Big Stories, Small Screens

October 2006

By Peter Caranicas

TV movies and mini-series,
from dramas to disaster films, continue to find slots on networks around the
world.

Sitcom, reality,
documentary, variety, sports—all these genres play major roles in the
worldwide TV-program marketplace. But one type of show in particular—the
TV movie, and its sister, the mini-series—have worked particularly well
across all cultural and geographic boundaries ever since the early days of the
medium.

The reason is simple.
Movies—especially dramas, thrillers, horror and disaster films—have
a universal appeal based on their power to convey emotions like love, jealousy,
fear, hate and other raw and basic feelings that are common to all people. On
the other hand, comedy depends on local humor, which doesn’t translate well.
Dramatic series travel better and can do well, but often represent a risk to
buyers, who must commit to multiple episodes. Sports are often national or
regional events, generating little interest outside their fan bases. And
reality TV travels well as a format but seldom as a direct program sale.

But take a good TV movie
or mini-series, especially one with a high-profile cast, dub it, promote it
well, and you probably have an easy sale to territories across the world. And the
demand for such fare is assured by the existence of hundreds of program-hungry
networks worldwide.

“The bottom line is that
broadcasters have slots they need to program 24 hours a day,” says Michael
Jacobs, the president of production and distribution at MarVista Entertainment,
which supplies up to a dozen movies a year to the international market. “There
will never not be a need for TV
movies. Only so many series will be produced and acquired. So [broadcasters] all end up with hundreds of slots every year that need to be filled.”

“There will always be
worldwide demand for high-quality programming,” says Laurie Younger, the
president of Buena Vista Worldwide Television. Younger cites the success her
company has had with “tent-pole, event television, which a great mini-series or
a TV movie can do very well,” adding that the popular Disney TV movie High
School Musical perfectly fits that
mold.

“Musical has achieved record-breaking success on Disney
Channel U.S. and across the Asia Pacific. We are now licensing it to
international free TV… and have sold it to the BBC and to other major
broadcasters in key markets,” Younger notes. “It premiered on free TV in prime
time on Seven Network Australia and was the time-slot winner against all major
demos.” Younger also has high hopes for the upcoming mini-series The Path to
9/11, which aired on ABC and has
been licensed to the BBC. Further sales are anticipated.

“Movies have been a staple
of television forever,” says Robert Halmi, Jr., the president and CEO of RHI
Entertainment (formerly Hallmark Entertainment), a company long at the
forefront of the production and dis­­tribution of TV movies and minis. “People want
movies and mini-series. They’re great entertainment.”

RHI’s recent projects in
this area include the medical thriller Pandemic, a mini-series now being produced with Larry
Levinson Productions for the Hallmark Channel; Son of the Dragon, a mini-series that sets a love story in the
legendary time of Merlin and King Arthur; and Marco Polo, a mini-series based on the adventures of the
Venetian explorer that is now in production at locations around the world.

SAVING THE SCHEDULE

But it’s not just
audiences that crave movies. Networks and producers favor them as well.
“Broadcasters are always receptive to TV movies and mini-series because they’re
regular ratings-getters,” says Halmi, pointing out that the Hallmark Channel
benefits greatly from running original movies every week. “It bolsters their
whole schedule. They’re very consistent, very steady. And mini-series do the
same thing for broadcasters internationally as they do for broadcasters in the
U.S. They create attention for the network, get high ratings and give the
networks something to tout to their advertisers.”

“Broadcasters constantly
need more fresh and original programming, and that can only come from growth in
the production of made-for-television movies,” agrees Randall Broman, the sales
manager at Power, the British independent producer and distributor whose
customers number more than 100 broadcasters. Power’s latest projects include The
Virgin Queen, a period mini-series
based on the reign of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, and Above and Beyond, a mini-series set among World War II aviators.

In addition, broadcasters
and producers alike favor movies and mini-series because they’re a safer gamble
than series. “When broadcasters buy a series, they’re really buying a few
seasons of a series, or the run of a show,” Halmi adds. “That’s a pretty big
commitment when you don’t know whether it’s going to work or not.”

Producers in particular
like the genre because they have less financial exposure with movies than they
do with series. “The beauty of [producing] a movie is that it doesn’t carry the
onerous risk of a series,” notes Halmi. “If you have a big investment in a
series and it doesn’t work, you’re stuck with a season. If one movie doesn’t
work, it’s over and you go on to the next one.”

And even within the
TV-movie genre, there are ways of reducing financial risk. For example, while
TV movies are thought of mainly as prime-time fare, they don’t have to be. They
can also work in other time slots. Regent Entertainment, for example, has built
its strategy on producing movies for late afternoon and late night.

“We looked carefully at
the marketplace three or four years ago, and we decided not to fight for those
prime-time slots that are hard to get into,” says Gene George, the president of
Regent Worldwide Sales. “We decided to give the stations what they need in
other slots. The license fees for those slots may not be as lucrative, but we
can produce for them economically.”

Regent supplies
family-friendly action films for the before-dinner audience. After prime time,
Regent finds that thrillers with female leads work well, like Air Force Two, starring Mariel Hemingway as a secret ser-vice
agent who saves the U.S. Vice President from rebels when his plane goes down.

CHANGING MARKETPLACE

The U.S., long a
powerhouse in the production of TV movies and mini-series, has seen its output
strongly influenced by the growing internationalization of the market. “Buyers
are a lot more selective now than they were ten years ago,” says Halmi. “These
days, you’d better think of the international market from the start. In the old
days, if something was made just for the U.S. and it aired, say, on CBS or
ABC—that was the bar for selling it in France and Germany. Well, that
doesn’t exist any more. You can’t do things that only work in the States.”

One wrinkle in the market
is what some see as Anglo-Saxon ex-clusivity. Take, for example, Towering
Inferno, a $5-million, 90-minute
disaster drama now going into production that SevenOne International, the
worldwide distribution arm of ProSiebenSat.1 Media, is offering buyers. It has
already been sold in over 20 territories, according to Jens Richter, the
managing director of SevenOne International. Richter says Inferno will probably sell well everywhere in the world
except the U.K. and the U.S. The film, set in Berlin, depicts a fire that traps
people in an observation tower and the attempt to rescue them. It features high
production values, expensive sets and impressive CGI effects.

“Those are the kinds of
movies you can sell almost anywhere,” Richter adds. “You get very good money
from Europe, can sell them in Japan and almost to all Asian countries and Latin
America. The only countries where we may have no sales are the U.S. and the big
channels in the U.K.”

The U.S. has always been a
difficult market to penetrate because of its own vast domestic output of
high-budget TV movies. “And the U.K.,” Richter points out, “can select from the
huge range of programming that comes out of the U.S.”

“Although we look all over
the place for mini-series, we find that in general the U.S. is still the maker
of the most relevant ones for our audience,” confirms George McGhee, the
controller of program acquisition at the BBC. “We want to buy mini-series which
are different from our own drama output, which complement our own programs.
This gives the BBC audience a more eclectic mix, and the mini-series that work
at the moment tend to be based on factual events or historical subjects.”

But what holds true for
the main BBC networks does not necessarily apply to the more specialized
channels of Britain’s increasingly splintered TV marketplace. “Occasionally,”
says McGhee, “for BBC Four we pick up a foreign-language mini-series or limited
series, like [Germany’s six-part] Heimat 3 [which aired last year] and the French thriller Spiral,” which ran this past summer.

As in many major
TV-program-exporting countries, TV movies and mini-series in Germany are often
deficit-financed, with overseas sales adding enough revenue over the domestic
licensing fee to enable the costly production of high-quality product. “We put
in quite a bit of money, and we want to go out and recoup it as fast as
possible,” says SevenOne’s Richter. “Sometimes we cover that by doing presales
and co-productions.”

FINDING THE MONEY

Whether the producer takes
the presale or the co-production route can depend on the subject matter. “For
catastrophe movies, it’s more often a straightforward presale because people
are interested in thrilling stories, danger, and impressive effects,” Richter
explains. “But with other stories our clients want to be involved in script
development. They want certain casts. Then it moves more toward a
co-production.”

But the fact remains that
without such co-financing and gap-financing schemes, many of ProSieben’s
expensive TV movies and mini-series would not be possible. Upcoming ambitious
projects include The Hunt for Troy,
a $10-million saga about the discovery of the historical city in Homer’s Iliad; The Airlift, a mini-series that weaves a fictional love story into the 1948
Berlin Airlift at the beginning of the Cold War; and Futureshock: Comet
Impact, a science-fiction thriller
that SevenOne is co-producing along with sister company ProSieben as well as
the U.K.’s Darlow Smithson Productions, Discovery Channel in the U.S., Nine
Network Australia and M6 in France.

Regent’s George describes
a looser, different kind of collaboration. “We know what the needs of
broadcasters are, and we develop things we know they’re going to license,” he
says. “In a conversation, they may have said they’re looking for, say, a
thriller that has adoption as an underlying theme. It’s that vague. Our
production division then develops the concept and commissions a script. The
broadcaster would acquire it at that point.”

“It’s a constant flow,”
says Adam Wright, the senior VP of worldwide sales at PorchLight Entertainment.
“We’re able to presell packages of these films to broadcasters and they look to
us for more. We go to them with some concepts, and based on our track record,
they come back for more. We keep them in the loop as far as what we’re doing
and who’s starring in it.”

PorchLight, which produces
or distributes about a dozen films each year, has recently seen its movie
library grow to more than 80 titles, including A Job to Kill For, a thriller set in the business world; Hunt for
Justice, about the effort to
indict Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia for crimes against humanity; and the
meteorological disaster film Lightning: Fire from the Sky.

MarVista, for its part, is
the executive producer of five TV movies for Lifetime Television. While Lifetime
has rights to the films in the U.S., “we’re the worldwide distributors,” says
Jacobs. “We have the rights for the rest of the world except for Canada and the
Pacific Rim.”

Two of these Lifetime
dramas made their international debut at MIPCOM this year: Past Sins, a drama about a tough female criminal defense
attorney, and Cries in the Dark,
a crime drama about a woman who goes missing after an encounter with a sex
offender.

MarVista has signed
similar deals with NBC Universal’s SCI FI Channel and ABC Family, which are
yielding two additional TV movies: Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York, and the romantic comedy Instant Message.

Many distributors stress
the importance of establishing partnerships and trust with their customers.
“Broad-casters know that I’m really interested in strengthening their schedule
and seeing them be successful,” says Craig Cegielski, the VP of programming and
sales at Lionsgate International Television. “There isn’t a return on my
investment with a broadcaster if I sell them a piece of tape they’re never
going to air, or they’re going to air in a time slot that’s not to my
advantage, and doesn’t pull ratings. They’ll look at me and say, ‘You’ve sold
me a bill of goods.’

“The future of long-form
in TV is an interesting place right now,” continues Cegielski, explaining that
Lionsgate has made an effort to seize greater control over its mini-series and
TV-movie sales. He says that before he joined the company, it was selling
product not to individual broadcasters but to organizations like Granada and
Hallmark and to other studios. “We said, ‘Wait, we’re missing the boat here,
because we should be distributing this product ourselves.’”

Thus, Lionsgate has
established new partnerships with individual directors and producers, and with
U.S. cable channels like USA Network, Lifetime and SCI FI, for more TV-movie
and mini-series development, production and distribution. The initiative has
yielded new product for Lionsgate, including the five-hour mini-series 5ive
Days to Midnight, a murder mystery with a brilliant physics professor as protagonist;
and the TV movie I Dream of Murder,
a thriller centered on a therapist on the verge of a midlife crisis.

In addition to forging new
partnerships, Lionsgate is meeting the needs of some broadcasters with
nontraditional program lengths. According to Cegielski, in some cases buyers
prefer limited series over mini-series. “International broadcasters are
accustomed to receiving from the U.S. series formed of nothing less than 13
episodes,” he says. “But locally they’re completely comfortable with short-form
series. There’s an appetite for that.” Lionsgate is catering to that segment of
the market with such programs as The Lost Room, a six-hour limited series premiering on the SCI FI
Channel that’s described as The Fugitive meets The Twilight Zone.

HOT TOPICS

In TV movies and
mini-series, certain kinds of subject matter have more universal appeal than
others, and different territories have different tastes and preferences. “Some
countries prefer the romantic comedies, others prefer catastrophe movies,” says
SevenOne’s Richter.

Most distributors agree
that com-edic and musical TV movies and mini-series work less well than dramas,
thrillers and action adventure. “Comedy doesn’t translate well and musicals
don’t really sell around the world,” says RHI’s Halmi. He also adds westerns to
that category. Harking back to RHI’s 1989 western Lonesome Dove, a giant international success, he says that
shortly afterward the world market became more local, shutting out U.S.
westerns. “You wouldn’t expect big sales out of westerns today,” he says.

“There’s nothing now that
works for everybody,” says George Shamieh, the CEO of American Cinema
International (ACI), long a major supplier of TV movies. “Thrillers are the top
subject matter for TV because they are safe, they are not very violent and they
tell a story. But now people can move so easily from one channel to another.
You have to grab them and engage them with the story.”

Despite the growing number
of choices that consumers face, Shamieh is confident that the right product
will keep them glued to the screen. And he is hoping that the company’s first
mini-series project will do just that. The ambitious three-part,
four-and-a-half-hour Ugarit—described
as a sort of Indiana Jones
taking place against the backdrop of an ancient monotheistic civilization
invaded by Egypt under the pharaohs—will go into production in 2007.

But while some companies
are expansionist in their approach to the market, others take a more
specialized approach. For instance, industry veteran Alfred Haber, the founder
of Alfred Haber Distribution, has found a lucrative niche, distributing
mini-series produced by the Rome-based international production company Lux
Vide to Latin America, selling them successfully to Televisa, TV Globo,
Venevision and other major networks.

“We started out in 1990
producing mini-series on the bible, beginning—naturally—with Genesis, then went on to David, Moses,
Abraham, Samson and Delilah, and so on,” says Haber. “Then we ended up in the
New Testament and ultimately with Apocalypse. This product clogs the airwaves at Easter time
and Christmas time.”

Lux Vide eventually ran
out of bible themes, so it moved on to such stories as biographical films of
renowned figures. Titles include Pope John XXIII, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II and Soraya. The production company’s latest venture is an eight-hour version of War
and Peace, on which it has begun
principal photography.

FACING THE FUTURE

While most executives
agree that demand for TV movies and mini-series will remain strong, the market
is not without challenges, especially for American distributors, who have
always exported the lion’s share of these genres. “It is challenging for an
exporter of U.S.-produced content, and we feel it will continue to be so,” says
Buena Vista’s Younger. “Single home-produced dramas, or local drama
series—many of which are TV movies or mini-series in all but
name—perform strongly and look set to continue to do so. Our figures show
that imported TV movies in Europe have tended to move out of prime time to
other dayparts, [and] imported TV movies will have to be exceptional to make it
on air in prime time.”

“The marketplace is very
tough at the moment,” agrees ACI’s Shamieh. “You have to know what you’re
doing, and you have to be very genre-specific. In the old days, the world
wanted American movies. Now the whole world is producing movies.”

Nobody can predict the
future, but everyone tries. With the distribution of video content moving onto
new platforms like the Internet and mobile devices, pundits are scratching
their heads, wondering what will work online and on hand-held media. Will the
new, smaller screens favor short snippets of programming, or will they also
enhance the distribution of longer genres like movies? Many are skeptical. “The
big question is, will consumers be ready to view full-length movies or
mini-series on a very small screen?” asks Power’s Broman.

RHI’s Halmi believes
long-form programmers have nothing to worry about. “The product that works
really well on VOD, broadband and video iPods is movies,” he says. “It works a
lot better than series. Billions have been spent on new delivery systems. That
money is now going to attract content in a big way. It will bolster production
and help people figure out new business models and stay in business. We now
spend half our time working on deals to launch our product in new media. It’s a
pretty exciting time.”