Emiliano Calemzuk

August 3, 2009 World Screen

This interview appeared in the April 2009 MIPTV edition of World Screen.

President, 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: What is the studio’s mission?
CALEMZUK: What Peter Chernin [the president and COO of News Corporation] asked me to do when he brought me here was to create a studio for the 21st century. We really started from a blank slate. We didn’t look at what we had done in the past, or what the industry was doing. We asked what was going to allow us to thrive in the future. There are two things: first, we have to be a global studio that taps into the strength of broadcasters around the world, and second, we have to take the rapid advancement of technology very seriously, so we also have to be a digital studio. That doesn’t mean that we are going to stop doing what we are doing, because we produce a few of the most successful cable shows in the U.S. in the 18-to-49 demographic, including Burn Notice. We have a rather sound business going, and we are by no means going to abandon that. But moving forward we have to redefine ourselves as a global studio and as a digital studio.
So when thinking about how to be global, the lessons of ten years as an international broadcaster came in somewhat handy. It was very difficult to secure access to good American series. And if the first three or four episodes didn’t get good ratings, the series would be cancelled in the U.S., and you would have invested a lot of money and time in the schedule and be left with nothing. I felt those were inefficiencies in the market that needed to be corrected, and we had an edge on how to tackle them, as we are a small but diverse group of people coming from different countries.
 
WS: How are your business models different from the traditional studio model?
CALEMZUK: We said, “Why don’t we take scripts from good show runners, work with American writers, actors and directors, and instead of pitching them to U.S. networks, let’s pitch them to a consortium of international networks first. Let’s have the international networks be the drivers of the production, and then if the show is good enough, which we think it will be, we’ll sell it to a U.S. network.”
So we decided to put three shows into production, thinking that we were going to get only one financed, but in four months we got three of them financed! The first show was Mental, which shot in Bogotá, Colombia. We’re currently shooting Persons Unknown, in conjunction with Televisa and RAI, in Mexico. And our third show, Defying Gravity, began shooting in January in Vancouver, with CTV in Canada, ProSieben in Germany and the BBC in the U.K.
What we tried to do was hedge the financing risk by creating another mechanism of producing U.S. series that doesn’t rely on spending tens of millions of dollars every year on pilots, 90 percent of which never see the light of day. There is a lot of waste in that traditional big-studio model. We came up with this more cost-efficient way. We go directly to 13 episodes so the series doesn’t get cancelled on episode four. It’s an asset that we can sell around the world; we can also sell DVDs.
FtvS was the first major U.S. studio to do this. We can sell these series in the U.S. at a lower cost than the traditional license fee because a lot of the financing is already in place. And with the economy as it is right now, we are getting significant interest from pretty much every network on everything that we are doing. We [came up with this business plan] about two years ago; it’s not something we just now decided to do, given the sour state of the economy. We realized that, given how the network-advertising model was going, we needed to do something different and provide networks with programming that’s on a par, in terms of quality, with the traditional studio show, but at a fraction of the price.
 
WS: You produced Mental in association with the Fox International Channels.
CALEMZUK: I think the Fox International Channels group is one of the smartest and most innovative international media organizations of today, so trying this out with them was a no-brainer. This was a win-win situation for the international channels group and for our studio. They needed programming that they could buy cost-effectively and distribute across all their channels around the world. We needed some financing to get the show in motion, which they provided, and they also wanted to learn the steps necessary to produce a U.S. series in their facility in Colombia, which is FOXTelecolombia. So we said, “We’ll show you how we produce a U.S. series. We’ll do it in Colombia. You come in with part of the financing and then you keep distribution for some territories.” So it was a great model for them and a great model for us, and I think the show is truly outstanding.