The Production Manager - Post, reality and advertising

To coincide with my production hiatus I decided to give myself a blogging hiatus too. But the network have said our show MUST be delivered before the end of the year so I’m back to onlining the pilot, scheduling delivery and waiting with bated breath to see whether the series will be picked up.

It’s very recently been said to me that our industry is actually devolving and I’m inclined to agree. The show I’m working on at the moment, for example, is staffed at over 50% by very recent NYU graduates. Now I have absolutely nothing against graduates, it just doesn’t take a genius to follow the logic that without prior experience these kids won’t know what to do? They are extremely bright and well meaning but there is a marked difference between a post producer who has led an edit and someone whose experience is in a classroom or class projects without time constraints their financial implications.

A case in point, I popped in the other day for a scheduling meeting and in the edit there were 6 people sat around the director producing by committee. I’ve really never seen anything like it outside of a Network screening. I surely know the necessity of finessing a cut, particularly of a pilot but the idea of having 3 kids who have never worked on a show before saying things like, I think it looks weird, can we try it with another beat boggles the mind. Being the ardent professional that I am I pointed out their clock missed out a number, suggested they don’t accidentally cover someone’s face with a graphic and hot footed it out of there. I know when too many cooks spoil the broth.

In other news, there was finally some movement on our hip hop reality show. Unfortunately the direction was down the toilet as our talent proved to be entirely reluctant to cooperate with filming requests. Fortunately I have been approached about another and much better devised show that I see doing extremely well on Oxygen or Soapnet. The experience with the hip hop reality hell did serve one purpose though. I’ve become exceedingly better at shaping a show to be sold.

And finally, I have a serious problem with people who aren’t supporting their own industry. The other day I was at an industry event where we were discussing shows we are getting into these days (Breaking Bad, Damages, Heroes) when it became apparent that very few of these people were paying to view these shows, they were downloading them illegally from the net instead of using the multitude of legal options available; cable, on demand, hulu, Netflix, network websites.

One woman even said her husband refused to pay for cable since he could download everything they wanted for free. I pointed out that since they both worked in the industry wasn’t it in their best interest to pay $30 a month for something that contributes in the long term to their livelihoods?

If we can’t even be bothered to pay for television either with our money or our time then how to we expect the industry to survive, let alone thrive? Television costs money and it needs to come from somewhere if we expect to continue to watch the good quality programming we all enjoy. Sure there’s a lot of shit on there too but that’s another story. We’ve all experienced what the impact of smaller budgets has been. Imagine them shrinking further because advertisers don’t want to pay as much because of a shrinking audience, or move their entire operations into product placement.

Everything has consequences, even illegal downloads so please take a moment to think about the impact of your actions and whether saving that minute of your time of a hulu advert is really worth the cost to our industry and your career. Thank you – lecture over…. for now

Tags: Movie, Movie Blog, Hollywood, Film, Movie Bloggers