Rola Bauer

Partner & Managing Director
Tandem Communications

A few weeks ago, four new movies based on novels by Nora Roberts aired on four consecutive Saturdays on Lifetime. The channel made a considerable investment in marketing the films, which included on-air promotion, billboard advertising in the New York subway, even a Nora Roberts Collection Sweepstakes, offering viewers a chance to win $500, signed sets of Nora Roberts books and a $1,000 grand prize.

The efforts paid off because the four films performed extremely well. The premiere of the first one, Nora Roberts’ Northern Lights, drew more than 4.5 million viewers. The movie aired three times during the premiere weekend, reaching a total audience of 17.4 million viewers. The other three movies drew similar ratings.

This was the second collection of Nora Roberts movies that Lifetime has aired. Based on bestselling novels, produced by Peter Guber’s Mandalay Productions and Stephanie Germain, and starring top talent, such as Rosanna Arquette, Faye Dunaway and Cybill Shepherd, these high-quality movies exemplify the type of product that Munich-based Tandem Communications, which distributes the collection worldwide, is looking to offer buyers.

Tandem was established ten years ago when Rola Bauer and business partner Tim Halkin decided to set up a company that focused on a select number of quality projects per year, rather than going after high volume output, and chose three lines of business to pursue: production, co-production and distribution of event movies and mini-series.

In today’s difficult economy, broadcasters have had to cut their programming budgets, but they continue to look for event programming that can draw large audiences. “I believe the word ‘event’ has many definitions,” explains Bauer. “It is not purely tied to fiction. It can be a sports event or a reality show like American Idol or Germany’s Top Model or a game show like Domino Days, which is a huge event on RTL Television. And then there are fiction events. The question then becomes how does a broadcaster divide the budget it has for events and give some to sports, some to reality and some to fiction.”

For ten years, the philosophy of less is more and of pursuing individual projects as opposed to large volume deals has paid off because, as Bauer explains, “We can really target our clients’ needs. We produced Lost City Raiders and people loved the fantasy element of it and they enjoyed having a TV movie that had an event quality and at that same time could present a ‘what-if?’ situation: living in the near future when most of the land mass of the Earth is under water. Or Impact, which is starting its launch across the world—in Germany, in the U.S. and in Japan—and is a catastrophe-genre mini-series; it poses the question, Could this scientifically really happen to our world? We have other events that are grounded in novels, whether it’s a Nora Roberts novel, or a Ken Follett novel, or a Patricia Cornwell novel.”

Bauer admits buyers are looking for these types of events and adds that since Tandem has been delivering this level of quality movies and mini-series for a decade, “People do ask what do we have on our development slate that could be potentially fulfill their part of the fiction-based event pie.”

Tandem’s new production is Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, based on the bestselling novel. The screen adaptation is headlined by Ian McShane (Deadwood), Donald Sutherland (Dirty Sexy Money) and Rufus Sewell (The Eleventh Hour), as well as Matthew Macfadyen (Frost/Nixon) and Sarah Parish (Mistresses). Production involves five-and-a-half months of shooting in Budapest, Hungary and Vienna, Austria. It is produced in partnership with director Ridley Scott’s and Tony Scott’s production company, Scott Free. Tandem will also be distributing the Patricia Cornwell event movie franchise, which includes two movies, At Risk and The Front, produced by Stanley M. Brooks.

This capacity for delivering quality event programming allows Tandem to do repeat business with a number of key broadcasters, especially in their very competitive home market of Germany. “We have sold the Nora Roberts movies to ARD; we have The Pillars of the Earth and Impact on Sat.1, and we are developing a TV event for RTL and we’re developing one for ProSieben,” explains Bauer. “With the exception of Sat.1, which has two, we have one event on each of these networks and we make sure that each of these programs are at different stages, so that we are not in production with everything at the same time.”

And Bauer and her team are very careful about controlling costs while at the same time getting as much quality as possible on the screen. “We make sure that when we develop something we try to keep within a [cost-efficient] reality and as you get involved with more and more productions, you get more and more experienced,” she explains. “I look at what Mandalay and Stephanie Germain did on the Nora Roberts movies. They had four of them. They shot them back-to-back. They picked stories that made sense. The first collection of four movies was all shot in one area in Canada and the other four were two in one place and two in another.

“We are shooting Pillars in two locations that are not very far from each other: Budapest and Austria,” continues Bauer. “The project is eight hours long so we can amortize costs, which is very important. And we have the support of people like Ridley Scott and Ken Follett, who is really behind the project. It’s a great, great adventure—we are building a set with a cathedral that is the size of a football field! But in developing the project and in telling the story—and this is what’s great and why I love working with Scott Free Productions—they completely understand that we have to be careful with costs. We did The Company together, but they’ve also done the series Numb3rs. When you look at Numb3rs you also see there is a real sense of cost-effectiveness in how it’s shot. We work with partners who understand that, whether it’s Mandalay, Stephanie Germain or Scott Free. We hooked up with Stanley M. Brooks on the Patricia Cornwell movies. He’s an excellent producer and completely understands about how to get quality on the screen.”