollywood was also very rewarding. It doesn't matter where you go to school or where you're from, you can succeed if you just work hard at it. Take what you know and get a job doing what you want to do, and everything else will work out. And then here's a kid from Tuscaloosa that did OK in Hollywood.