Misley - Fashion for Women

                      Misley - Designed and Made in Spain

Recently, Riveting Riffs Magazine sat down with Jeanette B. Milio who depending on the project she is working on sometimes wears the hat of producer and sometimes she dons the executive producer’s hat. During the course of her career Ms. Milio has garnered significant respect from her peers, networks, film studios and distributors for her keen business acumen and her knowledge of how to finance and produce a feature film or television and streaming series that will put people in the seats in cinemas or have their eyes glued to their television sets at home. We asked Jeanette B. Milio if she would be gracious enough to take us behind the scenes and explain the business side to us.

Jeanette B. Milio’s story begins in a small town outside of Cologne, Germany, where she was raised by a single mother, who was a hairdresser. At first glance this would appear to be an inauspicious start and far removed from the life she built as a movie mogul, but she credits in part, her success to lessons learned from her mother (more about that in a minute).

“I didn’t have any idea of what this industry would be like.

The one thing I remember that drew me to storytelling even as a child, is that I would come up with little stories and I would engage all the children on our street to perform the stories in Saturday morning theater pieces on the stairs in front of our house. I invited all of the other neighborhood kids to come and watch the plays and to pay ten pennies. I think I was ten or eleven when I started doing that.

I liked to tell a story and I liked to play with kids on the street, so I thought maybe we can do something here that everyone benefits from. At the end of the play that we performed we shared the money and we bought candy with it.

The storytelling was always in my brain, because I was a bookworm and I liked to write. I have always done that even as a child.

I studied business and I never really went into the entertainment industry. My first exposure was when I worked for a temp agency, while I was studying. The temp agency placed me as a secretary to replace a secretary who was going on vacation at RTL television, which is a larger German network that is located in Cologne. While I was there it gave me the first sense of what it was like to work in this type of environment. Lucky for me I worked in the entertainment department where we produced all of the shows that we had bought as formats from the U.S., like Price is Right, Family Feud and so forth. We produced those formats for the German network, as German game shows. As the secretary I was the hub for all of the producers. At any given time, we had between thirty-five and forty producers working on these different shows.

I was there for five years and then I was offered the (opportunity) to run a show for another network station that was a German sports channel. That was a daily health magazine show that ran every day at noon. It was the first time that I produced a show on my own, with a team of segment producers who were working for me.

I started working in Germany, first with network stations and then I was hired by a production company in Munich to be a film producer. I started working on a television series for ARD, which  Read More

Ana Muñozo - Costume Designer

Costume designer Ana Muñozo has designed for productions in theater and film, in both Barcelona, Spain and in New York City. She has lectured at Fordham University in the United States and UNED University in Spain. Although, she is a designer, you discover while in conversation with her that she is part costume designer, with a bit of director, a dash of screenwriter and with an affinity for actors and actresses.

Ana Muñozo studied fashion design and in fact spent four years at the beginning of her career in the industry and established a fashion brand with some colleagues.  

“On white fabric we hand painted the prints ourselves and we made a color chart for every season.

We designed accessories such as ties, fans, umbrellas, scarves and dresses. Actually, the original idea were nightshirts, I remember when I showed them to a client, she told me that she saw them as dresses and I said, "as long as you sell it, I don't care if they wear it to dinner or to dream." We did everything ourselves, the boxes, the labels, they were exclusive and on the label the client could see the number of the series. (There might be) a series of fifteen and you bought number four, therefore you knew that there were only fifteen of that model. We did fashion shows in different places like the international "fashion cafe" and we also participated in some collective exhibitions. I also worked at different times as a stylist for several publications,” she says.

Ana Muñozo grew up with her parents and one older sister in a rural area outside of Barcelona, before they moved into the city.

Her ties to both the fashion world and theater run several generations deep, “My mom was an excellent tailor. I grew up surrounded by buttons, fabrics and sewing.

My great-great grandfather and his siblings acted in his village since the theater companies did not go there. His brothers were the actors, and he was the promoter. This was the connection my family has with art and fashion,” Ana Muñozo explains.

She continues, recalling, “I spent most of my time drawing. I was drawing all day and then I decided to draw clothes for my dolls. My mother made dresses for my dolls, but she wanted to know what I had drawn. My mother made the dresses that she wanted, but I said mom! (you can hear the childlike inflection in her voice as she recalls)! She sewed what she wanted. They were beautiful but different than my (drawings).”

During her teenage years, “If I said to my mother for example, I want a jacket for this weekend, my mother would make it for me in a day. It was incredible.

I was influenced by the fashion of the moment, but I never wanted to have to wear my designs. This is weird. I think this is weird. I think in that moment I didn’t know what I Read More

Derek Siow -  Actor Interview

Derek Siow is one of those people you could sit and talk to for hours on end, both because he is so affable and he is an immensely talented actor, screenwriter and voice actor, who has worked in film, theater and the burgeoning video game market. The Australian thespian who now makes his home in London, England, he is part of the cast for the audio book The Sandman: Act II, which featured a stunning cast that included, James McAvoy, Emma Corrin, Brian Cox, Kat Dennings, John Lithgow and Bill Nighy. He also has two films in postproduction that he is not yet at liberty to talk about.

Before we get into Derek Siow’s acting let’s spend a moment or two talking about his other passion, screenwriting.

“I write sci-fi, drama and comedy and I write mainly because I just crave that creative outlet. In my younger days I wrote a lot of songs (oh right we forgot to mention his music, but we will!) but my writing is more focused on screenplays now. I was really fortunate last year when one of my comedy scripts placed as a semi-finalist one of the screenwriting competitions so I’m always looking at the various options on where to take my projects,” he says.

Derek Siow’s acting career got a big push in 2013 when he played the character Lee in the feature film Piercing Brightness.

“This was a very thought-provoking film. It was more a piece of art than anything else and it was screened at various film festivals, as well as the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). My character Lee was a Chinese immigrant that meets this local British woman and her mother who is an alien seeker. It explored the similarities between aliens from another world and people from other countries. A lot of the themes are still relevant today,” he explains.

Speaking of aliens, Derek Siow is passionate about the science fiction genre, but he assures us he has both feet firmly planted on this planet.  

Elaborating on that he says, “I love everything about science fiction, and I have ever since I was a kid. In science fiction, you can just let your imagination run wild, there’s no limits. Growing up in the 80s, I was a huge Star Wars Read More

                                                 Cozy Rebel

Maia Sharp - New Album

Maia Sharp’s new album Mercy Rising takes the listener from the highs, of the beautiful, seductive and romantic “You’ll Know Who Knows You,” which may be the ultimate love song of this century, to the reflective and picturesque “Things to Fix,” about a relationship that has ended. The former, burns with passion, mixed with ‘I want you and nobody else,’ and the latter uses the metaphor of fixing broken and worn things in a house for what the individual failed to address in the relationship, that perhaps would have made a difference. The words, “What I should have said / And what I should have done / Ya’ I keep skipping over number one / On my list of things to fix,” will take anybody who has been in that moment back there again.

The person in “Things to Fix,” stands in contrast to “John Q Lonely,” from Maia Sharp’s 2008 album Echo, and he was also dealing with a relationship that had come to an end.

She explains, “It shows that I have been doing it long enough that we can compare the end of a relationship thirteen years ago compared to the end of a relationship now.

“John Q Lonely,” is just a crab and his reaction to being hurt is just takes his football and he is going home. He is not going to play this game anymore. He closes himself off. His reaction is to pout. If love didn’t like me then I’m not going to like love.

“Things to Fix,” is a pretty different mindset. It is open and she is aware enough to see that there is something at the very top of my list that I’m avoiding, but the crux of the song is procrastination. It is when you have something in front of you that you should really be prioritizing. All of a sudden, the screw in the doorknob is the most important thing, because you will do anything to distract yourself from the most important thing you should be working on.

The biggest difference between the songs is “John Q Lonely,” was a title that I had, and I brought it to my co-writer Mark Addison who I had been writing with on and off since my first album. It was from a phrase that we liked, and we created a character. “Things to Fix,” is real. I moved to Nashville at the end of 2019, and I found my place a couple of months later. Anytime you move into a new house there is always something. There are little things that…as cool as the previous owners were, there are always little things. Read More