About the Producers

Roger Stewart Brown – Executive Producer

Roger was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. A high school counselor advised him to develop his sense of wonder and expand his horizons beyond New Orleans. Within months of that fateful meeting he left the South to attend Northwestern University’s highly regarded School of Speech on a full scholarship. There he studied film, art, anthropology, and linguistics, graduating in 1975 with a degree in Film.

He next developed his practical filmmaking skills at the Altschul Group, a Chicago based corporate and educational film house. In 1984 he formed Trillium Productions.

Since then he has traveled the world producing programs for clients like National Geographic, Discovery, The Field Museum of Natural History, McDonalds, and others. He is able to communicate difficult concepts in clear ways, and to communicate critical ideas across cultures.

He has been working more and more in Latin America, creating programs for and about Spanish speaking audiences. He recently wrote and produced two one-hour documentaries about world economics featuring Hernando DeSoto. The first will be seen October 8 on PBS.

In 1987 he joined forces with producer/director Gaylon Emerzian. Business boomed. Five years later they married. Now they live and work together in a big old Victorian house in Evanston IL.

But New Orleans will always, always be home.

Gaylon Emerzian – Producer

On her first birthday, in keeping with a family tradition, Gaylon’s grandmother laid out several objects in front of her, each symbolizing a potential path in life.  The objects were a dollar bill, a pair of scissors, a Bible, and a shot glass. Bypassing a life of wealth, drunkenness or religious piety, Gaylon reached for the scissors and her family pronounced her a future tailor. Little did they know that she would be cutting film and not cloth. She engages in every aspect of the filmmaking process and utilizes her passion, inventiveness and resourcefulness to constantly challenge herself as a producer.

Gaylon fell in love with New Orleans in 1975, long before she met Roger. After losing their visas to enter Ghana, she and her friend Mai McDonald picked the hottest, most exotic, yet cheapest place they could fly to…New Orleans.

They took a taxi from the airport to a ramshackled shotgun, somewhere in the 9th ward to stay with Mai’s friend, Pat.

The front windows of the house were broken and vines threatened to take over the building. It looked so bad the driver refused to let the young women out of the cab. But they got out and entered a secret world. The shotgun stretched back and back then terminated in an L-shaped patio with a sparkling fountain. A second story was ringed with a balcony. Gold fish flashed in the pond and jasmine scented the air. The lasting impression of that house and the community around it have stayed with Gaylon over the decades.

Use to the chilliness of the northern society, Gaylon was not prepared for constant banter with strangers on the street. “Hello, children. Where you going? Gonna get some chicken? You remember to bring me a leg.”

She still loves the smell of the ozone on a rainy street car ride, the ferns breaking through the mortar on the walls in the Faubourg Marigny, and the humidity that frizzes her hair.

She dedicates her work on this project to her late mother-in-law, Doris Stewart Brown. Doris always wanted her sons to marry Sacred Heart girls. What she got instead was a daughter-in-law from a blue-collar background in South Chicago. Doris conned Gaylon to picking a sterling pattern (Chantilly) and the road to retro-fitting her as a debutant began. Now Gaylon can make a perfect roux, just don’t tell anyone it’s done in the microwave.

An Emmy award winning editor and multiple award-winning writer/director, Gaylon has done work for National Geographic, A&E, the History Channel, and the Field Museum of Natural History to name a few.

Gaylon is constantly pushing the envelope, finding new ways to express her creativity.  Early on, she recognized the potential in web programming. The leap of faith paid off when the webcast she created, Spatulatta, received the James Beard Award-the culinary equivalent of the Academy Awards.

Gaylon blogs at  A Pinch of Reasoning