Company type | Private |
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Industry | Entertainment |
Founded | 1991 |
Founder |
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Headquarters | , United States |
Services |
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Website | www |
World of Wonder Productions is an American production company [1] founded in 1991 by filmmakers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. [2] Based in Los Angeles, California, the company specializes in documentary television and film productions with a key focus on LGBTQ topics. Together, Barbato and Bailey have produced programming through World of Wonder for HBO, Bravo, HGTV, [3] Showtime, BBC, [4] Netflix, [5] MTV and VH1, [6] [7] with credits including the Million Dollar Listing docuseries, RuPaul's Drag Race , [2] and the documentary films The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000) [3] [7] [8] and Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016). [9] [10] [11] [12]
World of Wonder is best known for its contributions towards LGBTQ programming, for which they won an Outfest Annual Achievement Award in 2011. [13] Their most well known production is RuPaul's Drag Race. They have managed the career of drag queen and titular host RuPaul since the early 1990s, eventually producing the television franchise alongside the majority of its live shows, podcasts, television specials, and conventions. [14]
World of Wonder was co-founded as a record label and management company by Barbato and Bailey in the mid-1980s after meeting in New York University's (NYU) graduate film program, [15] with the name coming from a British magazine Bailey used to read as a child. [16] The two formed Fabulous Pop Tarts, a disco-pop rock duo, and began performing regularly at Danceteria and other clubs in downtown New York City. [15] [17] They produced two albums, Age of the Thing, [18] which included their hit single New York City Beat, and Gagging on the Lovely Extravaganza, which included guest appearances by Lady Miss Kier, RuPaul, Martyn Phillips, and Filthy the Dog. [19]
Barbato and Bailey moved on to begin organizing projects in television production and licensing, documentary filmmaking, and the career expansion of their friends and fellow artists, particularly RuPaul, whom they met in Atlanta in the 1980s. [20] They produced RuPaul's first album, RuPaul is: StarBooty!, in 1986, and became his manager shortly after launching World of Wonder in 1991. They have since produced all of his television shows, his DragCon bi-coastal conventions and music productions, and have earned multiple Emmy Awards. [20]
One of Barbato and Bailey's early television documentaries, Died on the 4th of July: Nelson Sullivan's World of Wonder, shares its name with the production company. The documentary, a one-hour portrait of Nelson Sullivan, was created from an archive of over 1,200 hours of video footage taken over the decade preceding Sullivan's death of a heart attack on July 4, 1989. [21] Died on the 4th of July aired on the UK's Channel 4, was included on the DVD release of Party Monster: The Shockumentary, [22] and contributed to Sullivan's posthumous rise in notoriety. [21] The early focus on Sullivan solidified the company's interest in documentary filmmaking. In 2014, Barbato and Bailey were honored with the International Documentary Association's (IDA) Pioneer Award, "celebrating exceptional achievement, leadership, and vision in the nonfiction and documentary community." [23]
World of Wonder operates out of the Shane Building on Hollywood Boulevard. Designed by architects S. Tilden Norton and Fredrick H. Wallis and erected in 1930, the building served as the original home of the Directors Guild of America. [24] [25] The World of Wonder Storefront Gallery now occupies the ground floor retail space, with production and management offices occupying the upper three stories. The basement, once home to the punk rock club The Masque, now houses the company's video archive and a soundstage. [26]
World of Wonder primarily produces television content for networks in the US and UK, including BBC, Channel 4, FIVE, HBO, Cinemax, TLC, PBS, Showtime, A&E, MTV, VH1 and Bravo. [7] Productions over the past three decades include RuPaul's Drag Race, Manhattan Cable with Laurie Pike, [27] [28] Takeover TV , The Adam and Joe Show , [29] Tori & Dean: Inn Love , Good Work, Million Dollar Listing, Heli-Loggers, Pam: Girl on the Loose , Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce , and Island Hunters. [3] World of Wonder also produced the documentary series One Punk Under God , Sex Change Hospital , and TransGeneration , one of the first unscripted television shows to focus on the transgender community, [7] which won the 2006 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Documentary. [30]
Another franchise by World of Wonder, Million Dollar Listing, debuted in Los Angeles in 2006, and has since expanded to include New York, San Francisco, and Miami series. [31] The spin-off, Sell It Like Serhant, featuring one of Million Dollar Listing New York's top brokers, Ryan Serhant, launched in 2018. [7] In 2021, Barbato and Bailey produced and directed Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes and Small Town News: KPVM Pahrump for HBO. [32] [33] The company has received several Emmy Awards nominations for their documentary programming.
World of Wonder produced The RuPaul Show, hosted by RuPaul from 1996 until 1998. The company partnered with RuPaul to pitch the reality television show RuPaul's Drag Race to Logo TV, which was immediately picked up for a season and aired in February 2009. [34] The company also produced multiple spinoff series:
World of Wonder's work in television has been honored with over two dozen Emmy nominations, including multiple wins for RuPaul's Drag Race. The show has notably received awards for Outstanding Reality Competition Program and Outstanding Host for a Reality or Competition Program. [35]
World of Wonder has produced many feature-length documentary films, many focusing on provocative subjects, several of which have garnered industry awards and nominations. These include Inside Deep Throat , which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, [36] HBO biopic Wishful Drinking , starring Carrie Fisher, which received two Emmy nominations, [37] and Becoming Chaz, which premiered at Sundance as the Oprah Winfrey Network's (OWN) first ever documentary [38] and was nominated for three Emmy awards. [39]
World of Wonder has also produced feature films Party Monster , starring Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green, [40] and Menendez: Blood Brothers , starring Courtney Love, Nico Totorella, Benito Martinez, and Myko Oliver. [41]
Barbato and Bailey have produced a host of other original documentaries, including Party Monster: The Shockumentary, [22] The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Monica in Black and White, [2] Gender Revolution with Katie Couric, [42] [22] and The Last Beekeeper. [43] In 2017, Out of Iraq, a documentary chronicling the relationship between two soldiers serving in Iraq won a daytime Emmy for Logo TV. [44] In March 2018, the documentary When the Beat Drops, directed by Jamal Sims, premiered at the Miami International Film Festival, where it won the Knight Documentary Achievement Award. [45] [46] In 2018, World of Wonder produced and directed Liberty: Mother of Exiles, an HBO documentary examining the history of the Statue of Liberty. [47] The company was also commissioned by YouTube to create Stonewall Outloud, a documentary based on the Stonewall protests of 1969, using the audio recordings of StoryCorps founder, Dave Isay. [48]
Over the years, World of Wonder has expanded its presence into new media types, including conventions, video-on-demand, social media, and blogging. The WOW Report, a blog providing daily coverage of the pop culture and nightlife sectors, was named Best Counter Culture Blog by LA Weekly in 2011. [49]
In 2015, World of Wonder added conventions to their portfolio with the launch of RuPaul's DragCon LA, located at the Los Angeles Convention Center. [50] The company is also responsible for RuPaul's DragCon NYC, launched in 2017 and hosted in Javits Convention Center. The New York City edition of the convention is largest collection of drag art and culture in the world, with over 50,000 attendees in the sell-out first year. [51] [52] DragCon and World of Wonder expanded to London in 2020 with RuPaul's DragCon UK. [53] [54] During the COVID-19 pandemic, DragCon LA was hosted online as Digital DragCon. [55]
In January 2020, the production company began their first Las Vegas Strip residency, RuPaul's Drag Race Live! , where former contestants from the Drag Race franchise perform at the Flamingo Las Vegas, directed by RuPaul and Jamal Sims. [56] World of Wonder also has a YouTube channel with the name WOWPresents, which features over 5,000 videos and has more than 1.9 million subscribers. [57]
First introduced in 2013, the WOWIE Awards are World of Wonder's tribute to the best in LGBTQIA+ entertainment, trailblazers, activism, artistry, and pop culture. The awards coincided with World of Wonder's annual holiday party until 2022, when they included it as a closing event at DragCon LA. [58] Since 2020, the awards ceremony is streamed live on the WOWPresents YouTube channel. [59] Categories include Best Drag Queen Music Video, Best Red Carpet Look, Best Breakout Star, Best Blog or Website and Best LGBTQ Comedian. [60] [61]
In November 2017, World of Wonder launched the subscription streaming service WOW Presents Plus. [62] The service contains a multitude of original series and live events spanning the realm of pop culture and LGBTQ society. [63] Exclusive original series include: Sketchy Queens , UNHhhh , and Painted with Raven . The service is also the main international distributor in some regions for RuPaul's Drag Race and the international versions of the franchise. It also includes many web series found on WOWPresents' YouTube channel, such as Detox's Life Rehab and La Vida de Valentina. [64]
RuPaul Andre Charles is an American drag queen, television host, singer, producer, writer, and actor. He produces, hosts, and judges the reality competition series RuPaul's Drag Race and has received several accolades, including 14 Primetime Emmy Awards, three GLAAD Media Awards, a Critics' Choice Television Award, two Billboard Music Awards, and a Tony Award. He has been dubbed the "Queen of Drag" and is considered the most commercially successful drag queen in the United States, with Fortune saying that he is "easily the world's most famous drag queen." In 2017, RuPaul was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
James St. James is a television & internet personality, author, celebutante, frequent collaborator with Mathu Andersen, and former "Club Kid", a member of the New York City club scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Michelle Visage is an American singer, television personality, broadcaster, producer, and actress. She gained recognition as a member of the dance-pop group Seduction, who charted five singles on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1989 and 1990. She later served as lead vocalist of the R&B and dance group The S.O.U.L. S.Y.S.T.E.M., who reached the top of the dance charts with the single "It's Gonna Be a Lovely Day" in 1993.
Douglas Gabriel Rotello is an American musician, writer and filmmaker. He created New York's Downtown Divas revues in the 1980s, was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of OutWeek magazine, became the first openly gay columnist at a major American newspaper, New York Newsday, and authored the book Sexual Ecology. He now makes documentaries for HBO, The History Channel and other networks.
RuPaul's Drag Race is an American reality competition television series, the first in the Drag Race franchise, produced by World of Wonder for Logo TV, WOW Presents Plus, VH1 and, beginning with the fifteenth season, MTV. The show documents RuPaul in the search for "America's next drag superstar". RuPaul plays the role of host, mentor, and head judge for this series, as contestants are given different challenges each week. Contestants are judged by a panel that includes RuPaul, Michelle Visage, one of three rotating judges, as well as one or more guest judges, who critique their progress throughout the competition. The title of the show is a play on drag queen and drag racing, and the title sequence and song "Drag Race" both have a drag-racing theme.
Shock Video is a series of hour-long documentaries that aired on HBO between 1993 and 2004. They were produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato through their company World of Wonder. The first installment examines the rise and effects of camcorders and video surveillance. The 1995 sequel focuses on graphic footage shown in criminal trials. Both were aired as part of HBO's America Undercover series. Subsequent installments of Shock Video serve as compilations of clips from around the world which are typically sexual in nature.
Madison Hinton, known professionally as Ts Madison, is an American reality television personality and actress. With the reality show The Ts Madison Experience, she became the first Black transgender woman to star in and act as executive producer of her own reality series. She has appeared in a variety of smaller films and some major television programs.
Brian Michael Firkus, better known by the stage name Trixie Mattel, is an American drag queen, television personality, and singer-songwriter originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is known for her exaggerated, high-camp, 1960s-influenced style, distinctive eye makeup, and her blend of comedy, acoustic pop, and folk-country music; Mattel sings and plays guitar and the autoharp. In 2015, she competed in the seventh season of the drag reality television competition series RuPaul's Drag Race, placing sixth. In 2018, she went on to win the third season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. She also made guest appearances in various iterations of the Drag Race franchise.
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures is a 2016 American documentary film about the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, directed and executive produced by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, and produced by Katharina Otto-Bernstein for Film Manufacturers Inc.
RuPaul: What's the Tee? is a comedy podcast first released on April 9, 2014 hosted by American entertainers RuPaul and Michelle Visage. The hosts discuss a wide range of subjects and usually have at least one celebrity guest appear per episode. They often discuss behind-the-scenes topics from RuPaul's Drag Race, where RuPaul and Visage are also hosts. The podcast won a Webby Award in 2018.
RuPaul's DragCon NYC is an annual fan convention and expo of drag culture held in New York City, which debuted in September 2017. It is based on the successful RuPaul's DragCon LA which was launched in Los Angeles in 2015 billed as a “convention that celebrates ‘the art of drag, queer culture and self-expression for all’”. The NYC event is considered the "world's largest celebration of drag culture" with 100,000 attendees. The event is an outgrowth of the internationally successful RuPaul's Drag Race, which generated Drag Race Thailand, RuPaul's Drag Race UK, RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, and Chile's The Switch Drag Race. RuPaul's Drag Race and the two DragCons come from World of Wonder Entertainment (WOW), a production company based in Los Angeles. The first RuPaul's DragCon NYC was held in 2017 at the Javits Center, with over 40,000 attendees at the two-day all-ages event; it “garnered 687 million (online) impressions in 2018.” Based on the success of the original LA event, the NYC event expanded to three days in 2019: both had over 100,000 attendees in 2019.
RuPaul's DragCon LA is an annual expo of drag culture held in Los Angeles billed as a "convention that celebrates 'the art of drag, queer culture and self-expression for all'", which debuted in 2015. Its sister event is RuPaul's DragCon NYC started in 2017, and is considered the "world's largest celebration of drag culture." The event is an outgrowth of the internationally successful RuPaul's Drag Race, which generated Drag Race Thailand, RuPaul's Drag Race UK, RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, and Chile's The Switch Drag Race. RuPaul's Drag Race and the DragCons come from World of Wonder Entertainment (WOW), a production company based in Los Angeles.
RuPaul's Drag Race: Untucked! is a spin-off of the American reality competition RuPaul's Drag Race, currently airing on the cable channel MTV. The program debuted on Logo in the United States on February 1, 2010, as a companion show launched in conjunction with the second season of RuPaul's Drag Race; it moved to WOWPresents' YouTube channel on March 3, 2015, as a web series, coinciding with the debut of the seventh season of the parent series. The series returned to cable television on VH1, on March 22, 2018, coinciding with the tenth season of RuPaul's Drag Race. The show now airs on MTV as of January 6, 2023, in conjunction with the fifteenth season of the main series.
Drag Race is a drag queen reality competition television franchise, created by American drag entertainer RuPaul with production company World of Wonder. The franchise originated with RuPaul's Drag Race, which premiered in the United States in 2009. The objective of that series is to crown "America's Next Drag Superstar" who possesses the traits of "charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent". The original series is often credited for bringing drag into the "mainstream". The popularity of the original series led to the creation of a media franchise including spin-offs and international adaptations.
WOW Presents Plus is a subscription-based streaming service owned by production company, World of Wonder. The subscription service was founded in November 2017, by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. The service offers a multitude of original series, including shows like Painted with Raven and UNHhhh.
Painted with Raven is a makeup competition television series hosted by Raven, which premiered on WOW Presents Plus on November 25, 2021. RuPaul serves as co-executive producer alongside Randy Barbato, Fenton Bailey, and Tom Campbell of World of Wonder. After two weeks of the debut competition show, on December 9, 2021, it was announced that it had been picked up for a second season.
Drag Race Sverige is a Swedish reality competition television series based on the American series RuPaul's Drag Race. It is broadcast by SVT1 and SVT Play in Sweden and airs on WOW Presents Plus elsewhere.
The third season of Drag Race Philippines premiered on 7 August 2024. The season airs on HBO Go in Philippines and WOW Presents Plus internationally. The season was confirmed by World of Wonder on 17 October 2023.
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