Smile for the Cameras. Meet some of the metro region’s leading film, television, and video professionals.

Abby Greensfelder and Sean Gallagher. (Photo by Anchyi Wei)

AMERICAN GOTHIC REALITY: Meet the co-owners and executive producers of the Bethesda-based Half Yard Productions: Abby Greensfelder and Sean Gallagher. Before they headed out on their own, the two ex-Discovery Channelers were some of the brains behind “Deadliest Catch,” “Dirty Jobs,” and “Miami Ink” (TLC), to name only a few of their projects. “We felt like the time was right to be on the other side of the table,” Gallagher says. Why are they relevant? Half Yard was tapped by Bravo to bring “The Real Housewives of D.C.” to life. We like to think politicians have all the control in Washington, but in reality TV, the editors and producers have ultimate authority. Currently, no production team has more power to mold the image of both housewives and our city than Abby and Sean. That is the reality of today’s American Gothic.

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An legendary Hacienda tucked into the lush Santa Barbara foothills re-stakes its claim as a sunny haunt for Hollywood stars, political leaders and savvy traveler.

By Michael M. Clements

Originally part of land titled in 1769 by the Kind of Spain, San Ysidro Ranch served as a way station for Franciscan monks in the late 1700s and a working citrus ranch in the 1800s; in the 1930s Hollywood actor and former California Senator Ronald Colman transformed it into a secluded resort for world leaders and Hollywood’s A-list. John and Jackie Kennedy choose it for their honeymoon in 1953.

“It’s difficult for one used to our Eastern winter climate to imagine a more delightful situation.” – Winston Churchill

For three months during the winter of 1912-13, Winston Churchill, then 38 and having recently been named First Lord of the Admiralty, found himself – surprisingly – not involved greatly in affairs of State. Instead, the iconic British leader sank head first into the California lifestyle. Still forty years removed from his 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, he waxed poetic about his stay at San Ysidro Ranch: “The mountains, scored by deep canyons,” he wrote, “rise up behind, for all the world like grand-opera scenery idealized, and far below, across the green plains of Montecito, one sees the white line of the beach and the Pacific stretching westward to blue islands shimmering in the haze.” He would return sixteen years later in the fall of 1929 after a visiting with publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst in San Francisco to engage, almost Hemingway-esque, in bill fishing off the coast of nearby Catalina Island.

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The press gets a new home and kicks off the gala season

By Janet Donovan

Chris and Kathleen Matthews, Joe Scarborough, and Mitt Romney

Matters of Opinion

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, Atlanta-Journal Constitution’s editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich, and Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall had plenty of reasons to celebrate at The Week’s Fifth Annual Opinion Awards dinner at the Four Seasons on April 8th: they won.

The elegant and intimate evening raised eyebrows when panelists took center stage, and the discussion turned into a testosterone versus estrogen contest. This was led by Time.com’s Anna Marie Cox, who questioned why, when we have an African American and a woman running for President, the panel of experts were all white men? Fair question.

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