Twenty years ago, Nick DiBella walked into Schutt’s Apple Mill in Webster and immediately had an epiphany. He compared the feeling to being struck by lightning.
“Suddenly, I could see a television show in that place,” said DiBella, local filmmaker and co-founder of Faith Street Films. “I could see young people working on the farm, in the store and in the press room. I could see relationships and conflicts and generations of a family whose lives were all connected to this one place. I saw it before I had any idea what the story was.”
The idea sat with him for years, reawakening whenever he’d visit the cider mill. He didn’t explore it further until a few years ago. DiBella graduated from Cardinal Mooney High School in Greece and later went to work at Kodak as an optical technician. He began borrowing cameras from the camera club at Kodak and making short films, recruiting family as actors and coworkers as crew.
One of those short films ended up on Showtime as a filler between movies, which gave him the confidence to continue. After taking a buyout from Kodak, DiBella was free to pursue his passion for writing and making movies. In the following years, he sold and optioned several screenplays to studios, including Warner Bros.
Eventually, though, the business of selling and optioning scripts began to disillusion the local filmmaker. Studios only end up making a fraction of the projects they have in development, and once a writer sells a script, they lose control of it.
“At some point, I realized that instead of always trying to write the movie that I hoped somebody else would make, maybe I should … figure out how to make (them),” he said. “That was really the genesis of Faith Street Films. I simply wanted to take more responsibility for the destiny of the stories I was writing.”
DiBella started Faith Street Films in 2010 with his producing partner, Jim Pavone. The company produces inspirational, family friendly content, often about characters who have been knocked down and are trying to get back on their feet. To date, they have released three films and recently wrapped up post-production on a TV series.
After 20 years of sitting with the idea for a series set in a cider mill, DiBella finally wrote the script, cast the actors, and shot the first season of “Abilene.” The story follows a musician named Abilene, known as Abby, who finds herself stranded in the fictional small town of Fair Haven, Ohio. She accepts work at a family owned cider mill while trying to put her troubled past behind her. The series was shot entirely in the Rochester area, which DiBella still calls home. His first stop when scouting locations was, of course, a familiar cider mill in Webster.
Evan Schutt, fourth-generation owner/operator of Schutt’s Apple Mill, welcomed Faith Street Films onto the farm and into the store to shoot. The crew shot at a variety of other local destinations as well: Iron Smoke Distillery in Fairport, Stokoe Farms in Scottsville and the Charcoal Corral and Silver Lake Twin Drive-In in Perry, to name a few. They also shot at the brand new, state-of-the-art FLX Studios facility in Henrietta.
While putting the cast together for “Abilene,” the hardest role to fill was that of lead character Abby. She’s a complicated woman — someone with a past she’s running from and someone who finds herself in a new town, surrounded by strangers. She’s also a singer and a musician.
Rose Reid was originally slated to play another role in the series. She’d already insisted she was not a singer and not interested in the role of Abby. But after production had such a hard time filling the role, DiBella came back to her, asking if she’d reconsider. He said he learned long ago that if you can find a truly great actor like Reid, you can usually figure out the rest.
She accepted.
“The music aspect was terrifying,” Reid said. “Singing, in particular, was a new challenge and … (it) made me feel a little queasy some days. But that’s also part of what made me want to launch into it. (Abby) was going to be such a challenge.”
The series also stars seasoned actors like Elizabeth Mitchell of ABC’s “Lost”; Eric Close of TV’s “Nashville” and “Without a Trace,” Johnathon Schaech of “That Thing You Do!,” and more. A handful of local and homegrown actors appear, too, including Michael Pavone, Emma Jessop and Nicolette Hart.
“Abilene” will premiere in early 2027 on Great American Pure Flix, Great American Family, and GFam+. Bill Abbott, president and CEO of Great American Media, said DiBella and Faith Street Films bring “an extraordinary combination of creative vision, talent and work ethic” to the partnership.
“There is real depth to the storytelling (in “Abilene”), and the characters have relationships and challenges that feel authentic,” he added. “From the beginning, it felt like a world our audience would want to return to week after week.”
And that world that was all shot locally — which was an incredibly important decision for DiBella.
“I grew up here. I started making little movies here,” he said. “So there’s something pretty remarkable about, all these years later, being able to bring a production of this size home and … there’s a certain pride that comes with that.”
Shooting in Rochester lent some authenticity to the project, which was set in a small town. And instead of having to manufacture the world of Abilene — the lake, cider mill, old homes, country roads — so much of it was sitting right here in Western New York.
“We hired people here, we spent money here, we built our fictional town out of real communities throughout this region,” said DiBella. “And for several months, there was a six-episode television series being made in my hometown. That’s pretty cool.” faithstreetfilms.com
Jinelle Vaiana is a freelance writer and proofreader and a self-proclaimed “word nerd.” When she’s not obsessing over commas, she enjoys live music, gardening and perfecting her popcorn game.
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