Hollywood fantasy

By David Lyle 16-05-2016

It’s May, a very busy time for the TV industry as it readies itself for the fall while attempting to clean up the misses and messes of the past.

The business is meticulously polishing up the hype and delivering its lines with characteristic aplomb: “You look great!” or “You haven’t changed a bit… well not much!” And my personal favourite: “I love your show – I’ll get right back to you!”

What lovely sentiments meant to flatter and beguile but delivered with all the strained sincerity that has given Los Angeles a unique showbiz culture of fantasy.

There is no better display of this than during the second half of the month when the TV business connects to the rest of the world at the LA Screenings. What Mecca is to Muslims, the LA Screenings are to programme acquisition folk. The Hajj stops here. The different studios stage a collection of ceremonies to ignite enthusiasm among buyers and entice them into wanting programming, mostly scripted.

Back in the bad old days the studios selling both available feature film packages and TV series had half the world’s territories locked into output deals, meaning certain buyers in various territories did exclusive multimillion-dollar mega-deals with the US studios to get all or most of their yearly output.

American Idol producer Core Media filed for Chapter 11

Those were the glory days for top distribution executives, as these mere salaried employees had villas in Europe and personal bank accounts in Switzerland or the Bahamas fed with brown paper bags of cash.

In return for this largess, when the bag-bearers came to LA they were treated to days and nights of such outrageous lavishness and bling it would make a Bahraini blush.

But times have changed. Those output deals have mostly gone the way of the cash economy.

Yet there is still often an air of fantasy around the studios foisting food and drink on the buyers as they lead them into darkened screening rooms to view pilots of shows that, despite the extravagant introductions, everyone knows won’t last beyond four episodes.

Nowadays, real deals are done on a show-by-show basis (or at least with smaller packages – a whole other issue) as attention increasingly focuses on windows and digital rights.

A vibrant side market has also emerged this year at the Intercontinental Hotel, where producers from the Latin American markets take the opportunity to pitch their original productions to buyers gathered for the screenings – usually over three or four days leading into the marathon week-plus studio screenings. And let’s not forget the Canadians, who are also wedged into this picture to sell their fare.

Television’s fantasy month of May knows no geographic bounds. You’ve already been subjected to enough about the annual broadcast, cable and digital Upfronts ritual – TV’s strange mating dance with advertisers, where PR hype, floor shows and stand-up routines soon give way to cold, hard negotiations in the heat of New York’s brutal summer. All with billions of dollars in US ad commitments at stake.

To be fair, the Upfronts actually get a more critical eye from the press than the fantastical story that broke just as May began, when reverberations were being felt over Core Media Group’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Billed as the American Idol producer, the big takeaway was dear old Idol’s demise somehow made Core poor. But if anyone had taken a deeper look at how Core (previously part 19 Entertainment, part CKX) got into such a state – a simple Google search might have done the trick – it would have become clear that simple arithmetic, not silenced musical notes, were to blame.

Remember, Idol creator Simon Fuller sold 19 Entertainment for the very extravagant sum of US$210m to CKX in 2005, only to be outdone by the buyer, whose previous main asset seemed to be Elvis Presley’s likeness. CKX turned around six years later and sold the whole lot for a whopping US$509m to Apollo Global Management.

So take heart, Hollywood, sometimes this fantasy stuff actually works and the straw becomes gold – as long as you’re not the one left holding the bag when the music stops.