Wildlife at a Crossroads

October 2008

It’s fitting somehow that the adjective “blue-chip,” as applied to big wildlife documentaries, has its roots on the gambling table. These days, blue-chip wildlife films, in which “blue-chip” always means big money, are becoming a decidedly risky proposition.

They’re still popular and in demand, but putting together the financing to make them is difficult and sometimes requires a real leap of faith.

Many in the factual arena who are gravitating to less adventurous programming point to the BBC as the clear leader in producing true blue-chip wildlife for television, but even it sees potential hazards.

Neil Nightingale, the head of the BBC Natural History Unit, embraces the broadcaster’s role as a prime source of blue-chip wildlife. “I don’t think anyone has ever done it on the scale of ambition so consistently as we have done, over and over.” But, he adds, “It’s never been a big market. It’s difficult. You have to have a lot of ambition, a talent base with a great track record, and you have to be prepared to take a lot of risks.”

BBC funding and international sales make those risks manageable. “We just got a three-year commission for Natural World,” the BBC’s top documentary strand, “which we’ve never had before,” Nightingale says. “Half our income is from international sales and co-productions. We have some long-term partnerships with BBC Worldwide and an output guarantee on the strand with Discovery Communications for Animal Planet and Discovery Channel. We also work a lot with WNET. The bedrock, though, is the BBC commissioning in the first place.”

Nightingale notes that since the wildlife boom of the mid-’90s petered out after a couple years, wildlife filmmakers have scaled back their loftier goals. “Since then, you’ve seen a [variety] of types of wildlife programs. We’ve diversified enormously, but we have still kept those big, landmark series at the core of our business. It’s a very difficult market to break into because you’re asking for a lot of money and a lot of faith.”

Richard Life, the head of factual acquisitions and co-productions at ITV Global Entertainment, points out that big, narrated wildlife documentaries are popular internationally because they are easy to dub, but at the same time license fees are lower in real terms. “But the cost of producing hasn’t gone down and wildlife doesn’t age, so it still competes with new productions. What comes at a premium is genuinely new wildlife—revelatory behavior.”

The financing formula is challenging, Life says, because the average hour for a blue-chip documentary costs upward of €500,000 ($887,000), while the weakness of the U.S. dollar has made the world’s largest television market a less lucrative sale.

“The economics works if you can fund the show through two territories,” Life says. “If you can co-produce it between the U.K. and the U.S., the way the BBC does it, and maybe one or two other territories. Everybody else will buy the show because there’s nothing else like it in the market.” But, he goes on, if you need to bring in too many co-producers, you reduce the number of key territories you can sell to.

“Outside of the BBC there are very few producers able to finance traditional blue-chip wildlife,” Life says. “We’re often asked to invest as a distributor. People are coming to us saying they’ve already sold it to National Geographic Channels International. That means they’ve already got television rights tied up with a worldwide broadcaster, so all you’re left with is the traditional free-TV broadcasters, who are less interested if it’s been on cable.”

Another major player keeping its hand in with blue-chip while also offering less expensive wildlife fare is Discovery Communications. Caleb Weinstein, the senior VP of Discovery Enterprises International, the company’s new program-sales and licensing arm, sees a lot of interest still in blue-chip fare.

“There are broadcasters out there looking for blue-chips,” Weinstein says. “In some markets they’ve had a resurgence on the classic format. In Australia, they’ve had a lot of success at Nine. The buyers are out there. The challenge is how to present something in a new and compelling way that keeps the audience interested. They’re looking for that twist that makes it timely and cutting edge, or new topics being explored in ways that have never been done before.”

At the same time, the British independent Parthenon Entertainment has reduced its production of wildlife documentaries, says its CEO, Carl Hall, and it is putting more resources into bigger films, some of which are destined for theatrical release.

“At the moment, there’s no mid-ground,” Hall says. “There’s cheaper stuff, the kind of zoo-type shows where you meet personalities, quite accessible volume programs. And then you get the blue-chip end, the stuff that really sells to the very limited number of slots there are in the world, but when they [sell], they find their own niche.”

Britain’s Oxford Scientific Films (OSF), a part of the Australia-based Southern Star, has shifted its emphasis from one-off blue-chips to series. “We haven’t made a Natural World for about three years now,” says OSF’s CEO, Clare Birks, referring to the long-running BBC strand of nature documentaries. “We’re staying away. We’re more interested in characters and strong stories. If you come up with a really astonishing idea then I think the door is still open with Natural World. The bar is now set high. It’s harder for producers to come up with new takes and different angles and innovative ways of telling their stories. That’s what broadcasters are demanding. Coming up with something new and different is the hard part.”

NATURAL ODDITIES

But if the three-years-in-the-bush, David Attenborough-narrated blue-chip doc is becoming a rarer commodity these days, there is no shortage of wildlife programming on the market.

Maurice van Sabben, the president of National Geographic Television International (NGTI), says new technologies and compelling stories still make films on traditional subjects possible, but his company is steering away from what he calls “evergreen animals.” Current wildlife programs include Chameleon Beach and Cassowaries.

“I didn’t know what a cassowary was and I couldn’t believe it when I saw the animal,” van Sabben says. “It looks like something from Jurassic Park.”

The idea is that there are still interesting animals that haven’t been given the full documentary treatment. Chameleon Beach follows two chameleons from a small population of 300, living by a lagoon in Greece. It is the only instance of the African chameleon species in Europe. Cassowaries profiles the six-foot-tall birds in their native rainforest.

Discovery has a diverse slate of wildlife, headed by the five-part Pandamonium, made for Animal Planet with France 5. “Pandamonium provides an exclusive look at the world’s leading panda breeding, research and conservation facility in China,” Weinstein says. “The facility was right in the heart of the earthquake zone, so we’re going back to shoot a follow-up hour to see how the pandas survived through the quake.”

In development now is Amba: The Russian Tiger, shot in a conservation zone in Ussuriland in southeastern Russia. “Our quest was to find a Russian tiger in the wild,” Weinstein says.

Beyond those true blue-chips, Discovery also has series that focus on man’s coexistence with animals. Whale Wars is a seven-hour series on the efforts of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s controversial effort to protect whales on the high seas.

In an even more pop-documentary vein, Discovery has Dark Days in Monkey City, a series using live action and animation to tell the story of monkeys living on the streets of a deserted city in Sri Lanka; A Stable Life, on British show jumping and dressage; and A Farm Life, on farm animals.

While known for its blue-chips, the BBC has also diversified into other formats. “It’s dangerous to bet all your business on short-term trends,” Nightingale says. “This summer we had the most fantastic ratings for Lost Land of the Jaguar, an expedition series with a portfolio of presenter-scientists exploring a virtually untouched piece of jungle in Guyana in South America. Landmarks are very successful, but we found this sort of adventure-expedition vein also very popular.”

The BBC’s next blue-chip series is Nature’s Great Events, which aims to look at six of the most spectacular concentrations of wildlife on the planet. Nightingale explains that while the stories have been told before, the series finds new angles and revelations. “In the Serengeti, the stereotype is all about the wildebeest and lions,” he says. “The stunning revelation is that a wildebeest calf is much more likely to survive than a lion cub. The film turns the stereotype on its head.”

THE MEANING OF LIFE

The next big series, slated for the fall of 2009 on BBC One, is Life—ten hours on the diversity of the animal kingdom. “We’re looking at a different group of animal—insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and so on—and saying, ‘What is the essence of that group of animals?’ I don’t think we’ve ever done a series with more new animal behavior, fantastically filmed with a whole range of innovative filming techniques,” Nightingale says.

Parthenon’s search for new angles and subjects led it to make Wild Russia. “We did it with the cooperation of the Russian military, so some of the aerials are awesome,” Hall says. “We have fantastic images of places that were former high-security areas that no one had filmed in. We filmed at least four animals that had never been filmed before and discovered one new species.”

Buyers are looking for spectacle, Hall says, “something they haven’t seen before. Like what the BBC does so well with things like the tiger-cam. Or like Wild Russia, places you’ve never seen before. The one we’re really proud of is Cracking the Humpback Code, a big HD project that took two years to film in Hawaii. That’s the absolute latest on humpback whales and their language. We packed it with science. We use CGI to go inside the whale seamlessly. It’s not just the usual lolling shots of whales.”

OSF has had great success with its ongoing series Meerkat Manor, and Birks notes that it reflects audiences’ desire for characters and drama in their wildlife. “We wanted to reach an audience that was beyond the traditional natural-history audience with Meerkat Manor,” she says. “I think we succeeded. But in terms of its science, it’s very pure.”

A recent one-off from Oxford Scientific, Jessica the Hippo, mines similar territory. “It was a different take on the genre because it was about a baby hippo that had been washed up on the lawn of a South African living out in the bush,” Birks says. “We ended up with this wonderful triangle between the man, his wife and the hippo. You have to be bold and play with genres, cross genres, mix things up a bit.”

To that end, Jessica was directed by Fred Casella, who holds a degree in zoology but whose most recent directing credit was ABC’s Wife Swap, and narrated by the quirky features director John Waters.

ITV Global is also looking at more entertainment-oriented wildlife, documentaries about people and animals in the vein that the late Steve Irwin mined so successfully. “There is a strong audience for them,” Life says. “We have The Wolfman, which is about a man who has been learning to live with wolves. It’s about his quest to understand them by living with them. We also have The Bearman, about someone who spent his life trying to understand bear behavior. These have done well for Five at 9 o’clock. They’ve topped 2 million, which is way above their average. We’ve been selling these to traditional wildlife buyers and to people who normally wouldn’t buy wildlife, who are airing them in straight human-interest documentary slots. They’ve still got good strong science and they’re very informative, but they’re cheaper to make and they can be made over a much shorter period of time.”

ON THE BIG SCREEN

Blue-chip wildlife on television may be an endangered species, but the success of 2005’s March of the Penguins opened a lot of eyes to the potential for theatrical wildlife that would later find its way to the small screen.

The theatrical route is attractive to Parthenon, which announced in July that it was teaming up with NDR Naturfilm in Germany to make Knut & His Friends, about the Berlin Zoo’s Knut, the only polar bear cub to survive in captivity in 30 years, and Serengeti.

“The technology is available for us to bridge the gap between TV and the movies,” says Hall. “We can shoot in 2K HD at the moment,” providing double the resolution of 1080i HDTV, “and the potential is there to shoot as high as 4K with some of these new cameras. The main thing is these movies, at 90 minutes, feature length, attract the film funds that are in Central Europe.”

About a year after theatrical release, the movies can migrate to television, in either a 90-minute or one-hour running time. “You’re bringing the production values of a movie to TV,” Hall says. “You can attract documentary filmmakers like, in the case of the Serengeti film, Reinhardt Radke, who really wanted to make this movie. And because it’s got a cinema rating it’s worth a lot more in home video.”

Following on Deep Blue and earlier feature films, BBC has produced Earth, which Nightingale says is outperforming The March of the Penguins in the territories where it has been released. It’s set for a 2009 release in the U.S.

“When we find a great subject, whether allied with one of our television series or independent of them, we will do the occasional feature film,” Nightingale says. “The important thing is to not follow a formula, to play to the strengths of the subject. The appeal of Earth is the sheer scale and scope of it, the splendor of the earth.”

BBC Films has just wrapped The Meerkats, in partnership with The Weinstein Company in the U.S. “You absolutely have to have characters that are lovable, that we can relate to, filmed in an intimate but also epic style, capturing the grandeur of Africa in a place where the meerkats live amongst big game and lions and other wildlife,” Nightingale says.

And, speaking of meerkats, Oxford Scientific has made Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins. Birks, though, isn’t sold on theatricals. “Discovery asked us to make it. They had a huge brand, and I can understand why they wanted to exploit it,” she says. “March of the Penguins was the exception, not the rule. It struck a chord. But I’m not convinced. When you can see so much great natural history [for] free, I think you have to deliver something truly exceptional. I wonder if there are enough stories out there that have the simplicity and the power of the penguin story.”

ITV Global isn’t testing the theatrical waters now, and Life notes that some of the most popular theatrical documentaries were conceived as television properties. “Most of them, Penguins included, became theatricals almost by accident rather than design,” he says. “Penguins was a television commission that someone spotted, and very cleverly took a gamble on, and it popped. Planet Earth as a theatrical was an afterthought. When we’re looking at things other than television, we’re looking at a number of online and Internet ventures. But if we had a film and a theatrical distributor who was interested in coming in on something, we would definitely consider it.”