Ken DuBow

World Screen Weekly, May 1, 2008

President of Worldwide Distribution

PorchLight Entertainment

MIPTV was a very good market for PorchLight Entertainment, a producer and distributor of high-end family entertainment. Not only did PorchLight have a full slate of animated series, specials and TV movies to offer international buyers but, as Ken DuBow, the company’s president of worldwide distribution, adds, “the slightly bad weather kept people indoors, which didn’t hurt! We made some really good deals.”

In fact, the 26×13-minute FARMkids, about a bunch of fast-lane pampered city animals in a popular nursery petting zoo whose lives take a funny and unexpected turn when they suddenly get relocated, was sold to Rainbow’s HD VOOM networks. Four Eyes (52×13), a co-production with the French company Pictor Media about an alien girl attending a boarding school on Earth, and My Goldfish Is Evil (26×30), which chronicles the hilarious stories of a young boy named Beanie and his talking fish pet, were acquired by the U.K.’s CITV.

Also at MIPTV, PorchLight expanded its relationship with Peace Arch, which had released its film Towards Darkness theatrically in the U.S. PorchLight closed a new multi-title deal with Peace Arch for Canadian and North American rights for several of its projects, including Renart the Fox, a comedy based on the widely known fable Le Roman de Renart, and The Ultimate Gift, based on the best-selling novel of the same name from author Jim Stovall and starring Academy-Award nominee Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine).

In addition, the animated series of shorts Ozie Boo! (78×7) was sold to the U.S. cable network V-me. The Family Holiday went to top-level distributors, including Eagle in Italy and Maple in Canada. And in a multi-territory deal, Treasure Island Kids went to Jetix for the U.K. and Scandinavia.

DuBow has been with PorchLight for a year and during this time he has worked on expanding the company’s offering. “It’s been exciting and a year of a lot of growth for the company,” he says. “We’ve branched out into new areas with product that is not just family and kids’ oriented. We’ve also streamlined a lot of our procedures here. We’re a better, more efficient distribution machine than we were a year ago.”

DuBow set up Condor Releasing, a film and television division and home-entertainment label for programming that falls outside the family-entertainment genre. Toward Darkness, an R-rated bilingual thriller set in Colombia where kidnapping for ransom is a daily reality, starring and executive produced by Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winner America Ferrera (Ugly Betty), was one of the titles released under that label and has been well received internationally.

In order to keep PorchLight’s successful niche in the TV-movie genre, DuBow is looking for innovative ways of financing films that are popular with international buyers. As he explains, there is good demand for the woman-in-jeopardy thriller, but Lifetime Television in the U.S., which had traditionally ordered dozens of these each year, is now ordering fewer of them. “But the people who have been buying these movies from us still are very much in this business,” says DuBow. “And as they are looking at their schedules for the end of ’08 and into ’09, they are starting to wonder about the consistency of supply of these movies. We’re beginning to look at financial models that back us into the U.S. as opposed to being dependent upon the U.S. license fee to make them. And we are doing it with European partners who are very active in their own production and distribution businesses that have matured to the point of being world-class organizations.” DuBow expects to announce a number of such deals in the near future.

Having wrapped up a successful MIPTV, DuBow is now preparing for the Cannes Film Festival, where the company will be exhibiting on its own for the first time instead of sharing stand space with other companies. But this time the mood in Cannes will be very different from what it was at MIPTV. Gone will be the buttoned-down businesslike atmosphere, replaced by red carpets, paparazzi and movie star glamour. But DuBow, as always, will be focused on making more deals.