Hollywood life

Trinity graduate and Enniskerry native Sarah-Kate Fenelon has made it as a creative executive and film producer in Hollywood. Here, she shares how she did it and reveals the highs and lows of everyday working life in LA.

I’ve always dreamed about telling stories that got people talking. In some ways, working in Hollywood feels like it’s been a long time coming, but in others, I still pinch myself that I get to do this for a living. Perhaps one of the coolest parts of the job is that I get to go to work every day on the original Charlie Chaplin lot, whose legacy goes as far back as the medium itself.

My earliest memory of film is sitting down as a kid to watch a rented Karate Kid from Xtra-vision after school. Film and TV are so much more than entertainment – they are a vehicle for empathy. Movies give people permission to feel and express emotion. They bring you together for a shared experience. I still remember the moment when I decided to pursue filmmaking as a career. I was in the cinema watching Atonement, and Vanessa Redgrave was in the middle of her final monologue. I remember deciding there and then,

“This is it – I want to work in film.”

It wasn’t exactly a career path they talked to us about at school, which is wild because, in Ireland, film production studios are coming out of our ears. In school, I excelled at maths and always loved art – and film production combines both. If my school had been aware of that, it would have been a no-brainer. But because that didn’t seem like an option, I went into what I thought was the next best thing: English and drama in Trinity. While there, I also enrolled in a part-time filmmaking course at Filmbase. It was there that I got my first real hands-on experience working with a crew to turn an idea into a script and a script into a movie. After I graduated, I attended film school in New York City and started looking for jobs in Los Angeles. Agencies in LA run the business. They hold all the talent and negotiate on their behalf. Without agency experience, it’s hard to get anything off the ground. But at this stage, I had a dozen international short films I had produced, an MFA in creative film production from Columbia, and a rather shameless approach to networking. So that’s what I did – I met everyone I could for coffee. Little did I know that would end up leading me to work for legendary storyteller Neil Gaiman.

What I do now as a creative executive is hard to describe, as it’s a role that doesn’t really exist in Ireland. But, the best way to explain it is that we act as a bridge between the deal being made and the production being filmed. In essence, we’re responsible for the entire creative piece in the end. It’s actually closer to a consulting role than anything else.

From a day-to-day point of view, I take a lot of meetings. I talk to everyone who is working on the project, and together we bring that project through each of the stages of production. My boss is currently based in New Zealand, I’m back home, and the rest of the production is in Los Angeles – so a lot of my work at the minute is through email or Zoom.

I like to think I have been very lucky in my career so far, but I think that’s because, in this industry, you

sort of have to flip the idea of rejection on its head. I have a friend whose goal is to get 100 rejection letters every year, because that means they’ve sent out at least 200 other proposals that might lead to something else.

It’s the experiences you have as a filmmaker that are most important – you don’t have to be winning all the time.

The most Hollywood moment I’ve experienced yet has definitely been by way of my boss, Neil. I work with him quite directly, so always forget how much of a big deal he is. At SXSW [the South by Southwest

Film Festival], he had a whole security team including drivers, and all of us had to have passes, which was a bit surreal. Then the Good Omens premiere was also mad. Times Square was shut down for the occasion. There were countdowns to the end of the world on all the screens and like 50 nuns singing acapella outside McDonald’s. I just remember thinking, “This is not normal, and I love it!”