Sophia Dilley is a force in the industry. In 2018, she was hired by Concord Music to build their new content strategy. In 2021, she launched “Concord Originals,” the company’s Film and TV division. As Executive Vice President, Sophia and her team collaborate with all teams under Concord’s banner to identify, develop, and produce various screen projects related to Concord’s library of artists, compositions, plays, and musicals. She has been nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series for the SXSW Audience Award-winner “STAX: Soulsville U.S.A.,” a multi-part HBO docuseries about the legendary STAX Records from executive producer Ezra Edelman (“O.J.: Made in America”) and director Jamila Wignot (“Ailey”).
Under Dilley’s stewardship, Concord Originals’ current and upcoming projects include “Shari & Lamb Chop” directed by Lisa D’Apolito (“Love, Gilda”) and Ilya Chaiken’s music doc “Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks” from Executive Producers Julie Cohen and Betsy West (“RBG”). Prior to joining Concord, Sophia worked at Route One Entertainment and Not Impossible Labs, producing various films, TV shows, commercials, and documentaries. She holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees from Loyola Marymount University and a Master of Science degree in Project Management from Boston University.
Cinema Femme had the opportunity to interview Dilley about her projects and her work as an Executive Producer of these projects. We are so excited about what she is doing in the industry and the impact she is making through her work.
Let’s start with talking about how you came to your position at Concord Originals, and how the intersection of music and film came together.
I feel so lucky that I get to bring all of my passions into one job with music, film, TV and theater. All of these components I was passionate about growing up. For college, I went to film school at Loyola Marymount and studied production, and then after I graduated college, I went into development. I started working for the director Peter Berg on a couple films and then got tapped by a development company called Route One Entertainment. During my time there, Scott Pascucci, then CEO of Concord, reached out to me in 2018 as they were building the company and acquiring all of these rights with music publishing and theater. One of their acquisitions was Rogers and Hammerstein. When they did some due diligence, they realized that they also had some film and TV rights in these catalogues. They saw a business opportunity, and started a conversation to figure out music and theater and their intersection and see what could be developed and produced for the screen. So that is where I started, and it’s been a ride. Since then, the company has tripled in size.
I cannot believe all of the projects that you’ve been working on and what’s coming up for you. Can you talk about the mission of Concord and what projects you are drawn to getting behind?
I think it’s a combination between our own mandate which is to look at rights under the roof and discuss how do we build a film and TV project around this. And that starts with a lot of different criteria. Like, who is the audience, and what is the story? What kind of work do we want to put out into the world? And I always like to think about this question based on the mission of our company, how do we champion artists, elevate voices, and impact culture? This is a great way to think about content because we want to be creating quality work that after watching makes you leave thinking differently and feeling good. Or feeling that you’ve gone on a journey and have been inspired in some way. I think that’s the through line in the work that we are championing. It’s made how we align our content and our partners an easy process with that lens on our process. It actually helps with figuring out who are the best candidates for our projects and what stories really fit that model.
Can you talk about your role in developing the Emmy-winning HBO series “STAX: Soulsville U.S.A.” and working with the filmmaker Jamila Wignot on this series?
Jamila is such a great director. Every day we pinched ourselves at Concord that she signed on. Well how that came about was my colleague at Concord, Michele Smith, who oversees STAX Records and interfaces with all of the legacy artists under the label, came into my office right after I started at Concord and said, “we have to tell the story of STAX Records.” And I said, “well, let’s do it, it sounds incredible.” I started doing the research and we aligned very quickly with Polygram Entertainment, who also shares on a lot of the publishing rights for STAX. And we identified Whitehorse Pictures as a great partner for this project who just came off of the Bee Gees, The Apollo and Pavarotti projects. We then approached and attached Laylow Pictures, Caroline Waterlow and Ezra Edelman’s company. Collectively we said we wanted to tell this story in the biggest way possible. How do we find the right voice for this?
If we were going to move forward and champion this story, we’d be remiss to not have it told through a Black perspective, which had never been done before. With the STAX Records story, you have this incredibly rich catalogue that intersects with the Civil Rights movement and a lot of the systemic racism conversations that we are having today. It’s really important that we have the right voices championing that story. It was pretty obvious when we met with Jamila that she was the perfect candidate. She was also coming off of “Ailey,” which is a beautiful film. She wowed us in her approach to the thematics of this story and how she would envision it. And we were really lucky because, of course, then we aligned with HBO and they’ve been fantastic partners with really letting the story live and breathe in a way that it deserves. We premiered the first two episodes at South by Southwest.
That must have been really special.
It was really beautiful. It was a great moment and it’s always fun at South by Southwest because it’s got an energy to it as a festival as a result of all these different groups coming together. But I think for me, the special premiere of that project was in Memphis because we got to premiere it with the artists and in the hometown of STAX Records. That was a really beautiful presentation and a remarkable experience.
This is the kind of story where people are going to feel seen. Probably a lot of people didn’t know about the story of this studio.
I also love how timely your projects are. How was it working with Lisa D’Apolito on this project of “Shari & Lamp Chop”? I love that clip that is shown of her talking about having a woman president. And that was in the 1950s! What fueled you as an EP on this project?
Shari Lewis truly is an inspiration. I think she paved the way for a lot of people in children’s entertainment. She was in that space far before “Mr. Rogers” show and “Sesame Street.” But she also is this completely incredible talent. She was an actress and a dancer. She also taught herself Japanese in the middle of her career so she could go perform in Japan and conduct orchestras. The woman is sort of unmatched in terms of how she took on a task and just perfected it. Lisa has such a great way of capturing Shari’s story by pulling back the layers of the core of her life and what she was facing as an artist at that time.
But what’s beautiful is that you when you watch the film, it reminds you to not give up on your dreams. You’ll always face obstacles, but through Shari’s story, she shows if you put in the work and you really commit, you can succeed. Shari always had this true north, sort of like this guiding star. The way that she thought was that it doesn’t matter that people tell me no, I just keep going. It’s really a magical narrative as she keeps reinventing herself. For me, both as an audience member of the film and watching from the sidelines as an EP, it’s the kind of story that you realize has that layer of hope and inspiration that you hope people take with them from the film.
I noticed you are working on a project that Julie Cohen and Betsy West are EPs on about the Lunachicks. That must be awesome because they are kind of the tops of the tops in terms of documentary filmmakers. I know the project is still in production or in post, but can you talk about working with them?
You can start to see a through line in the types of projects I work on. Strong female voices are definitely consistent in the kind of projects that we work on, and Betsy and Julie are definitely a part of that group. Betsy, Julie and I were developing a different project together and they realized quickly the kind of project that we both were aligned on. They then brought to my attention this fantastic film that Ilya Chaiken is directing about the Lunachicks. And again, it’s another story of sort of this underdog group that truly should have had more attention. Because of the way the music business was set up in the 80s and 90s, it was very rare for female driven bands to break through. This film goes so far beyond just being a story about a band. It’s a story about women empowerment, and a fun journey of creating art and what that means and going through all of that. You’re always facing obstacles, but you inevitably are breaking ceilings for other people in the process. And the Lunachicks are fun. They are kind of bad ass cool chicks too.
I’m so excited. I know nothing about them, so this will be a great introduction.
Betsy and Julie have this history of aligning with women who break down walls in their work. And I just think that fits into our mission of the projects and great storytelling that we support. Also, for me, I’m a huge punk fan, so I already love the band and the story. I think it’s a really fun one. I’m really looking forward to people seeing the film soon, fingers crossed.
Are there any other projects you want to talk about, specifically related to working with women and non-binary filmmakers?
A large part of our slate of films champion women and non-binary filmmakers and female stories. I don’t know if it’s necessarily deliberate, but I think it’s more about one, the story should be told and hasn’t been, and two, the story shines a light on the underdog hero. These are the kinds of things I think people want to see. They want to feel like they can relate to stories that we all deal with and are about obstacles that we face every day. And you want to feel that feeling that someone else is there going through it with you, whether they are a movie star or a band or a ventriloquist.
We have a number of those kind of projects. Regarding the films that are out, we also did the Cyndi Lauper documentary on Paramount Plus, “Let the Canary Sing.” That was another really fun experience. And Alison Ellwood did a fantastic job capturing the essence of Cyndi. May we all bow down to Cyndi Lauper because she is an incredible force.
Across the upcoming slate we’re really excited about, we’re doing a limited series adaptation of Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” with Rachel Shukert as the showrunner and we’re partnered with Skydance TV. It’s more in the development phase, but we’re really excited about what that can mean for the next generation because of course, that story has had a few iterations. And this is the time for the next one.
What do you hope people see in the projects you get behind? What kind of legacy are you leaving with your work?
It’s a hard question to answer, but I love the essence of it. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about impact. I’m not a filmmaker and I’m more about helping to shepherd things to come to life. I always want to find something that I know will have that kind of cultural impact for whomever is watching it. That can mean a lot of different things, but what I want through the projects I’m behind is that they leave you walking away from it feeling like there is some purpose to what was in the narrative and it makes you feel more. And I think that can come across in a commercial entertaining film just as much as it can in a more educational and academic driven story. It’s really about what the audiences carry away with them. It’s so hard because we’re all competing for eyeballs and ears. You don’t want people to walk away and go, “why did I just waste an hour of my time?” You want them feel that they experienced something.
