STOCKTON, California — Emily Best found it difficult to fully comprehend.
“It’s crazy,” she said.
Fortunately, IVY Innovator Film Award voters think it’s perfectly sane.
Best, 35, a Stockton, California, native, who still considers herself something of a novice in her unexpected field of endeavor, was “utterly overwhelmed” Tuesday night in Los Angeles.
Best’s Seed&Spark, an Internet enterprise she founded to assist and empower independent movie-makers, won the 2015 IVY award for “contributions to the film industry.”
There even was a red-carpet roll-out at the SmogShoppe, where Josh Radnor, 41, an actor, director, producer and writer, presented Seed&Spark’s somewhat surprised CEO with the award.
“Oh, you can’t go 10 feet in Los Angeles and not hit a red carpet,” Best, who lives in Echo Park, said with self-deprecating wit. “I haven’t had much experience.”
Ten years ago, she was serving at and managing restaurants in Sacramento.
“I’ve surprised myself more than anyone, I promise,” said Best, who lived in Stockton for 10 years, studied anthropology in college, spent two years singing jazz and teaching in Barcelona, Spain, and experienced her “feminist awakening” five years ago in New York.
Her business, which has helped generate $2.7 million for 175 independent creators, has a succinctly un-Hollywood mission: “Sustainability for filmmakers and diversity of content for audiences.”
Winning a movie-oriented award in L.A. hasn’t been a distraction.
“Like the Water,” a film with a four-woman cast that includes Best and friend Caitlin Fitzgerald (Showtime’s “Masters of Sex”), was released July 31.
Fitzgerald, 32, co-wrote the screenplay with executive producer and director Caroline Von Kuhn. Best is the producer.
“I learned everything about film,” said Best, who generated $65,000 from “friends, family and fools” to craft a “slow, contemplative indie drama.” It’s set in bucolic Camden, Maine, near a “small” cabin built in 1911 by her great-grandfather. It remains emblematic of her ongoing growth and is filled with fond memories.
Seed&Spark also generates a semi-annual online magazine, Bright Ideas. “We’re launching” a “distribution arm” and a “2.0” website at the end of August.
Part of the motivation for “Like the Water” was that Fitzgerald — “she looks like a very tall Audrey Hepburn” — and her friends were “getting enraged by the kinds of parts she was offered,” Best said. “That was my year of feminist awakening. I started to see that movies for which they said there was no audience? There was, indeed, an audience.
“By the time, though,” that Seed&Spark became a vision, she wasn’t thinking of herself as an “entrepreneur or filmmaker. It was more a desire to create a future in independent films” and challenge industry dominance by “white males.”
After moving to Sacramento in 1990 with mother Ruth Blank, who’s publishing stories and has completed a novel, Best graduated from the International Baccalaureate program at Mira Loma High School.
She attended Pennsylvania’s Haverford College, studying anthropology — “I’ve always been bred to think of myself as an academic.” While writing a senior thesis on “body modification,” Best couldn’t maintain a “relativist perspective in light of actual atrocities” such as “female genital mutilation.”
After “losing my voice” while singing jazz in Spain, she returned to Sacramento before moving to New York, where dad Eric — a former editorial-page writer at The Record — provided a reserve of business aptitude while working in high finance at Morgan Stanley.
In Spain, she’d intensified a lifelong affection for food and cooking. Best fondly recalled developing that devotion as she and her mom bought fresh fruits and vegetables at Stockton farmer’s markets. “I hated asparagus. I like it now, though.” “Also, fishing on the Delta,” said Best, who attended Stockton’s Montessori School.
She helped develop a “site-specific,” New York version of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” “a really charming mess,” with an “incredible group of women collaborators.” Her theatrical instincts were awakened.
While working with her dad’s Best Partners consulting scenarios-to-strategy business, Best learned networking. That included heater production, acting, co-founding ABroad Stage Co. with friends and helping manage The Private Theatre Corp.
In 2008, she and her father worked on “The Deep,” a short animated children’s film Best produced and narrated. It subsequently was shown at France’s Cannes Short Film Corner.
Now, she’s devoting her energy, imagination — and “academic” discipline — to independent filmmaking, emphasizing women’s roles and views.
“There’s a definite disconnect between what filmmakers think the audiences will be” — for multimillion-dollar CGI/THX blockbusters — and the level of community engagement.
She remains “head-down” in her mission and commitment. Tap her on the shoulder if anyone says “award.”
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.