The Cost of Business

So, all things being well, I was, last week, supposed to be ‘coming to you live from Cannes’… from the beating heart of all things entertainment. Yes, I hadn’t forgotten, I’m supposed to be the Reality TV Producer, but if you’d read the back-story you’ll remember that I wasn’t always this way.  

Yes, I was supposed to be down in Cannes with my film producing team living it up with our sales agents, having meetings about an upcoming feature-film, mixing with old friends, and drinking an awful lot of pink wine.  However, today’s lesson is about “the cost of business”. I’m not talking about buying staples or expensive lunches at ‘The Ivy’, I’m talking about the real, true cost of doing what we do.  

To take you on one of my little tangents for a moment, let’s go to a bachelor party I was at a few weeks ago. It was one of those lovely events where nobody else comes from the industry; none of them had ever gotten their script to anyone – not even entertained the idea of coming up with a ‘great show about…’, not one of them had ever, ever ‘done lunch’ with anyone. Lovely. So, great – zero pressure to have sold anything immediately, so I can tell them about the show I sold last month – even though it has already been old news in the trades for two weeks… What IS great about these events is that you do get to bask in being ‘the guy from LA’ – and pretty much whatever you say is cool, because it represents a world completely ‘other’ than their’s.  

But, importantly, you also get reminded that it’s not necessarily ‘better’ than theirs.  

After a long, drink-infused, anecdote about the reality show I’m currently working my tail off on, (trying to turn from Pilot into series), someone asked me, an account manager at a bank I think, why I work such crazy hours, and put so much work into these shows. I replied, ‘that I love what I do’. They all nodded sagely, a couple even shook their heads and whispered ‘wow, that’s cool’.  

I was feeling pretty good about my martyred self, when one of the others asked, ‘yes, but you miss all those weekends, miss family events, you don’t even get home most nights until late… you do this for your new little company (rather than for yourself), AND get paid less than you’ve been paid for years… WHY?!’

I have to say, I didn’t much like this turn in the discussion, I liked it when it was about my life being really cool. But, I thought long and hard, and, summoning up as much business-brain as I could, I replied ‘the important thing about this ‘investment in me’ is that it’s either going to go down the sh*tpan or it’s going to come out in spades later – then I’ll be able to have stability, maybe a little house and even, yes, even, have weekends’. 

Around the table I was now faced with a sea of bewildered looks. One of them even sniggered. What had I said?  “That’s funny”, said one. ‘What’s funny?” I asked, rather irritated nobody was whispering ‘wow’, this time.  The banker leaned in close and said, like an old wizard giving the secret spell to the young adventurer – “It’s funny, because you’re doing all this crazy work to get exactly what we already have – in fact you should come to my house in the mountains one weekend”.

 So, if you can all go wobbly for a minute, I’ll bring you back in time to the moment I was  sitting in my edit suite last week, on hold on the phone with Virgin Atlantic – with the girl on the other end asking the question, ‘so you’re sure you want to cancel this ticket to Nice, France?’ I looked over at my editor, cutting like the wind, and a half page of network notes on my desk… glanced at the timeline on the computer, with over half the show to fine-cut – and then a final look at my watch: 3.46pm. I was never going to make that 8.30pm flight. I was never going to finish this before the middle of Cannes.  So, the decision was made. If I had any chance of turning this pilot into a series, I wouldn’t be going to Cannes.

The cost of business, as far as I can see it, is an ever increasing pile of imaginary, missed-weekend-shaped chips on a large poker-table. And, as I said so eloquently to the bankers, who may yet have the last laugh, this could all go down the sh*tpan, or it has got to, got to come back to me in spades.