Michael W. Abbott is a Los Angeles based Producer & Director of Motion Pictures, Scripted and Unscripted Series, Feauture Documentaries, Branded Content and Music Festival Live Streaming Original Content. A Los Angeles native, Abbott attended the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, with an emphasis on Critical Studies. He was honored twice with the Cinema-Television School’s Mary Pickford Award for academic excellence and was bestowed USC’s Senior Recognition Award upon graduation. Abbott began his career in entertainment at Savoy Pictures in Santa Monica as a Marketing Financial Analyst for films such as “A Bronx Tale”, “Circle of Friends” and the documentary “The Show”. While at Savoy, Michael produced the groundbreaking electronic music documentary, “Synergy: Visions of Vibe” directed by Valerian Bennett. In 1999, Abbott, along with Paul Tollett, Sid Zuber and Oren Bitan created the Coachella Independent Film Festival aka “The Film Tent” at The Coachella Music and Arts Festival as a platform to curate music-driven feature films and documentaries, short films and music videos for attendees at the Polo Field for years. Concurrently, Abbott was producing music videos and branded content for brands such as Diesel and Nike with legendary LA photographer and director Estevan Oriol.

In 2007, Abbott produced the documentary film “Stripped: Greg Friedler’s Naked Las Vegas”, which premiered on Showtime Networks to become one of the top five most watched documentary films of 2007-2008 for the premium cabler. Abbott followed up “Stripped” as an Associate Producer on Cecilia Miniucchi’s narrative feature film “Expired” starring Samantha Morton and Jason Patric. “Expired” premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and followed up with its International Premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in the 46th International Critics’ Week. Abbott pivoted his focus into branded documentary content and in 2007 he would take on producer and director duties under his new banner United Front for the GM/Cadillac series MyCadillacStory. The two-year campaign, featuring short docs on Travis Barker, Wynton Marsalis, Coach K and Tiki Barber among others, became the 5th most watched branded channel on YouTube in 2009. Abbott continued directing duties with “Motivation”, an award-winning online commercial for Namco Bandai’s hit video game Tekken 6 starring Evander Holyfield, Henry Tillman, Josh Barnett and a slew of other world-class fighters. In 2012 Abbott was the cinematographer for the global hit documentary “After Porn Ends”. The film would become the most watched documentary on Netflix between 2012-2013 and spin off two sequel documentary films.

In 2015, Abbott produced One Direction’s hit music video for “Steal My Girl” starring Danny DeVito which would go on to be seen over 400,000,000 times on YouTube. Abbott expanded his scope of documentary branded content directing series television as the Executive Producer & Director of Season 2 of “The Navigator Live”, a 5-episode Marriott / Renaissance Hotels backed 1-hour music travel series which aired on the cable network AXS featuring artists The Lone Bellow, AWOLNATION, Cut Copy, A TRAK and MSMR.

Between 2016-2017, Abbott produced a series of online branded documentary commercial campaigns for Microsoft Surface Products with Azyenberg Group and his third feature documentary film, “The Cadillac Tramps: Life On The Edge” directed by Jamie Sims Coakley. In 2018, Abbott produced the Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers music video “Gainesville”, Warby Parker’s commercial “Happy Dance” and Paul McCartney’s Kodak Award winning musical short film “Who Cares” starring Emma Stone, with director Brantley Gutierrez and Academy Award winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren. Abbott produced his fourth feature documentary film, “A Cam Life”, which premiered on Hulu on March 26th, 2019. In 2019, Abbott was brought onto the team to create and launch “Coachella Curated” for AEG/Goldenvoice as Creative Director and Senior Producer for Original Content while also serving as Senior Producer of the 2019 Coachella live stream. The 2019 Coachella live stream webcast broke YouTube records with 171 Million views over 10 days. In 2020, the fifth feature documentary film Abbott produced was released during the height of the pandemic; “Coachella: 20 Years In The Desert” premiered as a YouTube Original to critical acclaim and over 6 million online views during lockdown.

Abbott currently is in pre-production on “The War of 84” at Netflix, with Move Films producing the film with Screen Arcade (“Narcos”, “I, Tonya”) with a screenplay by Andrea Berloff and John Gatins (“Straight Outta Compton”) and Andy Weiss (“White Boy Rick”). Abbott’s work can also be seen in the Apple documentary “Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry”. Abbott’s producing, interviewing and camera duties captured in Salt Lake City opens the film. In April of 2021, Abbott Co-Directed and Produced “Even Higher Together”, a 5 hour streaming multi-million dollar musical event from Weedmaps and Live Nation hosted by Snoop Dogg and featuring Mike Tyson, Ms Pat, Too Short, G Eazy Jaleel White with performances from ASAP Rocky, Jhene Aiko, Wiz Khalifa & The Taylor Gang, Bam Marley and Eric Rachmany from Rebelution. Most recently, Abbott has been working with Olivia Rodrigo | UMG | Geffen producing original content for the release of her acclaimed sophomore album GUTS, including producing the hit YouTube video “Vampire: Live Piano Version”.