Woman of Vision: Abby Greensfelder (Rerun)

Abby Greensfelder has an instinct for developing not only iconic cable shows such as, “Say Yes to the Dress,” but also documentaries featuring icons Megan Rapinoe and Alicia Keys. In this episode, host Sandra Abrams chats with the indie filmmaker and native Washingtonian, ahead of the World Premiere of UNCHARTED at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. The doc, from her company, Everywoman Studios, is a behind-the-scenes look at Keys’ songwriting camp that hopes to create a pipeline of women songwriters and music producers. The studio’s first film, LFG, featured the U.S Women Soccer team’s fight for fair pay. In this discussion, Abby shares why her company aims to develop women-centric content that has a social impact and how female filmmakers can apply for the Propelle program to develop their media ideas. In May, WIFV named Abby a 2023 Women of Vision honoree. 

www.everywomanstudios.com 

https://west.realscreen.com/2023/propelle/

To view a complete list of Women of Vision winners, visit https://www.wifv.org/women-of-vision-awards/

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Transcript

Quiet roll camera two, and action. Welcome to Media and Monuments presented by women in film and video in Washington, DC media and monuments is conversations. Featuring Industry pros speaking on a wide range of topics of interest to media makers. Do you like soccer, wedding dresses and music? Or maybe I should say, do you know Megan Rapino, Kleinfeld's Bridal, and Alicia Keys?

I'm your host, Sandra Abrams, and in this episode in Media Monuments, I'll chat. With Abby Greensfelder, the c e o, and founder of Every Woman's Studio. During our discussion, you will learn Abby's ties to Say Yes to the dress, the documentary L F G, about the US Women's National Soccer Team's fight for equal pay and her latest project, uncharted A behind the scenes look at Alicia Key's songwriting camp.

To help young, black and brown women. The mission of her current company is to tell female-driven stories. In addition to making documentaries that support this mission, the studio has also created Pro Propel, an accelerated program to help up and coming women media creators in partnership with Real Screen.

Prior to starting her current company, Abby co-founded Half Yard Productions, which created a string of hit shows. And she worked at Discovery recently, women in film and video named Abby, one of its Women of Vision, en Reese for 2023. Welcome, Abby to Media and Monuments. Thank you so much for having me.

This is so much fun. Well, first of all, I wanna say congratulations on being named a Women of Vision winner. So when you were starting your career, I know you got your MBA from Warton, from the University of Pennsylvania, did you have a vision? No. I really was someone who always loved storytelling, writing, and I was a photographer, did photography in high school and also in college.

And so I think I've thought of maybe photography as something that I love, but maybe is not something that could be a career probably just because most of my people that I knew in Washington and in my family who had sort of careers were what seemed to be professional careers like lawyers or. My mom was a nurse, worked in the healthcare industry.

So I really didn't have a vision early in my career of that. But I think as, as happens, as time went on, the vision started to appear. Uh, but it wasn't till later, well, later you worked at Discovery. In fact, you'd worked on a lot of male-oriented type shows. So how did working at Discovery prepare you to leave and be the co-founder of Half Yard Productions?

I had what I think was the dream job out of college. I interned a discovery, spent a little time away working in production, then came back. So it was really my first experience in media. I worked for Discovery for about a decade and came up on the content side of the business, and I think. Doing what was sort of developing programming for a male skewing audience.

It was a broad adult audience, but male skewing. I saw the growth of really unscripted television in that time from when I started Discovery, which was the company's tenure anniversary, and mostly we were acquiring and reversioning content to, by the time I left, we were commissioning original programming.

Most of its series. These prolific producers who were making hit shows from us, and we were probably doing about 700, 600 hours of premieres at a year. I looked at that and saw really the growth and success of this industry and of some of these key producers that we worked with saw that they were really able to run businesses at scale.

And I thought, well, maybe I could do that cuz I had been a buyer. And I knew what kinds of shows worked, but obviously being a buyer and a developer at Discovery, I had a fairly limited creative palette with which to tell stories. So I was excited about the idea of broadening that creative palette. And so with a colleague of mine, a Discovery, who was sort of my creative collaborator there, Sean Gallagher, he was at the time overseeing content for tlc and I was overseeing content for discovery, but we had worked together for years.

Decided, well, let's go and try and do this ourselves. How hard can that be? Well, of course there was a lot more to it, right? Things are always harder than you think. Yes. Um, but that initial optimism was enough to get us to leave the cushy world of corporate media and set up our own business. But we really grew our business out of our initial, um, relationship and history with discovery.

Cuz most of the first shows that we did were four discoveries. Family of networks and something like Say Yes to the Dress, which was one of the first shows we ever made, is still, uh, still on the air today. And that speaks volumes as to what your thinking was behind why you wanted to start it. Because I was gonna ask you, what was the genesis to that?

Uh, was it somebody came to you, you were looking for, or were, you know, somebody you know was looking for a dress? Yeah, it's an interesting one actually, when I was at Discovery, true story. Um, there was a producer who came in who I actually gave the idea to someone that I know had gone to Kleinfeld and gotten their dress there, and I thought, this is such a great story, like this family owned business.

And at the time there were a lot of successful shows on cable, like places like Discovery that followed family owned businesses. We had American Chopper was a big hit on discovery at the time that followed this sort of family owned. Motorcycle fab business and it, but it was ultimately sort of partly family drama.

So I thought, well if you could do that with a family owned bridal business, that would be amazing. And I actually gave the idea, cause I was working at Discovery to a producer when I was there thinking, well, we couldn't do this for discovery, but you should develop this and pitch this around. So years later, When I decided to leave Discoveries, one of the first ideas, I thought this would make a great show.

And we got in touch with Kleinfeld. And when we went in, I later found out that that producer had actually developed the idea, gone to Kleinfeld, tried to set it up at Lifetime, but couldn't get the deal closed with Kleinfeld, um, and Lifetime in order to make the show. Mostly cuz it had to do with sort of, Brand control and trust with Kleinfeld in terms of how to make the show and make it in a way that was not gonna be negative for Kleinfeld.

Because of course at that time there were all kinds of reality shows, right? So if you were gonna do a show that would show, you know, there was fear. Like what if somebody, you know, hates this dress and it's bad for the brand. So it turned out that very producer I'd given the idea to follow it up and actually tried to make the show.

But only we, we were actually, I'm very proud, able to establish a trusting enough relationship with Kleinfeld that they allowed us to give us the full access to make that show. And of course we went to T L C. They were thrilled about it. And sort of the rest is history. The owners of Kleinfeld to this day are dear, dear friends, like that show the sort of leap of faith that they took, of course ended up being.

It was great for our business. It was great for their business. It was good business for TLC and ultimately, You know, we still remained friends after all these years. That's wonderful. I do remember going to Kleinfeld's, but this with with friends to shop for the dress. I was living in New York at the time.

Yes. But we went to Brooklyn. Yes. Before we had moved to Manhattan. And I just remember being on this subway thinking, where are we going? But we had a very specific appointment though, and we had to get there in time. Yeah. So it turns out actually Kleinfeld was a family-owned business. Um, but at some point after the point when you visited and before we did this show, the business had been bought, taken over by.

Uh, Ronnie Rothstein and Mara Che, and they brought the store to Manhattan. Totally renovated it. So to us, when we first visited that new store, which was in downtown New York, it's like 18th Street, and went in there and they had a basically, almost like a, um, you'd have where you'd dry clean clothes, and they have one of those racks.

Mechanized racks. They had one that ran two full city blocks in the ceiling holding wedding dresses. And they took us behind the scenes and in the back and showed us that. And I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And of course, off to the side was a woman like crying cuz she found her perfect dress. And I thought at that moment, yes, this is kind of getting inside and behind the scenes of this process.

But more than anything, it's a show about a rite of passage and that's why. This show is more than just behind the scenes at this family owned wedding shop. It's really getting into the rite of passage, which a story we can all tap into, whether we have been married, want to be married, you know, had a child that's getting married, whatever it is, we all can sort of put ourselves in that story.

And I felt Zen and I still do now. That's part of why it's had such. Longevity cuz it's a story that keeps being told over and over and over again. Now you're a native Washingtonian. Yeah. Where did you go for your dress? Oh, good question. So it's very funny cuz people who know me think it's hilarious that I made this show cuz I'm number one growing up was very much a sporty, no nonsense gal.

Um, and actually when I went to shop for my wedding dress, I was in business school at the time while I was working at Discovery, and I was commuting back and forth from Pennsylvania while working a full-time job. I was very busy, so I managed to set up one appointment at Hannah Lores, which was a wedding shop family owned in, in Old Town Alexandria.

I went in and, um, during my appointment, Saw three dresses picked one, and that was that, which very no nonsense. Yeah. But when you tried it on, did you cry? I did not cry. I think I was like, I love this. This is beautiful. Let's get it, you know? But, uh, Kleinfeld was not on my radar at that moment. Of course, if I had been making the show at the time, I would've gotten the whole princess treatment at Kleinfeld.

The team probably would've convinced me to do an episode, but I'm the kind of person. The irony is, you know, I'm kind of low-key, uh, Noma, no fu so I wouldn't have wanted do it that anyway. That's a great story. Um, so then you sold, uh, half Yard productions and you jumped to starting all over again with every woman's studios.

Um, what did you learn from selling your company and restarting? That was an interesting journey at the time. So half yard was in its past, its second decade, or in its second decade. So we started the business in 2006. We've been running it for about 12, 13 years. And at the time there was a lot of consolidation and we very much felt we would have the benefit of being part of a bigger group.

They could give us sort of more access to international markets and things like that. Um, so we sold our company to Red Arrow, who was a great partner. Um, And around that time I had stayed, Sean Gallagher, my partner and I had stayed with the business during that transition. And very much when we sold the business, if anything, I thought to myself, well, I don't wanna age myself out of this business.

I love what I do. Right. I'm not trying to get out of it. Um, but as happens in life, you feel the need for a new transition. I think I had been running the business for a long time. We had. Been quite successful at it. Uh, I also, as a woman, creative executive in the business, felt like there just weren't enough of me out there.

And I also felt at the age in my life where I just wanted to do, give back in a way, in the business and in culture, in my own very small way, and do projects that were. Consistent with those values. So even though every project at Half Yard we did, I loved and was very passionate about, but I felt a calling to specifically do something to give back to women in the business and women in culture.

Having grown up in DC I happened to go to an all-girl school in dc. I kind of was raised a feminist, uh, in the seventies and at some point in my life, early on I thought maybe I'd be a women's rights lawyer. It was sort of my parallel, other alternative path. So in some ways it was a, coming back to some of my, that early vision you talked about the non vision vision, but I thought, well, I could do some of those same things that I believed in, that I wanted to do, but use storytelling to do that instead of say advocacy or politics.

Um, or law. So that's really where the idea of every woman's studios came from was just the sense that we all have one life. The older you get, the more tired you get, and I thought if I don't do this now, my sort of passion 2.0, I'll never do it. So I decided to leave the company that I loved with the people that I love to.

What I thought was gonna be take some time off before starting this next thing. And then the L F G story hit and all of a sudden I felt very called to tell that very specific story and that got me moving a little earlier than I thought that I would. But it kind of became an organizing principle of the kinds of stories that I wanted to tell.

And the kinds of ways that I could think about telling those stories. You really scored a goal with that, and your timing was just right because that fight was just starting at that time. Yeah, it was, and I very much felt that was a story that if it was not gonna be told, it would be lost because that lawsuit was happening, the World Cup was happening, and I was sure that someone would be covering it.

Just cuz it was such a big story, I felt, and it touched on a number of things that resonated with me when I had founded every woman's studios. And I was thinking about even before I founded it, and I was thinking about could I do this and how would I orient the company and what kinds of stories I wanted to tell.

I thought specifically about what I call content deserts for women. Which are areas of stories that just women aren't seen in at all. And of those, going back to my discovery days, they were actually a lot of spaces like the discovery audience would populate with men, like adventure, the outdoors, sports science, history, those were all genres.

For whatever reason, you just didn't see women in and less women of color, diverse women. So the idea when the L F G. Or rather the story of the women's soccer team and their equal pay fight. When they announced they were going to sue their employer and enter into this lawsuit, I thought, man, like if I ever, there was a calling of a story with my name on it that here's one.

Um, I don't think I knew how hard it would be to do, but it was a story that was moving and moving fast and that if I didn't grab it, I felt like it would be gone. So, I grabbed it. And what was the thing that said to you, okay, I'm gonna hook up with this person. Did you make a phone call? Were you introduced?

Did you meet the head of the US Women's Soccer Federation? Like how did that connection come about? Well, it's funny, you know, I think so much of life is relationships and people that you know that come into your life. And this was one where, so not only did I. Had I identified this content desert Also, I happened to be a soccer fan also.

I played soccer, and I have two girls that play soccer, but one of my very closest friends, Molly Levinson, who was in the movie, as it turns out, was working behind the scenes early on, advising the women's soccer team on. The communication side around this lawsuit. So I had some visibility to what was going on.

And when the lawsuit happened, I asked her, surely someone is telling this story? And she said, no. Because of this reason and that reason, and this reason, which was really that all the kind of usual media partners who were in deals with US soccer were disallowed from telling the story. And so, She was really part of the reason that I was able to get connected to the right people.

She put me in touch with the woman who runs the union for the team separately. I reached out to Abby Womack, who was helpful early on in terms of getting to know some of the story and helping to make some introductions. So it was a bit of on the ground hustle, and then also relationships and connections that I had into the story that helped get us.

The initial access. Well, I was reading that you had the premiere for L F G at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2021. Now almost two years to the month, you're having the world premiere of Uncharted, the story of Alicia Keys, and she's the music songwriting camp. And again, how did this connection come about and what do you do?

As you're the producer, what's your involvement on this? Yeah, it is kind of amazing when you say that because you feel like, you know, time just flies with the pot pandemic and everything in between. But on L F G, you know, I was lucky enough to work with amazing filmmakers, um, the Fines, who are also a local DC based.

Production company and we took L F G, made that film and then took it to Tribeca at some point. After that, the film premiered and was well received. I was interested in, in terms of the other contents, deserts, the music space, and I was introduced to, uh, one of the people who is on the board of this organization called She is the Music and this organization.

Was founded by a number of women leading women in the music business, including Alicia Keys. Um, her partner Anne Men si a bunch of other women in the music business. And this person who I met said, you should do a story on cheese, the music. So I eventually set up a call with some of the folks involved, Alicia, her partner, Anne, to hear about what they were doing to try and see, well, what could this story be?

Is there a story here? And in that call they talked about these camps that they run, and I thought in that moment, well, this would be a great way, much like L F G. We didn't tell all of the story of women's soccer. The fines in that film really focused in on the lawsuit, the women who were leading that fight and telling a human story Here, I thought, well, the story of women in music, why does Alicia Keys and these other women.

Need to create these songwriting camps. The reason is because only 3% of women are producers a little more are songwriters, 10%. Um, in terms of music that makes, that gets charted on the billboard 100, um, no female still has been produced of the year, so the stats are awful. When they told me that, I couldn't believe it.

And when I heard what they were doing, which was running these camps, which are basically. Set up to pipeline emerging artists into writing songs that get placed with established artists. And I thought, man, if we could immerse ourselves in one of those camps, that would be a great way to tell a human story about kind of an industry issue.

Um, and that's what we did. So we were able to embed in their, uh, song I writing camp, the first camp that they did for all women of color. And we embedded in that camp. And then we tracked a couple women's story on details over the next year to see how this experience helped shape their careers following.

And it opened up some doors, but it also showed how, really just how hard that business is for women and especially for women of color. So we're able to see the journey and to see some of the successes that come out of this endeavor. Yes. Yes. And one of the cool things, this one's neat because sort of the f the insight with L F G that I had, and part of the reason that I've honed in, not exclusively but partly on documentary film for every woman's studios, is that they uniquely, I think, are set up to do the thing that I'm interested in, which is using storytelling to make an impact in culture.

And move the needle for women on issues. So L F G was a way to pressure, honestly, US soccer to give women equal pay. But then more broadly, that's had ripple effects the US soccer fight in international teams, and now FIFA's looking at changing the game. And of course, that equal pay fight can inspire women in the workplace and can inspire women in the workplace abroad, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So, This music story. The goal here is in telling this very small story, we are trying to get some of these women literally on the charts by featuring the music that they wrote at this camp, and in doing that, hopeful that we can shine a light on this issue, but part of the goal of the documentary itself.

Is to get these women notoriety cuz they're all kind of knocking on the door. And in fact, the entire movie, for the most part is all the music in it is written by these women. So the movie itself is a way to bring attention to their. Songwriting and producing and engineering, et cetera, some of which songs will be performed at Tribeca.

Fantastic. That's really exciting news. Well, you're all about empowering women, and I wanted to talk to you about your content accelerated program. I think it's Propel. Yes. All right. So now you're on your fourth cycle. Yeah. You've got four projects heading to real screen in June, and I understand the first year winner, um, that project is streaming now on Discovery plus.

Yeah. And that is prisoner of the prophet. So tell me more about that program. And also I think people who are listening to this podcast, they will wanna know how can they apply for future cycles. Yeah. Propel was one of the first things that I did when I set up the company because in many ways I had two interests.

One was to tell stories to fill these gaps, buying about women. The other was to support other women in the business because I felt that. I had some great mentors along the way. I had some great experiences and had the opportunity to run a business at scale, which meant that I could get stories out there that felt authentic to me, to others, et cetera.

So the idea of Propel was a very simple one. Like let's do in unscripted what sort of the tech industry and others have done well in these accelerators, which is let's have women. Bring ideas that they feel are pretty fully formed. Meaning, you know, they have a treatment and a sizzle. Maybe they've got a real idea that they think has potential, and let's pair them each with a established creator in the space.

So a female head of production company or head of development at Big Studio, and they'll help shape that idea. To help make it market ready. And then we bring network executives, distributors at streamers to get in front of these creators. So they pitch those ideas that have helped been shaped, pre shaped.

So it's kind of a friendly, these are friendly pitches, but it's also a safe way to get them FaceTime with industry execs. And then based on the feedback we get from those executives, we determine. A winning project, which then every woman's studios further invests in to take to market to, and help get made.

So the first project prisoner of the prophet Kelly Salway, brought that idea into the accelerator, was a originally called escaped normal. And it was about this woman, Brielle Decker, who had escaped a polygamous cult, the F L D S, and was the 65th wife of Warren Jeffs. And incredibly having escaped this cult had set up a home, a sort of restitution for other women escaping the cult.

Um, actually the home, she had used the courts to get one of these compounds back from Warren, Jeffs, and she was able to donate that and set up this home. So the story was really getting inside her world, telling her story. How she escaped, how she used her own experience to help the lives of others, but also to show that this abuse was still happening now, like actually today, and I did not know this, there are still women, children, adults, men too in this community that really are being abused, whether, you know, certainly mentally controlled, et cetera.

So, Kelly brought this project in. We thought it was fabulous. We helped shape it a bit, and distributors loved it. We ended up attaching some other elements to it and took it out to market and produced it with, uh, discovery Plus, and it was started streaming at the top of this year and did quite well for discovery.

And that was a great success story because in that you had Kelly, she was attached to the project from beginning to end. She was in all those pitches. She was in the field, she was an exec producer of the project, had co-ownership of the project, economic incentives attached to the project. So she had both creative and financial success around the project.

And that was kind of the key, the accelerator. So that's like the model is that we try and find these projects. Where we can have that creator cradle to grave attached, we might have to bring in other people to make it almost bulletproof for these buyers who are very risk averse, but along the way, they get that experience, those credits so that then next time around they can bring the project in or.

Maybe they partner with a production company who was their mentor or everyone's studios on the next project to help get it made. Because as we all know, this industry can be, it's sort of a gate kept business. It's a relationship business, and it's very hard for these distributors to take a chance on someone new cuz they have such limited real estate, limited dollars and commissions to give out.

So the risk of, even if it's a great story, This is an untested producer. Can they deliver? Do they know our audience? Can they make something that will fit our brand? So really, we're kind of putting together a new creator with a tested creator, and that combo has worked. That's the model. And I would say for anyone listening who's interested, we run this program every year.

From January to June, so we open up the, the sort of portal for applications in January. We review those from about January to March, and then we run the program from like mid-March, April through to June where we set up the pitches at real screen West out in la. That's what's happening in the next couple weeks.

And then based on that, we have the projects, it's a winner, and then we work to develop those projects further afterwards. But the program itself is like a six month kind of from submission to pitch, and that has seemed to work. Like the actual workshops themselves are pretty tight in terms of timeline.

I think that works. It keeps everybody focused. So you have Uncharted that's gonna be premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival. What other projects do you have, uh, coming up that you, uh, can talk about? We have some things in development that may be too early to talk about, but one of the things we're working on actually came out of the Accelerator, which is also a feature documentary film by a great young filmmaker.

And it's sort of another Unsell story in the music business and in the prison touches. Prison and prison reform. And we've just partnered up with another, uh, production company and we're hoping to get that film financed and produced and like L F G, LFG and Uncharted hopefully to festivals and also distributed.

So, We've got a couple other things. Something in the women's health space we're working on. I would say these projects are kind of long life cycle and high touch, but they're all kind of labors of love in that way. So they may take a long time and take circuitous roots, but they're meaningful to work on, especially when you feel like you can make an impact.

One of the things I wanna ask you about is the fact that you are doing all of this. In the DMV area. You didn't say, I'm moving to la I'm gonna be in New York. You're here as a successful, um, filmmaker and with your companies. What is that like to be in this, in this area and doing it in this, uh, your hometown?

Originally it was a good thing cuz Discovery was here. That's what got me here originally. Of course, discovery since left the area so. When we were running half yard, we also had a New York office. That felt important to do both in terms of sourcing great creative personnel, but also to be near a lot of the buyers.

When I set up everyone's studios, which was before the pandemic, I'd actually thought, cuz we had started doing some remote editing and producing for Half Yard. And I thought, given what I wanted to do, I was gonna be in DC and I thought maybe a core team, but really we could be anywhere that great creatives were.

So I'd actually envisioned the company very much as a kind of virtual creative, creator driven company. And then of course the pandemic happened. That's like, oh, everybody's doing this now. But what I will say has been interesting about being in DC especially doing sort of impact driven stories, is I think that that in some ways does have more relevance to DC in that.

A lot of these issues are things that are being talked about or legislated in DC and so I find myself, funnily enough at this stage maybe having more DC linkage, um, in that, like we've done screenings for L F G with the state department and with national organizations of women and other sort of lawmakers in DC that are interested in.

Equal pay issues, for example, I think the same could be true of something like Uncharted. We're gonna do DC, DC DOC screening on June 16th. Plug for that. So I think dc, DC is a place that thinks about issues and ideas, and that's, for me, has always been part of kind of my head space. I'd say previously working at Discovery and half yard, less of what fueled my pipeline, but now what I'm doing at everyone's studios, it's more in the Venn diagram cuz I'm sort of about where entertainment meets ideas and issues.

And so DC is in that Venn diagram. Well, thank you Abby Greensfelder for chatting with Media and monuments. Abby's company is Every Woman's Studios. And her film Uncharted is gonna be premiering at the Trico Film Festival, but where can people be able to see uncharted after that? Well, we're working on pitching out the film to distributors, so maybe the next time you look, we will hopefully be, people will be able to see it on a platform streaming soon.

But for now, it will be at a bunch of film festivals, Tribeca on the 10th. DC Docs on the 16th, and then we're also at Sheffield Doc Festival in the uk and we've had a lot of interest actually from film festivals. But I'm, I'm a mass audience gal. I be leave in the power of eyeballs, so I'm really motivated to.

Get the movie onto a streaming platform so that everyone can see it. Cuz I think these ladies stories deserve to be seen by lots of people. Right. Abby's company is Every woman's studios.com. Thank you Abby, and have a good time at Tribeca. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time chatting with me today and for everything that women in film does, not just in DC but.

Across the us Thank you for listening to Media and Monuments, a service of women in film and video in Washington dc. Please remember to review, rate and subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. For more information about with, please visit our website at W I F as in Frank, V as in victor.org.