Chris fedak josh schwartz biography

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Contributing Writer

Posted: January 26th, 2012 / 03:19 PM

CHUCK, the romantic spy comedy that has lasted five seasons on NBC, draws to a close with a two-hour series finale this Friday night at 8 PM. Co-created by Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz, CHUCK has chronicled the evolution of Zachary Levi’s Chuck Bartowski from nerdy Buy More employee to confused spy to genuine hero and husband of more experienced fellow spy Sarah Walker, played by Yvonne Strahovski.

Schwartz, who previously created THE O.C. for Fox and still has GOSSIP GIRL on the CW, is now in post-production on his feature film directing debut FUN SIZE and is in pre-production on THE CARRIE DIARIES, the SEX AND THE CITY prequel series, for Warners Television.We weren’t able to catch up to Schwartz before CHUCK’s cancellation was certain, but here are some previously unpublished reminiscences regarding the series.

ASSIGNMENT X: Obviously, the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike was tragic for a lot of people in a lot of ways, but did that give you any breathing room in terms of extra time to think about Season Two, or was it just a completely horrible interruption?

JOSH SCHWARTZ: It was unfortunate in the sense that the show was really building momentum [before the strike happened] and building in terms of I think the episodes themselves, and the numbers were going up, so that was sort of a bummer, but short of that, it’s always nice to have time and spend the time on the creative, and to have a break and let the cast have a break. Zach works like eighteen-hour days, seventeen days a week, so I think for that reason alone, it was a nice chance to take a beat and refresh and come into [the second] season guns blazing, because we recognized the challenge of being off

American screenwriter and television producer (b. 1976)

Joshua Ian Schwartz (born August 6, 1976) is an American screenwriter and television producer. He is best known for creating and executive producing the Foxteen drama seriesThe O.C. which ran for 4 seasons. Schwartz is also known for developing The CW's series Gossip Girl based on the book of the same name and for co-creating NBC's action-comedy-spy series, Chuck.

At 26, he became one of the youngest people in network history to create a series and run its day-to-day production when he ran The O.C.

Early life

Schwartz was born to a Jewish family in 1976 in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Steve and Honey Schwartz. His parents were both toy inventors at Hasbro, working on the development of toys such as Transformers and My Little Pony, until they went on to start their own company. Schwartz grew up on the east side of Providence, Rhode Island with a younger brother, Danny, and a younger sister, Katie. Schwartz always had ambitions of being a writer since early childhood.

When Schwartz was seven years old, he won an essay-writing contest at Summer camp for a review of the recently released movie Gremlins; the opening line was "Spielberg has done it again" and stood out amongst the other submissions. By age twelve, he had a subscription to the entertainment industry newspaper Variety.

He attended Providence's private Wheeler School, a coeducational independent day school, for 11 years, graduating wi

2007 American television series

Chuck is an American action comedyspy drama television series created by Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak. The series is about an "average computer-whiz-next-door" named Chuck Bartowski, played by Zachary Levi, who receives an encoded email from an old college friend now working for the CIA. The message embeds the only remaining copy of a software program containing the United States' greatest spy secrets into Chuck's brain, leading the CIA and the NSA to assign him handlers and use him on top-secret missions. Produced by Fake Empire (known as College Hill Pictures, Inc. during the first three seasons before folding afterwards), Wonderland Sound and Vision, and Warner Bros. Television, the series premiered on September 24, 2007, on NBC, airing on Monday nights at 8:00 p.m./7:00 p.m. Central. The opening theme song is an instrumental version of "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" by the American rock band Cake.

As the second season finished, flagging ratings put Chuck in danger of cancellation, but fans mounted a successful campaign to encourage NBC to renew the show. The campaign was unique in that fans specifically targeted a sponsor of the show, the Subway restaurant chain, leading to the chain striking a major sponsorship deal with NBC to help cover costs of the third season. The series' renewal was uncertain in each subsequent season. The fifth season was the last, beginning on October 28, 2011, and moving to Friday nights at 8 p.m./7 Central. The series concluded on January 27, 2012, with a two-hour finale.

Episodes

Main article: List of Chuck episodes

Series summary

Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) is in his mid-twenties and works at Buy More, a Burbank, California, consumer-electronics chain store. He is an intelligent, but unmotivated, computer service expert and works alongside his best