Kelly Brown: making things happen

"I was supposed to be Punky, you know," Kelly Brown says, playing with her lighter. She puts out another cigarette in a nearly filled ashtray, exhaling smoke as she speaks in rapid, spitfire sentences. Her voice is a raspy but playful, like a grown up Punky Brewster. "It was down to me or Soleil Moon-Frye. I kid you not."
She’s sitting in what is now the living room of her rent-controlled Park Slope apartment. The long, narrow layout of the place is unusual; it took Brown months before she finally settled on a room arrangement.This used to be her bedroom, and then it was her dining room, then it was her guestroom, until finally she decided to make it her living room. She has lived here with her cat, Oliver, for nearly a year now since relocating to New York after over 10 years of working in Hollywood. Moving comes naturally to Brown; she has spent much of her life migrating from place to place, from career to career, uprooting herself from the most comfortable situations. Even sitting still sometimes seems like a challenge—she fidgets in her chair, looking anxious or excited or late for an appointment. After 10 years of knowing all the right people, making all the right friends, Brown packed up her things and moved to Manhattan, where she knew no one, to try to make movies from the ground up.
Though her childhood dreams were to be in front of the camera, her involvement behind the camera began accidentally. She was young, eighteen, and needed a job. Because her father was a screenwriter, she had grown up with people in the industry. The first movie she worked on was a small independent. "I think I got paid like $50 a day.” She says. “I couldn't even tell you what it was about." Soon, she started getting gigs through word of mouth. Moving set to set, she would go on day shoots for small films that needed help where she would act as a production assistant. Sometimes her friends were on a show or in the movie and would just bring her to set. "Then I'd make nice with the production coordinators" she says.
When she was 20, she was offered a job in music management. She helped manage the blues-rock band the Black Crowes and revolutionized the way fan clubs were run. The Black Crowes were one of the first bands to offer special tickets to fan club members; the first 20 rows of seats were reserved for fan club members only. "(lead singer) Chris Robinson wanted to see his true fans when he sang," Brown says, lighting another cigarette. And in most stadiums, you can only see the first 20 rows.
Though she was having a great time, Brown knew she didn't want to be in the music business. After 6 years in the field, she realized it was just a job to her— So, being the mover that she is, she left.
But music wasn't done with her. While she was in the middle of producing a reality television show for MTV ("A Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, but for adults…it was actually brilliant."), Brown heard that a song she had written for the soap opera Port Charles was nominated for a Daytime Emmy. Brown’s song, "Hey Sister," was originally written about her little sister moving to Texas, but, like every effective soap opera song, it was reworked to be about a girl who finds out she has a twin sister and when she finds her, learns the twin is dead. "In the end," Brown says, breaking into a girlish smile, "I lost to a song about a dead midget."
Brown had just finished producing a short film when she heard about a deal on an apartment in Brooklyn that was too good to pass up. “So, I just up and left,” she says, fiddling with her lighter again. Brown wasn’t afraid of the effects it would have on her career; she knew she would be able to do film and television consistently in New York, and after growing up in Los Angeles, “it was time to leave the nest—at 32 years old,” she says, laughing.
This has been her biggest move yet, and she says, the most fulfilling. “I hadn’t had a ‘first’ in a really long time,” she says. Her career has kept is keeping up with her. She's casting for MTV, she's co-writing a show, and she's trying to produce two films. Right now, one of her first projects out of Los Angeles is merging two major parts of her life—music and film—into a biopic on the nearly forgotten hillbilly rock pioneer Eddie Cochran. The only difference is, now she's in New York, where she knows no one. "In LA, everything is about networking," she says. And after years of being the person people would network through to get to celebrities, Brown now has the chance to learn for herself how to work in the business. “In LA, everyone is talking about what they're going to do or what they want to do,” she says. “In New York, they're just doing it."
"I can't not be working towards something," she says. "You just don't succeed if you're sitting on your ass."