Richard Propper

TV Real Weekly, May 21, 2008

President

Solid Entertainment

Solid Entertainment has been offering quality non-fiction programming to buyers around the world since it was established in 1994. It has built its reputation on choosing films and series that are distinguished for their powerful imagery, sophisticated editorial content, clear storytelling, and their ability to engage and enlighten the audience. It’s a formula that works.

This commitment to high-end product paid off in a big way this past MIPTV, when Solid closed a number of large deals with major broadcasters. “It was a good market,” says Richard Propper, the company’s president. “We closed a deal with RAI in Italy, with our agent Polivideo, on four titles: Gods of Rice, Chocolate: Pathways to the Gods, High-Tech Monorails and Jules Verne Adventures: Devil’s Island Journey into Jungle Alcatraz.” Solid also sold to RAI the 2008 Academy Award-nominated documentary Operation Homecoming, which he says is “a powerful film and its quality is evident. We are in negotiations now to close three other large territories in Europe and will announce these sales shortly,” says Propper. On the series side, Solid completed a sale to Discovery’s new international HD-only channel with 22 episodes of the automotive series Hot Rod TV.

Not only has Propper chosen topics that are of interest to broadcasters around the world, but he is also offering buyers a variety of one-off documentaries and factual series. And he is giving them the choice of selecting documentaries in the format best suited to their time slots.

“This year we’ve already picked up some great festival docs. To adjust to market needs, we have nearly every title in a feature length as well as a one-hour version,” he explains. “It’s really been helpful to have the bigness of a feature film, that 90-minute running time, and the energy and creativity in a one-hour broadcast versions, these are a majority of our sales.”

At MIPTV, and through his year-round contact with clients, Propper keeps a close eye on what genres of factual programming broadcasters are requesting. “Blue-chip wildlife seems to be coming back, there seems to be a desire again for it. For us, world history still is strong. Science, technology and current affairs are all still strong." Propper also notes that buyers are looking for two topics in particular. “The first is anything to do with green technology. Everybody was looking for a different twist on ecology, conservation, something related to it but slightly different,” he says. “And the other is the elections here in the U.S. In both those categories, we have programming. In fact, we have great new product.”

Propper has recently picked up quite a slate of feature-film documentaries, for which there are also one-hour versions. “The first one is Revolution Green, narrated by Woody Harrelson,” he explains. “It follows one of the first scientists in the biodiesel industry and he has a refinery located in Hawaii. He has figured out how to take waste cooking oil and turn it into biodiesel, which is interesting because when I sat down at MIPTV, most countries were pretty turned on by this, because everybody is interested in alternative fuels. Germany, on the other hand, outlawed biodiesel because it gets into the larger discussion of fuel or food and that is becoming the next political discussion. This documentary deals exactly with that: is biodiesel sustainable as an alternative fuel?”

On a completely different subject there is A Table in Heaven, about Sirio Maccioni, the founder of the famous New York restaurant Le Cirque. “It’s a tremendous documentary about what Le Cirque was in 1970s and 80s and how it changed when it moved its location in 2005,” says Propper. “You follow them into the real world inside the Le Cirque restaurant and it’s not what you think. It’s one of those charming docs that you don’t want to end.”

And Chasing Baja goes inside the 2007 off-road race in Mexico called the Tecate/SCORE Baja 1000, which has been around since the ’60s. “It’s one of those events, much like the Paris-Dakar, that is hard to experience if you’re not there—you can’t really feel the thunder,” explains Propper. “This filmmaker set out to do that. He got 13 HD cameras, he campaigned his own team, which was sponsored by BF Goodrich, and you follow them as they make their way from the start to the finish. It’s 1,000 miles and four drivers that rotate in and out. Even if you’re not into auto racing, it gets you hooked.”

As Propper explains, there is an interesting side note to the documentary. “The Paris-Dakar, the famous European off-road race, wasn’t run this year because of terrorism threats,” he continues. “And for 2009 they have the same problem because they can’t really control what happens in Africa, so it has been moved to South America. So the Tecate/SCORE Baja 1000 actually becomes a blueprint of what that race will look like. We had a lot of broadcasters who were really interested in this, because they really don’t know, on a broadcast level, what they are going to show if the Paris-Dakar doesn’t run, or if it does move to Latin America.”

In 2007, Solid Entertainment entered into a collaborative business partnership with non-fiction distributor Ocule Films to form O.S.I. (Ocule Solid International) to expand its traditional distribution sales base and enhance its digital placement of content.

—By Anna Carugati