THE EARLY DAYS - 2006 - 2009

Our 6 folders from the Early Days of   "Life Is Hell"

      

       On June 9th 2006, Aramis and I decided to write our very first episode of "Life Is Hell." So I went over to Aramis's house and we began by trying to picture what these characters would look like. So we took out a blank peace of paper and began to draw. Aramis was a better drawer than me so he was the one with the pen and paper. He drew pictures of the main characters. The picture of me was kind of funny. At that time I decided to shave my head bald. So Aramis decided to take the liberty in making me look like a bald version of Charlie Brown. I didn't agree with it."The shows a comedy," He said. "Look at this photo... Have you ever seen anything on tv funnier than that?"

       The photo of me was Hilarius, so I said "ok we can use this". The next person he drew was Almorindo.  Aramis drew a very angry looking man that was bald with one patch of hair in the front of his head (what we called the island) and a beer belly.  Once the drawings were down, we went right to the writing. It was the first script we ever wrote and it was short one. It was only four pages long. The story was about Almorindo and his neighbor. The neighbor was refereed to as the Tomato lady because over the course of the night, she would sneak into Almorindos back yard and cut down his tomato plants.Funny enough, this was based off a true story.

         After we finished that early draft of what was titled, "Tomato, Tomata," we went onto write episodes like "A trip to Mexico," "NYP 123," " The Maple Leaf" and many more over the course of the next 3 years. We filled a total of 6 folders full of good ideas and bad ones. At the time of 2006, our main character was Almorindo and Aramis. But by the time of 2007, Aramis started to talk to me about a guy named Tony Rissi. He lived right down the street from him and he was funny and was 300 pounds. So then this new charter named Tony jumped onto our scripts and had became the main character.

       2 years later, it was the year of 2009 and we decided that we are not going to do a cartoon show.  The main reason behind that was that many people think of cartoon shows as kids shows. We wanted to do something that everyone would want to watch.  We decided that we are going to do a real life comedy show with actors, directors and nice sets that will appeal to the eye.  So with that idea we re-wrote our first script. It went into a completely opposite direction as our first draft. The script was titled "the Playoffs have begun."

        The story was about my character being grounded by his father named Angelo when the hockey playoffs were on. It was a funny script, but it was too short. We needed second story. So we scrapped that whole idea and wrote an episode titled "Pink Men." That episode was re-written 3 times (we are still working on the third draft to date). The second draft was what we thought was going to be our pilot. But even though we had finished a script, we still  weren't ready to pitch it to networks. This was because our scripts weren't in proper format as Aramis pointed out after reading "Seinfeld" Scripts. So we needed to find out how to write scripts in a proper format. So then the research had begun and for the first time, Life is Hell was put on hold.

Andrew Di Pardo