Eurowood

This article originally appeared in the MIPTV 2010 issue of TV Europe.

 

With its massive budgets, humongous domestic TV market and its talent for telling good stories, Hollywood has controlled the business of event-TV dramas, in English, of course, watched everywhere else in the world. A new trend, however, indicates that independent production studios in multilingual, multicultural Europe are now cranking up the number of English-language blockbusters they are selling to international broadcasters. Individually, these European studios might not be able to afford the $3 million to $4 million per hour the U.S. spends on its major drama series (by contrast, production in a country like France costs an average of $800,000 per hour). By melding creative financing with the best talent available, however, they are satisfying demands of networks hungry for high-end entertainment at more economical prices.

 

Welcome to Eurowood, a land where the less affluent European producers, the French and Germans in particular, resort to cross-border alliances and innovative creativity to stake their claim in the international prime-time event-TV games long associated only with Hollywood.

 

“The business has been dominated by the major U.S. studios,” says Katie O’Connell, the CEO of the Los Angeles-based Gaumont International Television (GIT), the production-and-distribution outfit established by the iconic French film group Gaumont. “But what we’ve seen in the past five years is the emergence of many European independent studios, who previously found it difficult because of the big barrier to entry.”

 

First off the GIT production line will be Hannibal, a one-hour drama series based on the bloodthirsty psychiatrist villain Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who was made famous by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 thriller feature The Silence of the Lambs. Bryan Fuller, who created Pushing Daisies, is Hannibal’s writer and executive producer, while Martha De Laurentiis, who worked on the Hannibal Lecter movies Hannibal and Red Dragon, is another executive producer. NBC has ordered the show to series.

 

GIT has also nabbed Michael Hirst, the scriptwriter of the long-running mini-series The Tudors and the Hollywood movie Elizabeth: The Golden Age, to write Madame Tussaud.

 

Over in Germany, Tandem Communications has a track record of producing several of the most recent prime-time English-language mega-series, including the $40 million The Pillars of the Earth, which premiered in 2010 in Canada and the U.S. The France-based StudioCanal, a leading European movie studio and distributor, took a majority stake in Tandem in January to diversify into Europe’s growing industry of TV mini- and event series.

 

Rola Bauer, Tandem’s president and co-founder, and her business partners have used their combined experiences in the U.S., Canada and Europe to understand how the less affluent European producers can deliver the goods.

 

“When you don’t have the means, you need to be inventive, and it’s amazing how creativity rises to the occasion,” Bauer says.

 

International English-language TV hits by European producers are not a totally new phenomenon. In the 1990s, the biggest achievement of the German company EOS and its Beta Film division was The Bible, one of the biggest mini-series of all time.

 

Unlike then, when such blockbusters were a once-in-a-blue-moon treat for TV audiences, demand from broadcasters today has skyrocketed.

According to Bauer, “The economy is bringing that need to the forefront. Every network needs event programs because feature films are increasingly being seen on all different media platforms before hitting the free-to-air broadcasters.”

 

Overnight, the right event drama can raise a broadcaster’s brand amid the hundreds of channels available. Accustomed to the high-quality but expensive Hollywood imports, local audiences expect more. That challenge is further exacerbated when broadcasters slash their budgets because advertisers are spending less in today’s extremely fragmented media market.

 

But independent studios are meeting the challenge and developing a host of English-language mega-dramas with hallmarks that read, “Made in Europe.”

 

This year, Tandem will be completing the eight-part, one-hour event drama World Without End, which, like the Emmy-winning and Golden Globe–nominated ThePillars of the Earth, is based on a best-selling Ken Follett novel. The cast comprises a list of stellar names, such as Cynthia Nixon and Miranda Richardson.

 

Also on Tandem’s books in 2012 is Labyrinth, a four-hour mini-series shot on location in France and South Africa and with the British director and screenwriter Christopher Smith at the helm. Additionally, Tandem is the distributor of Titanic: Blood and Steel, a $33-million 12-part series about the birth of the historical ship produced by the Italian De Angelis Group.

 

Competing in the same English-language TV-entertainment space is France’s Lagardère Entertainment. Its Atlantique Productions subsidiary is producing a 12-part, 52-minute spinoff of Transporter, the action movie made by the French producer Luc Besson and starring the British actor Jason Statham.

 

If one delves deeper into how these high-end productions are financed, one sees that the original production companies bring in multi-territory co-production partners, avoiding the burden of one enterprise shouldering the tens of millions of dollars in costs.

 

Transporter is being made by Atlantique and the Canadian QVF Inc., with M6 for France, RTL for Germany, HBO/ Cinemax in the U.S., and Canada’s The Movie Central and The Movie Network.

 

The Pillars of the Earth had funds from the Canadian public broadcaster CBC and the German network Sat.1, and it debuted on Starz in the U.S. and The Movie Central and The Movie Network in Canada. The co-producers were Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scott Free Productions and a Canadian outfit, Muse Entertainment.

 

Canada’s Shaw Media and Sat.1 were investors in World Without End, as were the co-producers Scott Free, Take 5 Productions, Mid Atlantic Films and Galafilm.

 

Tandem’s Bauer says companies like hers manage the costs by being astute about the most efficient funding methods: “You finance out of Canada, use international partners and then sell to the U.S.”

 

Dirk Schweitzer, the managing director of the Munich-based Tele München Group (TMG), concurs: “The biggest challenge is to sell into the U.S., so it helps to have U.K. and/or U.S.-based partners.”

TMG, famous for its co-productions, including the $25-million mini-series Moby Dick and the two-part action drama The Sea Wolf, has gone into production with an unidentified major drama series this year; it is scheduled to go on air in 2013.

 

TMG’s Schweitzer points out the need to be flexible about the required investment. “The main source for funds for English-language productions is presales. But we put the equity up (usually more than 20 percent) mainly against international sales done by our own international distribution company.”

 

In Germany itself, ironically, TMG has created one of the public broadcaster ZDF’s most enduring English-language dramas. For several years, it has been producing English­language mini-series based on the British author Rosamunde Pilcher’s romantic novels set in England.

 

Another major European broadcaster, France’s biggest commercial network, TF1, is diversifying into English-language production by forming a partnership with the French producer EuropaCorp Television. It is a subsidiary of Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp film-and-TV empire, which has extensive experience producing successful English-language feature films.

 

Inviting broadcasters to share the financial risks, as opposed to selling finished products to them, can make a difference. “Even though we can bring to broadcasters a quality product they can’t fund by themselves, this is more about producing for the channels, as opposed to selling to the channels,” TMG’s Schweitzer observes.

 

Funding will always remain an issue, notes Tandem’s Bauer, hence the need to “look at different ways [to produce], especially via international co-productions. We want to be able to afford the cost and still produce high-quality entertainment.”

 

Production companies also rely on what they call “soft money,” the subsidies and tax credits available in domestic or overseas markets seeking to lure producers to use their locations.

 

Just because it is cheaper to shoot big-budget works in Europe, though, does not mean the end result will be cheap, Eric Welbers, Beta Film’s managing director, declares. Sometimes, it depends on the value of the euro compared with other major currencies. It is cheaper to shoot in Eastern European markets such as Romania and the Czech Republic than in North America or Northern Europe. And Canada and Ireland offer some of the most generous tax credits or subsidies. But being economical does not mean selecting second best, Welbers adds. “You just can’t go anywhere for locations. For Borgia, it made sense for us to shoot in Europe; there are no Renaissance buildings in North America.”

 

A sign of success is to sell to the U.S., one of the world’s toughest TV markets. HBO has acquired EuropaCorp TV’s Transporter. EuropaCorp is in talks with other U.S. platforms to sell the next installment of the conspiracy thriller XIII. The action series first aired in 2008, was placed on a hiatus and returned to production this year.

 

EOS-Beta Film’s Borgia, about the scandal-riddled papacy in 16th-century Rome, was a roaring success in France, Italy, and Austria and pulled in up to 6.2 million viewers on ZDF.

 

And just to show how new digital media is opening doors for these European English-language products, Borgia has also been sold to Netflix, the streaming-TV service giant, for the U.S. and the U.K.

 

Getting the finances right shouldn’t control the creativity, producers say. But for a work of art that financially depends on foreign partners, the allocation of creative control can be a sensitive issue.

 

“Tandem has always taken the lead in all its projects,” Bauer says. “For The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, we cut the deal with Ken Follett, we put together the finance and made the co-production deal with Scott Free; we did the casting and I was on the production floor for many months. We’re a small team, so it’s very hands-on at Tandem.”

 

When Tandem enters a project as a deficit financier, it expects to have the right to veto certain creative decisions. But Bauer states that Tandem’s working relationship with Scott Free shows why finding a mutual stance is essential for the production.

 

“We’ve done several projects together and they have a level of respect that is in keeping with my own, and that’s a voice you don’t normally find on the financial side. You’ve got to let the creative needs lead you into what you need financially, otherwise the production’s development isn’t organic and it ends up looking like shit. You have to ask yourself, ‘What makes sense for my story?’”

 

EOS co-produced Borgia (which cost $30 million and was written by Tom Fontana) with Atlantique Productions, the French pay-TV giant Canal+ and the Czech producer Etic Films. Public broadcasters ZDF of Germany and Austria’s ORF were also involved.

 

“No one wants to fund a project with plenty of money and have no say,” Beta Film’s Welbers says. “This is managed differently from project to project. But as long as the talent is acknowledged as very good, [the funder] should trust the production. With Borgia, everyone accepted it was Tom’s product; you need someone who is respected in that way.”

 

But Welbers advises caution: “Not everyone is made for international co-productions. You can understand your local market, but you also need to understand the different mentalities of the companies you’re working with.”

 

Fontana is involved in another multi-territory co-production, Copper, a crime mini-series set in 1860s New York but shot in Toronto. It is being produced by EOS and Cineflix Studios for Canal+, BBC America and Canada’s Shaw Media, with Beta Film and Cineflix Rights sharing the distribution rights outside of North America. Its U.S. premiere is on BBC America this summer.