L.A.'s 30 Under 30: The City's Rising Stars
The Digital-Media Maven: Milana Rabkin
One peek at the iCal of this Digital Media Agent for United Talent Agency is enough to make anyone want to pound eight Red Bulls! From rolling calls from S.F. all the way to Amsterdam to launching a YouTube channel for a TV production company to meeting with a famous actor who wants to partner on a mobile start-up — caffeine may not even cut it most days for Ms. Rabkin! Day in and day out, though, the Endeavor mailroom-bred babe somehow manages to bring Silicon Valley to Silicon Beach, shaking up old-school Hollywood tactics to bring traditional clients state-of-the art digital success. It’s such an innovative (and complicated) biz that there’s no rule book, but she explains, “I’m interested in multi-platform story-telling, crowd-funding, new models of distribution that allow artists to go directly to their fans, and social media as a new form of entertainment.”
After the frustration over the lack of great movies being made, noticing her own consumption habits change, and watching her colleagues create actual revenue-bearing and audience-growing URLs, Rabkin returned to UCLA to do independent research, creating her own classes since there was no major. “I kept thinking, what if I took these characters from this dead script and launched it as a Twitter feed, or reworked this feature script as a low-budget web series to breath some life into this world?” She finished her final exam and — bam — started at UTA the next day (she was 22). This kind of young disruption is exactly what L.A.’s been craving, and we have our fingers firmly crossed that the prolific chick sees one of her start-ups make a major exit, or perhaps even go public. (And then takes a luxurious vacation.)
—Brenna Egan
Hair by Jacquie Fetch, makeup by Mayera Abeita and Ali Magee.
in NYC