Q&A: Michael Prupas

When The Kennedys received ten Emmy nominations perhaps no one was more surprised than Michael Prupas, the president and CEO of Muse Entertainment, and executive producer on the eight-part mini-series about America’s most legendary family. Muse, in association with Asylum Entertainment, had originally produced the mini-series for HISTORY in the U.S. But in advance of the planned airdate, HISTORY announced it would not broadcast The Kennedys. Press reports claimed the Kennedy family had objected to material and exerted pressure on HISTORY executives to cancel the mini. The Kennedys aired instead on ReelzChannel to a record-breaking audience for the channel and has been sold around the world.

WS: How did the project come about?
PRUPAS: The project came about because HISTORY executive Dirk Hoogstra had been very interested in trying to get a series going about the Kennedys for several years. He initially approached us through our colleagues at Asylum, with whom he had had dealings in the past, and asked if there was some way we could put a project together. We suggested getting involved with Joel Surnow, who had been a very successful executive producer on 24 and somebody we and Asylum had worked with on a pilot we’d done for TNT the previous year called Night And Day, starring William Fichtner,that never got picked up.

The instigation for The Kennedys did actually come from HISTORY but the team was put together from a previous experience we had had together. We all agreed we would produce it under the auspices of Muse as the production company and we hired writer Steve Kronish to do the principal amount of heavy lifting on the show and Joel provided comment all the way through.

WS: It’s a mini-series, not a documentary. How much historical research went into this; I imagine quite a bit?
PRUPAS: Yes, absolutely. Steve Kronish had been a Kennedy aficionado for many years and when he started the process, he referred to 30 different books of the 2,000 books that have been written about the Kennedys over the last 40 or 50 years; he was very much immersed in that material. There were discussions that went on with us, with the network, as to what kind of approach we wanted to take. The key point that needs to be remembered about the series is that this is not a political series per se—it’s a story about a family more than anything else and how this family rose to a position of such significant iconic status in America and in the imagination and minds of people around the world.

WS: What can you tell us about why HISTORY decided not to air The Kennedys? What is it that the Kennedy family was so opposed to?
PRUPAS: First of all, I have to say that none of us, none of the producers had any direct contact with any member of the Kennedy family and I’m not prepared to say that they were involved directly, though there are a lot of fingers that would point that way. What I can say is we were working very closely with the HISTORY executives, primarily in New York, who had come up to the set, who had seen the cuts and been incredibly supportive of the project all the way through. They had read the scripts; they had their historian read the scripts. They had their historian tell us that every single episode of the script was historically authentic and we had that in writing before we started shooting. We bent over backwards to make sure the material being presented was not only the truth but was supported by proper research in every single case. We were quite surprised that they turned around and said they didn’t want to broadcast it.

What we had known through the process was that clearly some of the dialogue had to be changed; some of the time frames and locations had to be changed for dramatic purposes and for production purposes. When I say the dialogue had to be changed, we don’t know exactly what was said in [private moments in the bedroom], but situations like the Cuban Missile Crisis, every single word that was pronounced in that Cabinet room during the entire 13-day period was recorded and is available to historians. But we weren’t going to run a 13-day episode, so we needed to cut things back and make it dramatic. No one has actually challenged us on that particular episode, it was more the personal stuff in the show that has been written about that the people close to the Kennedy family would rather not have seen in public. They wanted to have it buried until long after their grandchildren were dead.

WS: What was your reaction to the Emmy nominations?
PRUPAS: I had psychologically prepared myself for the worst and I didn’t even turn on the TV that morning. I didn’t want to have to face the pain once again. One of my colleagues called me up at 9 a.m. to tell me we got ten nominations. I nearly fell off my chair! It was truly, for me, a credit to the members of the Academy that they took the time to actually watch the show and not read the press. There had been some very negative comments in the press about the show over the last several months and I’m glad to see that people could form an independent judgment about it and see it for what it was. There were two thoughts that could have gone through the public’s mind at the time the show was dropped by HISTORY: either it was true we were slandering the Kennedy family or that the show was actually a terrible show. Certainly, the nominations prove to anybody who knows the television industry that the show was not a terrible show. The reaction that we’ve had from almost everybody who’s actually watched the show has been extremely positive.

At the end of the day, I believe that the audience will come away even more sympathetic to the Kennedy family than they ever were.

WS: I’ve read a number of books on the Kennedys and knew about John’s back problems, but I didn’t know about the amount of medication he took.
PRUPAS: I refer you in that context to a book by Robert Dalleck, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy. He is a respected historian and professor at Boston University. He published this book in 2003 and he discloses in this book that he was the first one to have detailed access to the medical records of John Kennedy. The severity of his suffering is one of the heroic aspects of his presidency.

WS: What kind of challenges do you face when casting a mini-series in which the actors must resemble the historical figures. That must add a level of complication to the process.
PRUPAS: Absolutely. Casting was a huge challenge, not only because the actors need to resemble historical figures, but people remember what those historical figures looked like, it’s fresh in the imagination of everybody. There was a tremendous amount of effort that went into both the casting processes and in the hair, makeup and prosthetic process. Unfortunately Barry Pepper was not born with the kind of nose that Bobby Kennedy had and we needed to have prosthetics at that level to help him feel comfortable in the role.

The other thing that we experienced with all of the actors from Diana Hardcastle who played Rose to Kristin Booth who played Ethel to Greg Kinnear (John F. Kennedy), Tom Wilkinson (Joe Kennedy, Sr.) and especially Barry Pepper, was the fact that every single one of them felt the weight of the responsibility of portraying the real historical character and it was quite intimidating.

WS: Tell me about the commercial success of The Kennedys.
PRUPAS: It’s rating very well in some countries. It’s done extremely well in Canada, in Britain. It’s been broadcast in Australia to good numbers. It’s also aired in Japan, France, Sweden and Norway. It did extremely well in Belgium. It will launch in Italy and Spain in September. It’s been broadcast in Israel and the Arab-speaking Middle East on pay-TV so far; it hasn’t hit the major commercial networks there. We’ve sold it to Russia, believe it or not. Serbia, Hungary, Estonia, India, Singapore. We’re still working on China.

WS: ReelzChannel’s distribution is much smaller than HISTORY’s. How much greater would the audience in the U.S. have been had The Kennedys aired on HISTORY?
PRUPAS: Reelz only reaches about 60 percent of the U.S., whereas HISTORY reaches 100 percent of the U.S. audience. The fact that Reelz got as much as 2.8 million viewers means that had it been on HISTORY it probably would’ve got at least 40 percent more than that. Had it got the kind of promotion campaign that HISTORY was planning to give, it would have done spectacularly well.

WS: What upcoming projects are you working on?
PRUPAS: We’re currently working on a very interesting project called Bomb Girl which is about the first women to get out of the home and get into the workforce in the Western world in the 1940s during World War II when men were off at war and women had to take on the job of building the bombs. The drama has been ordered initially for broadcast in Canada. We’re working on the U.S. side of things. I’d like to say that show is Mad Men but with women and set in the ’40s—very edgy and slightly raunchy, very compelling stories about the experiences women had when they first were able to get out of the home. We’re going to start shooting on September 12 for delivery and broadcast in January.

We’re also we’re delighted that we’re in the process of shooting the second season Being Human, which has been very successful for Syfy. It’s done very well here in Canada and around the world.