Dinner With Dames San Francisco #4 – With Kathleen Grace (Recap)

Who: Kathleen Grace, CEO of New Form Digital, hosted by Cinefemme and Dinner with Dames SF Program Directors Cameo Wood and Monica West, and sponsored by Charming Stranger Films and Tosca Cafe in North Beach, SF. Attendees included filmmakers Arie Sandhu, Emily Scott, Laura Fries, Maria Mealla, Molly Ratermann, Rachel Styer, Trina Espinosa, Sanjana deSilva, Yun Suh and myself, Ryan Lynch.

What: Dinner with Dames is an engaging discussion on expanding the network of Bay Area women filmmakers, balancing creative with production, and the need for equal gender representation in the film industry.

Why: To foster new relationships among female filmmakers and to extend the network for women in film in the Bay Area.

When: Thursday, September 13th, 2018

We sat down with Kathleen Grace at Tosca, one of San Francisco’s iconic restaurants where many patrons of the film industry have mingled and there’s a bullet hole in the wall that may or may not have been put there by a famous actor.

One of the first things we were asked was what was the first viral video we ever saw. This is Kathleen’s realm. She’s an executive who knows the digital landscape better than anyone. Her company, New Form Digital, is a video distribution and production company backed by Discovery, Brian Grazer, and Ron Howard. With millennials as their target audience, the company is blurring the lines between traditional media and new horizons.

Being an experienced creator herself, she is able to translate the business side of production to the burgeoning talent she nestles under her wings. For many of us at the table, we often wear the many hats of creative and production and it was refreshing to hear how she manages both, even if it means waking early in the morning to work on her creative pursuits and by 10 am her producing/executive hat is back on.

For many in the industry, people don’t know how to handle her. I’ve felt the same way, I worked at Pixar Animation for 10 years in development and production management, yet, I was always writing and directing my own stories – web series, shorts, and TV pilots during my free time. This is just who I am, I’m a creator, but I also know how to manage a team and produce content within a budget. This was really refreshing for me to hear, she’s doing it all, being an executive and also creating her own content. She says the industry is changing and that people are blurring the lines between the buckets they put you in. You can do both, but it really comes down to your time management and she’s got a fierce spreadsheet to keep her going!

We talked about pitching projects to production companies and managers, rather than agents, and how much goes into building a show and what she looks for in a creator. “They must be idea machines and must be able to execute on a timeline,” she says. Always have 3+ more ideas in your pocket when you go into pitch, as you never know if they already have something similar you are pitching in development. She also recommended having three phrases about your project that an executive can easily repeat: why only you can do this project (passion), what is its mass appeal, and why it could be successful monetarily.

She talked about creating content for the millennial generation, which is her specialty, and beckons one to “write the thing only you can write” but also, don’t just write for you, write for your community.” Millennials have grown up with the Internet, so they are well versed in taking in a lot of information all at once. It’s best not to pace the film fast, but deep and be super tight on your narrative. She also brought up how ‘vertical videos’ see more views and even higher audience retention, too much of the chagrin of us filmmakers! It was wonderful to spend time with Kathleen and hear her fast-talking wisdom about the industry and how to be successful in it.

Footage and Photography by Krystle Cansino / Editing by Steffany Ramirez

About Ryan Lynch:

Ryan Lynch is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and producer who loves to focus on stories that are inspired by true events. She recently wrote and directed UTurn, a VR pilot about gender discrimination in tech, which has played in numerous festivals, including San Francisco International, Mill Valley FF and at the UN Women Global Voices. Her comedy web series, SanFranLand, which garnered nine awards, including Best Screenwriting from Miami Web Fest and Best Directing from LA Web Fest and is distributed by Canal OTT (an arm of Canal+), Roku and Amazon.

Ryan’s upcoming projects include Hump, an animated film she’s co-producing with an ex-Pixar director, Rob Gibbs (Mater’s Tall Tales) at the helm and written by Sundance winner, Amin Matalqa (Captain Abu Raed). Princess of Dachau, a true story of a Muslim woman who becomes a radio operator during WW2, which she is executive producing and The Perfect Cover, a film she is writing and directing that is based on the true life story of her uncle who was a famed combat cameraman turned CIA operative during the Iran Contra Affairs. Ryan has an MFA in Film Directing and worked the Story and Development departments for over ten years at Pixar Animation Studios on films such as Toy Story That Time Forgot, Brave and Ratatouille.