Fernando Szew

World Screen Weekly, March 20, 2008

CEO

MarVista Entertainment

A couple of weeks ago, Fernando Szew, the CEO of MarVista Entertainment, signed up for Share Your Job Day at his daughter’s school. He and other parents had to tell the children what they did at work so that the class could learn about various professions. “It was just amazing to be able to tell 5- and 6-year-olds what I do, and try to explain an industry that is hard for them to grasp,” he explains. “So I started by asking, ‘How many of you like to travel? How many of you speak different languages? Who likes to watch television?’ Then I [focused on] the quality of the people I meet, the quality of people who work with me, and how we create something that then ends up on screen for the enjoyment of people who are watching.”

Share Your Job Day gave Szew pause for reflection on all the different aspects of his work. “It’s really the traveling and multiple cultures of the people we meet that is fascinating and what I love about the job,” he says. That, and of course, the fact that MarVista celebrates its fifth anniversary this year, and they have been five years of continued growth. He attributes the growth to hard work and passion. “We really are passionate about what we do. And clearly finding the right positioning for the company was instrumental, as was [concentrating on] the TV-movie segment at a time when a lot of people were not focusing on it, and are still not focusing on it. It’s one of our core businesses and has promulgated our growth because it has helped us [deal] with a who’s who list of broadcasters. Our growth has been driven by high-quality TV movies and also by the successful production and distribution of our prime time drama series Beyond the Break.”

Over the past three years, Szew and Michael D. Jacobs, MarVista’s president, have served as executive producers and invested more than $60 million in movie production and acquisitions, resulting in the distribution rights to more than 20 television movies for the international television marketplace. Most of the movies have aired in the U.S. on ABC Family, Lifetime Television and NBC Universal’s SCI FI Channel, and overseas, the movies have collectively aired in more than 120 countries on premier broadcast outlets such as TF1, RAI, STAR, Hallmark Channel, SBS Belgium, TV Globo and HBO Latin America.

At MIPTV, MarVista will be showcasing a number of TV movies, including NYC Tornado Terror, starring Sebastian Spence (Battlestar Galactica) and produced for SCI FI; and TV movies produced for Lifetime Television: Deadly Pledge, about a college freshman (Leighton Meester, Gossip Girl) who suspects there is something sinister about the prestigious sorority to which she decided to pledge; Girl’s Best Friend, a comedic road-trip film starring Janeane Garofalo (Ratatouille), Kristen Holden-Ried (The Tudors) and Nicolas Wright (Tipping Point); and the paranormal thriller The Watch. MarVista is also offering buyers a slate of newly acquired movies.

“We continue to be active in kids’ programming,” says Szew. “Perhaps one of the most exciting things, and it’s been a while coming, is that we now have the second installment of Wompkee, which is a character we used for a Christmas direct-to-DVD animated special and this one is called The Hidden Treasure of Wompkee Wood. It is a project that we hold dear to our hearts because it is one of the things we started with five years ago and now we have the second one and it looks really terrific with CGI that is nearly of theatrical quality.”

MarVista is also continuing its association with Apartment 11 from Montreal, Canada, which is producing new episodes of the series Prank Patrol. “We are offering worldwide broadcasters not just the finished shows that are produced for YTV in Canada, but also the format rights, as well as the finished U.K. version of the show, produced by the BBC,” explains Szew. “So we really have quite an extensive package of Prank Patrol programming, which is very exciting.”

And, of course, MarVista continues to sell its hit live-action series Beyond the Break that has been picked up by several major broadcasters, including M6 in France, La Sexta in Spain, Five in the U.K. and Globosat’s Multishow channel in Brazil.

Live-action series, in fact, is one of the genres Szew believes will propel MarVista into continued success for the next five years. “That is really where the explosion of the company can occur, with more series that are as successful as Beyond the Break, so we are very focused on bringing more series to the market and have the production and sales team in place to get us there.”