Greg Phillips

World Screen Weekly, April 24, 2008

President

Fireworks International

Fireworks International celebrates its third year under the ownership of London-based ContentFilm with an expanded catalogue and sales team, and a new emphasis on digital media. The last six months in particular have seen a flurry of activity from the company, with several new additions to its slate, most notably the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) program catalogue.

For Greg Phillips, Fireworks’ longtime president, the deal provided an opportunity “to acquire a significant amount of good quality new programming, a strong library, and build our activity in terms of volume.” CBC’s content, Phillips says, “is certainly compatible [to the Fireworks slate] in terms of quality, production values and commercial appeal.”

The agreement also brought a host of documentary fare to Fireworks, an area, Phillips says, that the company has not had a significant presence in for some time. As part of its new efforts in the factual arena, Fireworks unveiled three new shows, Dating Confidential, Wine Confidential and Gardening Confidential, at MIPTV.

Fireworks has also been enhancing its drama slate, taking on the CBC series Heartland and The Border, following its success with another CBC drama last year, JPOD. “Heartland and The Border are very high quality, exciting one-hours that the international marketplace is looking for,” Phillips says. “The Border is an action-adventure hour with a strong plot, intrigue and a host of good characters. Heartland is a very, very strong family drama.”

Another area for growth for Fireworks has been its new-media division, led by Jonathan Ford as senior VP, who joined the company from Sony in December 2006. Since taking on the rights to original programming from the male-skewing website Heavy.com in 2006, the company has been “very aggressive over the last year soliciting shows from various sources,” Phillips says. “The good news is that after the first few months of everybody getting used to the fact that we’re offering a different kind of product, it’s really started to take off.” Fireworks’ most recent deal in this space was with the British animation studio ZAC Toons. The agreement includes international TV, broadband, video, mobile and VOD rights for series like ABC Wid Da Mob, a 10×1-minute show featuring a host of misplaced mafioso types presenting their own brand of early learning; Crazy Cabbies, a fly-on-the-wall look at the bizarre antics of crazy cab drivers, as they bemuse and terrorize their unsuspecting passengers; and Blood Red, a 21st century makeover of the traditional fairytale as Little Red Riding Hood becomes the flirtatious Blood Red.

In addition, Fireworks is looking to strengthen an area that has historically been successful for the company: live-action tween and teen fare. On the slate this year is The Assistants, a show from Tom Lynch for The N in the U.S. about a group of young adults working for a young, eccentric Hollywood film producer.

Phillips notes that the initiatives under way at Fireworks today are an indication to the international content industry that the company is “open for business. Come knock on our door because I think we can be flexible, we’re independent, we want to be doing more and we are open to ideas.”

A veteran of the television distribution market, Phillips is excited to be embracing all the new forms of content and all the different platforms available today. “It’s a fabulous time in the business,” he says. “It’s broadening out incredibly. It’s a switch from a few venerable gentlemen telling the whole world what they are going to see to the public actually deciding what it wants to see and when it will see it. Our challenge is to bring what the public wants and hopefully they’ll buy it!”

—By Mansha Daswani