Mark Kaner

May 2008

As president of Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution, Mark Kaner manages some 125 people located in offices around the world, whose job it is to sell programming to broadcasters and pay-TV services worldwide, resulting in about $2 billion in sales. Kaner’s unit has sold hit shows such as The Simpsons, 24, Prison Break, Burn Notice and Bones, and feature films including The Simpsons Movie, the Academy Award-nominated Juno, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Live Free or Die Hard. But even more important than meeting revenue targets, Kaner feels, are lasting relationships—with clients, with colleagues and with mentors. And in between making deals and nurturing friendships, those who know Kaner are well aware of how much he values a good sense of humor.

WS: What kind of input does your division give the development folks at Twentieth Century Fox to ensure that the series they are creating have international sales potential?

KANER: I came here 14 years ago and one of the first things I did was set up meetings with our colleagues in development and production. I just didn’t think it was very good business to develop in the dark. We have always met with the creative people on a regular basis. We’ll get a phone call from Dana Walden or Gary Newman from Twentieth Century Fox Television, or Emiliano Calemzuk from Fox Television Studios, and they say, We are thinking about doing this show, do you think it would work? The international television marketplace has always been important, but over the last decade it’s not just been important, it’s become critical to the economic viability of any program on the television side, and increasingly so on the motion-picture side as well.

When I started in the business, international revenue was the icing on the cake, but now it has gone from being icing to an essential ingredient. There is rarely a way to make economic sense of something that has no international appeal at all. We would never be so arrogant as to say to our development or production people, You absolutely shouldn’t make that, because the U.S. market is still the biggest single market in the world, and if you do exceptionally well here you can make all the money you need. But that is now the exception rather than the rule. It used to be the opposite.

WS: What can you tell us about this year’s L.A. Screenings?

KANER: We will have fewer pilots and more presentations than we’ve ever had before. There will be fewer pilots not only this year, but forevermore, and that goes to the heart of how we develop TV and whether or not the way we do it is the right way. The U.S. network television business is in a period of transition, as are all broadcast networks around the world. They are increasingly involved in new media—they must be in order to compete—so how does that impact the way we develop shows?

Last year we produced about 28 pilots between our various production entities. That’s too many, but we are in a business that has an 80-percent fail rate. We go to Las Vegas every single day in this business and we roll the dice. Our business is unlike, say, the telephony business, where they will make substantial investments, lay fiber-optic cable in the ground, predict with some certainty how much use there will be and how much they will get paid for that use, and they can make a reasonably secure bet on what the return on that investment will be. We, on the TV and film side, can hire the very best writers, producers and actors, and use the very best special effects, put everything together, and then, we can fall flat on our face. Having said that, we can also have enormous success and create assets that have real long-term value—and it’s a lot of fun!

WS: What impact did the writers’ strike have on international distribution?

KANER: It had an enormous detrimental effect not only on international distribution but on the business as a whole. Millions and millions of dollars were lost across all of the program providers and broadcasters. It had an immediate and really negative effect on the international television business because in many cases we could not deliver completed series and many of those series are probably completely dead internationally. It’s not just the U.S. networks that were affected. They had problems, but they had other shows and they’ll get past it. But what happens to the shows that we would have sold internationally? International networks and pay-TV services have to run their own businesses just like we do in the States, so they will fill their schedules with other programming. Some of that programming will be successful, and some of it will fail, but where it is successful, we will have lost those slots, and that will make the international buyers think, Do we need this? Should we develop something that is more homegrown? Typically speaking, anything that is indigenous has a better opportunity to work than an imported program.

I’ve said this before, our biggest competitor, as good as they are, is not Warner Bros. Our biggest competitor is local programming.

WS: But as long as you have a 24 to offer, which is so different and of such high quality, you at least have a chance, right?

KANER: Absolutely, and we always will. There are brilliant creative people here in the United States. There is no question they will continue to produce terrific shows. They will come up with new and unique ideas, and with that kind of programming, we will be successful.

But 24 is a very good example. It was hit so badly by the writers’ strike that we missed an entire year. Can you imagine? We missed an entire year of revenue for that show. So that is really difficult for the show and all the great people who work on it, really difficult for all the networks and pay services who bought it, not to mention the network here. How do you keep people interested and loyal to the show when they have so many other choices? Everyone will have to spend much more to get the show (or any show) back up and running, and that’s not a good thing.

WS: So if networks are producing fewer pilots, will there be a tendency to go with creators who already have a successful track record? Will it be more difficult for newcomers to break in?

KANER: That will depend on the company and the circumstance. But it’s not hard to imagine that if the networks are producing fewer series, or they don’t have as many in the stable to back up a failure, they are going to look for a show runner who is tried and true. And that will certainly challenge an up-and-comer who wants to say, “This is my show and I know how to do it.” The network will say, “We love your idea but you haven’t done this before so we will pay you for your idea but you’re not going to run the show.”

WS: What have you learned from Rupert Murdoch?

KANER: One of the things I have learned from Rupert is that you need to think globally but act locally. I think I knew this before I came here, but he’s certainly proven it in spades. If you take a look at FOX News in the U.S. and look at Sky News in the U.K. and then look at the TG24 news [channel] from SKY Italia, these three news organizations are very different in terms of their bent. FOX News is very conservative. Sky News is not as conservative as FOX News, relatively speaking within its home market, and then you have TG24, on SKY Italia, which I would argue is the most balanced news organization in that country. And it’s all under Rupert Murdoch’s organization. And the reason for that is that he has acted locally. In each marketplace he built a business that was going to be successful for that market—that filled a void, that handled things properly, and that is brilliant. And each one of those organizations has done extremely well.

WS: Early in your career you worked at Screen Gems, previously the television division of Columbia Pictures, with three executives, Herb Lazarus, Norman Horowitz and Ken Page, who had a profound influence on you.

KANER: I never had as much fun as I had when I was with those three guys. They were unique and they were really good businesspeople. The company made a lot of money and they were forward thinking. They took risks that other people thought were crazy. And all the time they had a tremendous amount of fun. They taught me that the single most important asset of any company are the people inside it.

WS: That’s really important to you.

KANER: It’s critically important. One of the problems with big corporations is that we are all held to really tough standards and guidelines and you lose humanity. When you lose that, you lose everything. One of the single most important parts of my job is to make sure that I provide an environment that people feel good in. And that is really hard to do, especially during difficult financial times, or with changing business models or with different personalities. It’s tough to manage a team when everybody is a star and everybody wants the ball. So I spend a lot of time talking to people when they are not happy, trying to find out why. The environment in my little group is really good and that makes for real productivity.

I meet every single person who comes in to the division regardless of their position. I just say, “Hi, I’m Mark, it’s great that you are here.” So much of what we do is all inherently just about being polite, and it’s really important to aggressively listen. You need to listen to what your people have to say and then try to figure out within the confines of your business constraints, what’s the best way to achieve your goal. And it’s always through your people.

We have offices around the world. We have people working from many different cultures and e-mail has become the major way we communicate. In this world of instant messaging, there is an expectation for an instant response. You have to stop yourself from immediately firing off an answer. But because everybody is overworked and has so many e-mails, and is trying to meet deadlines, there is a tendency to shorthand things. I always say to my colleagues, Take an extra ten seconds to say please and thank you in your e-mails. And give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt. The problem with e-mail is that the tone can be so completely misconstrued. English is a second language to most of our colleagues, so we should be quite impressed that we are all dealing in English here. Sometimes you need to be patient and say, I don’t think I understand what you mean. That level of patience is one of the hardest things to achieve in the really crisis-driven environment our business has become.

Probably the greatest thing that Norman and Herb and Ken taught me is that this is a game, not a war. And if I’m really upset about something, what that probably means is that someone else is playing the game better than me. So take a breath and get perspective on things.

When I met my wife, Colleen, she was a neonatal intensive-care unit nurse. She had an important job and I paid the rent. That’s still the case today. That is not to demean what we do. But I say to my colleagues very often, it’s only television. We’re not saving children’s lives here; let’s take a break. When you run a business of about $2 billion a year as we do here, that gets a lot of attention, and things can go right or wrong and you can make or lose a lot of money in a short period of time. So we have to be serious about what we do, but by the same token, more than anything else, I want my colleagues to wake up in the morning and love to come to work.

WS: What do you enjoy most about your job?

KANER: There are so many things: the ever-changing nature of the business, the quality of the programming and working with the distribution, marketing, development and production people. And seeing something going from the script to the screen and having it really work, is a thing of joy and beauty. We have this little motion picture, Juno. When I got the log line on Juno and they told me what it was going to be, I thought, why are we doing a movie about this? Sometimes I think I’m pretty smart, I think I know what I’m doing most of the time. In this case I totally blew it. Thank God for Peter Rice [the president of Fox Searchlight]. Because as it turns out I absolutely loved Juno, and part of what I loved about it is that I was so completely, totally wrong. I missed the boat—let’s be honest, I didn’t miss the boat, I wasn’t even on the dock. I was on another ocean! I didn’t listen aggressively enough to the passion of the people who were involved in bringing that fantastic story to life. I was wrong and it’s good to be reminded of that on a daily basis.