Since 2006, Krieger has been teaching in UC Riverside’s Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production as well as the Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts MFA program. He says students often pop by his office to say something akin to, “Dude, you wrote my childhood.”

Among Krieger’s many writing credits are 12 movies for Disney, including modern takes on classics such as “Freaky Friday” and “The Parent Trap II.” In fact, the original version of “The Parent Trap” may have had something to do with Krieger writing movies in the first place.

“I was a huge ‘Parent Trap’ fan,” Krieger said, adding his admiration for the movie’s lead actress. “I was a huge Hayley Mills fan. There was a point when I was about 13 or 14 years old where my entire wall above my bed was wallpapered with pictures of Hayley Mills.”

Krieger grew up in Rochester, New York, with no connection to the movie industry. But he says by middle school he was talking about being a writer.

“We made a family vacation to LA when I was 12 years old,” he said, “and I went, ‘yeah, this is where I belong. This is where I'm supposed to be.’”

He attended SUNY Brockport where he studied with professors Ron and Sara Watts, a husband-and-wife pair that taught journalism classes. Krieger describes them as his first mentors.

“They had been reporters and journalists themselves, and they were the first two people that said to me, ‘I think you could do this for a living. I see something in your writing where I really think you could do this.’”

At the time, Hillary was working for Garry Marshall, creator of the hit series “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” and “Mork and Mindy.” When Marshall found out Hillary’s then-boyfriend was a writer, he asked to read some of Krieger’s work, eventually optioning one of his scripts and hiring him to write another. Krieger considers Marshall another key mentor, explaining that he encouraged his writing but also was a guidepost on how to live life. He keeps a badge from Marshall that says, “Life is more important than show business.” Working with Marshall brought more attention to his work, leading to additional projects. But Krieger took care to manage the kind of work he did.

“Very quickly, I realized that writers get typecast as quickly as actors do,” he said.

After developing several teen-focused projects, Krieger took three months off to work on an autobiographical family comedy called “Kinfolk” and started sending the script out to producers. Though the script was optioned three times, it was never made into a movie. It did, however, end up in American Film Magazine’s list of “The 10 Best Unproduced Screenplays in Hollywood.” Krieger explains to students how important that work was for his career because it got him to “A Year in the Life,” a miniseries that won the Emmy for outstanding miniseries in 1987.

“That got me to Steven Spielberg, working on ‘Amazing Stories.’ That’s when he approached me about doing ‘The Land Before Time,’” he said. “So, even though that script never got made, it was the most important thing I ever wrote in terms of the breadth of my career.”

At other junctures, Krieger made similar choices to manage his career. After he wrote the screenplay for “Monkey Trouble” starring Harvey Keitel and Thora Birch, he was invited to a meeting about “Curious George.”

“And it was like, ‘Okay, I'm not the monkey guy now. I just did my movie with a monkey. I don't want to do another monkey movie. I want to do something different,’” Krieger said.

Krieger credits his attention to varied subjects and formats with improving his employability.

“I had demonstrated I could work in film. I could work in television. I could work in family comedy. I could work in family drama. But it was all very conscious choices,” he said, noting he often turned down jobs that didn’t feel like the next step forward. “Because of the perversity of the business, every time I ever said no to anybody, usually within a couple of months, they offered me something else.”

In some cases, Krieger aggressively pursued the projects he wanted.

“When I found out there was a ‘Parent Trap’ sequel happening, I called my agent and said, ‘Call them. Tell them I will give them money if I can write this sequel.’” Krieger said. “He called me back and said, ‘There’s already a writer on it, not gonna happen. I tried, buddy. Sorry.’”

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Six weeks later, his agent called to tell him studio execs didn’t like the script and were in a time crunch to shoot the film before Hayley Mills headed to her next project. The only problem — he had just three weeks to write a new script. When asked if he could do it in time, Krieger told them, “I could do it tomorrow.” In reality, it took him a little more than three weeks, but it won the approval of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

“A couple of weeks after that, I was on a plane to Tampa to meet Hayley Mills,” he said.