Award-winning film and television directors/producers

Award-winning film and television directors/producers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato founded World of Wonder Productions after meeting at NYU Graduate Film School in the late eighties. Bailey, a Brit hailing from London, and Barbato, an American from Jersey, formed the pop music duo The Pop Tarts, performing and deejaying in New York's underground clubs. Their after hours shows in the East Village were the beginning of a fifteen-year collaboration in music, film, books, fashion, TV, and all things pop. With a bit of money they'd acquired in a music publishing deal, the duo was inspired to launch what would soon become the most cutting-edge production company in Hollywood.

World of Wonder Productions was born in 1991 in Bailey & Barbato's Manhattan loft. Champions of the misunderstood, the two have grown their company from the idea that "today's marginal is tomorrow's mainstream." Together, under the WOW moniker, they have co-directed and co-produced a broad range of documentary films, which often feature controversial subjects and challenge the traditional documentary approach.

Soon after the inception of their television production company, they began working as managers with an unknown New York drag queen named RuPaul, making history by giving America its first mainstream drag artist. From this relationship bloomed World of Wonder Management, which later looked after RCA recording artist Kristine W, author James St. James, and Britain's favorite comic twosome, Adam & Joe.

In the meantime, documentary commissions from the UK were plentiful, and in 1994, the company went transatlantic with a second production office in London, producing programs for Channel Four, Channel Five and the BBC. That same year, Bailey & Barbato uprooted US headquarters from New York and set up shop in Hollywood, where their staff continued to grow as they garnered projects for HBO, Cinemax, VH1, Showtime, Bravo, MTV, CourtTV, and AMC, also producing various music videos for recording artists. The duo and their company began collecting awards, including an Emmy, a Cable Ace Award, and film festival honors around the world. In 1998, they were awarded the GLAAD Fairness Award. In the passing years, Bailey & Barbato became Sundance Festival darlings with films such as PARTY MONSTER and THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE.

The company has established a large online presence, launching a trio of entertainment and merchandising websites: www.worldofwonder.net, www.101rentboys.com and www.eyesoftammyfaye.com, the latter of which garnered a full-page feature in Filmmaker Magazine for remarkable design. In 2000, World of Wonder websites collectively received a quarter of a million hits. This success sparked the inception of The WOW Report, a monthly e-newsletter announcing company programming and listing the hippest sites on the net that minute, which has become a staple for 9,000 industry tastemakers worldwide.

Over the company's ten-year history, they've had offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles with affiliates in San Francisco and Spain. In 2000, they purchased the historic 1929 Shane Building in the heart of Hollywood for their US headquarters and, in the same year, moved their UK office to Chelsea Warf, overlooking the Thames River.