She’s worked on the sets of Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon and now has her own small business, Seek New York. Rebecca Frey, 01′, talked to us about her time at Towson, living in New York and starting her own business!
In November 2007, the Writers Guild of America, the labor union whose members write for virtually every facet of the entertainment industry, went on strike. The strike effected the hundreds of thousands of people who work in television and film. They were all suddenly unemployed.
The public may have noticed an absence of new episodes of popular television shows like The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Saturday Night live, but the employees of these shows were without a paycheck.
Rebecca Frey was an assistant costume designer for Late Night with Conan O’Brien when she found herself out the job that provided her with the paycheck that payed her rent and bills.
“It pretty much shut down all TV and production in New York, there was nothing,” she said.
Frey said there was also a broadway strike that overlapped during the time of the writer’s strike. Many of the people who worked in television and film sustained themselves by finding part-time gigs with their friends working on Broadway she said. That is until they started striking too.
“I was so lucky that I was working [part-time] at the Met at that time,” she said. “I remember my boss telling me, ‘Come in an extra day, I’m not going to kick you out. There’s no where else for anyone to go.’ That job really got me through that strike. It was a very scary, difficult time.”
Frey, a costume designer, is a 2001 graduate of Towson University where she earned her Bachelor’s of Arts in theatre with a concentration in design. She has worked on the sets of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live and numerous other television shows. Today, Frey own hers own shopping and costume consulting business, Seek Out New York and still maintains a freelance costume design career.
Seek New York provides personal shopping and styling, shopping tours and builds custom costumes. Frey said that she decided to start the company after working her entire career as a freelance costume designer because of her passion for clothes and desire to have a more stability in her career.
“Pretty much how this industry works is that you are always freelance,” she said. “‘I’m kind of at a point now where I love doing TV and entertainment things, but you definitely sacrifice your personal life to do that full time. You’re there on a set sometimes from 8 a.m. to midnight. That really becomes your life.”
Frey said that since she has her own company, she is able to do a project that she is really passionate about for a week or two. She continues to work frequently on TV shows or magazine shoots.
“I think I’ve finally after seven or eight years in New York figured out the mix between the two worlds,” she said.
Frey decided to pursue costume design as an undergraduate at Towson while she was in the theater program for acting.
“After the one Intro to Acting class I knew that I was not going to be an acting major,” she said. “I think costume design was one of the required classes you had to take so I took the first level and I fell in love with it and went from there.”
Frey credits one of her former professors, Professor Emeritus Georgia Baker as one of the reasons why she succeeded as a costume design.
“She definitely had a reputation of being a taskmaster and of really getting a lot out of her students,” she said. “The few of us that stuck with it got so much out of her classes because she really, really knew her stuff. I owe a tremendous amount to her and I think that having her so physically as a professor was probably the reason I ended up going in the costume direction for grad school instead of scenic or lighting or one of the other elements.”
After she graduated from Towson in August of 2001, Frey moved to New York in September of 2001.
“I moved to New York a week before September 11 so that was my first introduction to life in New York City,” she said. “It probably was not the typical ‘moving to New York’ experience.” I ended up leaving and going to grad school in Pittsburgh a couple months after that and came back a week after finishing grad school. I’ve been here since then.”
Frey attended graduate school at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She moved back to New York in 2005 and has been working steadily in the entertainment industry ever since.
“While you are in school, learn everything you can. Take advantage of every internship opportunity, workshop, any extra classes you can take,” she said. “Then network as much as possible because when you move to New York, or I would think any big city, so many of the jobs you will get are because of who you know.”
Frey got her start as an intern at Late Night With Conan O’Brien and was hired after she graduated. She says that opportunity and the connections she made, both in school and while working, is how she has gotten most of her jobs.
“I would say 99% of the work that I’ve done, has come to me because I knew someone,” she said. “That’s really how it works. That is almost as important or more important than even school. Just network with the right people that are potentially going to employ you.”
That she says, is the most important advice you will ever get.
See all of Rebecca’s work on her website Becky-frey.com and check out her business Seek New York.