Emiliano Calemzuk

 

The president of Fox Television Studios.

 

From the acclaimed U.S. cable series Burn Notice and Saving Grace to co-productions such as Mental, Fox Television Studios (FtvS), headed by Emiliano Calemzuk, is developing innovative, successful business models that are cost-effective and involve international partners.

 

WS: Tell us about your production slate.

CALEMZUK: It’s been a good year for us. We launched three dramas under our co-production model: Mental on FOX, Defying Gravity on ABC, and we are waiting to launch Persons Unknown on NBC. We launched another great show on USA Network called White Collar, which is performing extremely well. It’s our second show on USA after Burn Notice. We are also prepping a show for FOX called Jack and Dan, with Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks. It’s a great cop show that will probably launch in late spring of 2010. It’s been a really good year. We’ve continued to develop our cable scripted-drama business in addition to the international co-production model for broadcast.

 

WS:How did your co-production model evolve, and why is it of benefit to broadcasters all over the world?

CALEMZUK: One of the things that we tried to figure out was whether we could bring more than one broadcaster to the pool of investors to produce a drama whose quality was good enough to play in the U.S. but do it in a way that we could avoid participating in the piloting and development process. Studios spend between $50 million and $100 million a year just in developing and piloting projects. We wanted to avoid that expense and also be able to test production locations around the world where we could save money and produce at equal quality. So we embarked on this idea. We raised financing from partners around the world, such as RAI, ProSieben, Televisa, Fox International Channels, CTV and the BBC, and we put these initiatives together and they really turned out great. The quality is fantastic, the shows have American show runners and American casts. We shot some of them in Canada; in Bogotá, Colombia; and in Mexico. So it was an innovative way to get foreign broadcasters involved from the get-go in the production of a show for the world market.

 

WS: Quality programming at low cost seems to be in demand nowadays more than ever. Was 2009 a good year for you even though it was not a good year in general?

CALEMZUK: It was very good, and I think it’s going to get better for companies that are looking into ways of producing high quality at a lower cost because the economics that underpin the television industry are changing very fast. New distribution [outlets] and technology are causing significant disruptions, the price that networks can pay for content is going to continue to change, and clearly the days of paying in excess of millions of dollars in license fees are gone. 2009 was a very, very tough year for broadcast networks, and they are looking for alternatives. As a company we want to be there with our bag of ideas and projects that we can deliver in a way that they can make money and we can make money.

 

WS: Where do you see the future of the television industry?

CALEMZUK: It’s very difficult to predict where the industry is going, but I think we can definitely look at some trends, some of which are not necessarily coming from the television business. Digital distribution systems have allowed people to choose what they want. Look at the music business, where before you had to buy a full CD just for one song—now people can buy a song for 99 cents and the value of music content had to find a different parameter. Now, arguably, a song in the minds of people costs 99 cents, provided you do the legal thing and you buy it. Something like this may be happening in the television business or in the movie business. There are different options to get your hands on a piece of movie or TV content. And while [today you have to] buy a $100 cable subscription, in the future that may change. What is clear is that the value of intellectual property in the minds of consumers keeps changing given the changes in technology. We are going from a world of limited choice to a world of infinite choice, and when there are cheaper or free alternatives, certain content is worth different things to different people.

 

I don’t know what the future will bring, but clearly the value and the costs related to how certain content is produced needs to be reflective of the value in the minds of the consumer, and today it’s not very clear that there is a causal relationship between A and B. In the future, before you start shooting a movie or a TV show, you need to know, How much am I going to get from a broadcaster or a cable system, and how is the consumer going to pay for it—whether it’s on demand, on DVD or whatever—and just make sure that those numbers add up and you can still make money.

 

That is going to be the most radical transformation of this business, because some of the underlying assumptions belong to the past and not to the way we will be living in the future.