Yahoo Lifestyle Ilene Chaiken, Jennifer Beals and Pamela Drucker Mann Join Forces to Launch Run-A-Muck Media (EXCLUSIVE)
Prolific producer Ilene Chaiken, actress Jennifer Beals and former Condé Nast president and global chief revenue officer Pamela Drucker Mann have teamed up to launch next-gen media company, Run-A-Muck Media.
Drucker Mann is set as CEO of the company, while Chaiken and Beals are co-chief content officers. All three are founders of the new venture. Chaiken and Beals have worked together on and off since 2004 when Beals starred in Chaiken’s Showtime series “The L Word.”
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Under their new banner, the trio aim to create new projects and franchises across streaming, social, Web3, audio, live events and consumer products. The initial slate at Run-A-Muck includes:
An expansion of Ilene Chaiken Studios, with several scripted and unscripted series at major streamers. One example will be “The L World,” a fully built-out universe of content and experiences from the team behind “The L Word.”
The world of sports will come with a whole new slate of scripted and unscripted content across multiple consumer touchpoints and will start with a project set in a high-profile women’s sports franchise.
Additional new franchises in development with artists and entrepreneurs spanning multiple categories including sports, food, home, fashion, and music. The first will be a scripted series about ambition, loyalty and chosen family, set in an iconic gay dance bar in New York City.
While not formally set up as a revival at Showtime (which owns the rights to “The L Word”) the larger concept behind “The L World” is to tap into the existing fan base of the series as a built-in audience for new projects in the same vein.
However, that doesn’t mean a new revival is off the table.
“One of the things that I’ve said, claimed, learned, is that I’m going to be on my deathbed still developing new ‘L Word’ iterations,” says Chaiken, who is also known for her work on “Twin Peaks,” “Empire” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” “It just doesn’t stop. I have Gen Z twin daughters whose friends talk about ‘The L Word’ and are discovering it for the first time. They go to ‘L Word’ parties and they don’t tell anyone that their mother had anything to do with the show. So there are just still so many stories to tell that specifically are ‘L Word’ stories. Now that’s a Showtime proposition. Showtime owns ‘The L Word,’ Showtime has continued to show an interest in the IP. But we believe, in addition to ‘The L Word,’ there is an ‘L World.”
The Run-A-Muck partners vow to use their collective experience to pursue “an immersive media strategy that puts audiences at the center of content.
Drucker Mann says Run-A-Muck is in its pre-seed round of funding and “a lot of demand” amid its initial slew of investor meetings taking place this week. “We are moving very quickly because we already have projects that are set up. We have a working business, which is probably the best thing you could show a VC,” she says.
For Beals, who rocketed to stardom with her role in 1983’s “Flashdance,” the venture is an opportunity to work more behind the camera with her longtime friend and collaborator Chaiken.
“Run-A-Muck is the result of a fever dream Ilene and I have been having for over 20 years,” Beals says. “We’ve wanted to create or work with others to find compelling artist-led stories that invite an audience into a world that shows them things that they haven’t seen before, and that enables new experiences and connections, but always with a view to understanding the commonalities among us. To understanding the universal emotions that we’re all experiencing in our silos.”
(Pictured: Ilene Chaiken, Jennifer Beals, Pamela Drucker Mann)
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