THE CHAMPAGNE MOMENT

So last blog I talked a bit about my role in sating the World’s appetite for new reality tv.

This week I’ve been out pitching a new show – so I wanted to talk about the ‘Champagne Moment’… or reality tv’s very own unique version of this ultra-tease.

Here’s how it goes. You spend months finding new characters, preparing them for the ordeal of the months of work and slow progress ahead. You write up the act breakdown – (what goes in each act) – and work up the treatment, perhaps even a script. And then you fly somewhere across the States and shoot tape with your own money for a couple of days to make a reel… you painstakingly cut it over weeks – and finally have a 5 minute reel that you feel happy to show. It’s fast, it’s cool, it has all the right character bits in it. Great, now you screen it to your agent with a view to finally going out and pitching this in meetings.

Now, for the first time in the process my agent says “Yeah! I always LOVED this project, never doubted you!”… which is pretty much 100% the opposite of what he said six months before… then – boom – you’re on the top of the books again because – you’re now the team going out with a show!

So, you spend your time and your own hard earned cash flying to the East Coast, flitting about Burbank and Century City, running from meeting to meeting, shaking hands, being ‘good in the room’, watching the vast array of terribly set up TV&Audio systems in various network meeting rooms, (with tv’s that are seemingly never set up for the TV to work, waiting for “Jonah, our tech guy” to switch the channel, but who forgets to turn on the amp. Then waiting for Jonah to come back and fix the sound…) – but mainly, above all, you spend all this time drinking in all that wonderful positiveness. Ahhh.

That’s great. All that hard work and now people really like the show. They love the show. Some of them even understand the show. Then there are handshakes, I even had a backslap last week, (I think I enjoyed that), and the meetings are over. Then, your team and your agent wait until the elevator before saying positive things to each other about how well that meeting went… or… ‘he’s really cool, I particularly liked the bit where he said I was great’.

(But strangely nobody says anything bad in these moments, because as loony as it seems, there’s a collective recognition, and it’s never spoken out loud, that the elevator might actually be bugged… I even found myself sliding my feet to the very edge of the floor when leaving the office of a well known pay cable network last week, I guess with the very real expectation that the floor would open up any second and we’d be dumped down a chute into a pool and I’d really have my day ruined by Hollywood sharks).

Then, once you drive away, your phone rings and it’s your agent with everyone in their own cars on a conference call. Now you talk about what really happened in the meeting.

This can be very dispiriting. A meeting where they loved every second of the reel, where they nodded and made appreciative clicking noises with their pens as they jotted down the details of your pitch – is often interpreted as ‘a complete waste of your time’ by the agent. ‘What a total douche-bag that guy was’.

Sometimes he might be right. But… mostly… I dunno. I was THERE. I didn’t see it. But there’s such a thing as a game face, I guess. And your agent, for all his faults, can spot it, and in the long run even if you don’t believe them, they can turn out to be very, painfully right.

Then come the offers, passes and ‘don’t do anything until I’ve shown the team’ calls.

It’s exciting – everyone agrees – this could be the one. They offer, counter offer, reveal what the offer REALLY meant by having their business affairs call and deny any of the offer was actually what I have written down right here in my notes. But the most important thing is that any day you KNOW you’re going to call your friends, email your family and give everyone the good news – ‘we sold a show!’…. champagne will flow, beers will be drunk – laughter will be had. Great times.

But no. Because then the offer changes a little more, they want a few more bits of free work before they’ll truly actually really sign, or their enthusiastic statements about how you’re all going to love working together become laced with caveats like ‘Bob just wants to take a last look at it with the focus group, but you’ll definitely know by Monday’.

It’s still exciting… but now it’s another weekend with the champagne still sitting in the fridge. Monday comes. Monday goes. ‘Everyone’s SUPER excited’ the agent says, ‘you’ll know by Friday for sure!’

Friday comes and goes… now the offers are still good, a lot of people are putting in real time putting them together, negotiating them, working through it. But, what there isn’t is a ‘YES’ - a real live, slap-it-it’ll-wobble ‘yes’. And you stand swinging on the open fridge door, staring down that bottle of champers. But you don’t touch it, you resist.

Any minute now. Just wait for it. You can drink it soon enough…

And finally, as the field has narrowed to two suitors, (that’s still TWO, folks), your agent casually slips in the sad news that the major network officially passed yesterday, but ‘this is great about THIS deal, right?!’… you can’t help but be left with the feeling that this has all been such a lot of work all you want to do is sell the f#king show now. You’re done with this process… it’s not fun any more. Why didn’t someone buy it last week when they said they loved it? What did we do wrong? Your agent shrugs – happy that at least you’re selling it to a really good network – and chiding you for being down on a fantastic achievement.

But somehow, after all that fuss, all that whirl, everyone seems to have conspired to have made all this process a colossal buzz-kill. And now opening the champagne seems kinda pointless considering all the work you have to do now to turn this option/development budget or ‘off network pilot’ into a real pilot. And what if they don’t like the pilot. What if it goes away? Or what if they pick it up – then we’ll have to convince them the series is great too and then, what if we get axed after two episodes, publicly, and as a failure? What then? Ohmygod…. There’s SO much to go wrong!

Oh. This is horrible.

I don’t think I’m even in the mood for champagne.