Lakeshore launches TV arm

Los Angeles-based film finance, production and sales company Lakeshore Entertainment is launching a TV division headed by a former network executive.

Under producer and former ABC drama series VP Chad Hoffman, the new division will follow a strategy based on the model Lakeshore employs with films – acquiring material, developing it in-house and pre-selling it to foreign buyers as well as a US outlet.

That model, said Hoffman, will “create the leverage necessary to control as much ownership of the material as possible.”

The company is also “pursuing the possibility of creating series that we could finance totally on an international basis,” Hoffman added.

Lakeshore’s film library, which includes the Underworld films and the Oscar-winning Million-Dollar Baby, could be a source of material for TV series. “There are a fair number of things that we think have potential,” Hoffman said, “and we are starting to think about how we want to develop them.”

Lakeshore is already involved in two potential series, although both are based on a different model to the one the new division plans to employ.

The company is set to executive produce a series with comedian Sebastian Maniscalco that is being developed at NBC with Sony Pictures Television producing. It is also to start shooting Blanco, a pilot for cablenet Cinemax, with Fox TV Studios. Lakeshore chiefs Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi are executive producing.

In a statement, Rosenberg said that TV Lakeshore “will build on our successful feature formula of developing, financing, producing and owning carefully selected projects. Being able to get quality projects made independently is one of the hallmarks of Lakeshore and we will expand that to television.”

At ABC, Hoffman developed series including Twin Peaks, China Beach and Thirtysomething. He previously worked at Hearst Entertainment, Sony and internet start-up Permission TV.