Excerpt from a recent interview

From the acclaimed U.S. cable series Burn Notice and Saving Grace to co-productions such as Mental, Fox Television Studios (Ftvs), headed by Emiliano Calemzuk, is developing innovative, successful business models that are cost-effective and involve international partners.

WS: what is the studio’s mission?

Emiliano Calemzuk: What Peter Chernin [the press ident and COO of News Corporation] asked me to do when he brought me here was to create a studio for the 21st century. We really started from a blank slate. We didn’t look at what we had done in the past, or what the industry was doing. We asked what was going to allow us to thrive in the future. There are two things: first, we have to be a global studio that taps into the strength of broadcasters around the world, and second we have to take the rapid advancement of technology very seriously, so we also have to be a digital studio. That doesn’t mean that we are going to stop doing what we are doing, because we produce a few of the most successful cable shows in the U.S. in the 18-to-49 demographics, including Burn Notice. We have a rather sound business going, and we are by no mean going to abandon that. But moving forward we have to redefine ourselves as a global, the lesson of ten years as an international broadcaster came in somewhat handy. It was very difficult to secure access to good American series. And in the first three of four episodes didn’t get good tarings, the series would be cancelled in the U.S. and you would have invested a lot od money and time in the schedule and be left with nothing. I felt those were inefficiencies in the market that needed to be correct, and we had an edge on how to tackle them, as we are a small but diverse group of people coming from different countries.

WS: how are your business models different from the traditional studio model?
Mr Calemzuk: We said, “Why don’t we take scripts from good show runners, work with American writers, actors and directors, and instead of pitching them to U.S. networks, lets pitch them to a consortium of international networks be the drivers of the production, and then if the show is food enough, which we think it will be, we’ll sell it to a U.S. network.”
So we decided to put three shows into production, thinking that we were going to get only one financed, but in four months we got three of them financed! The first show was Mental, which shot in Bogota Colombia. We’re currently shooting Persons Unknown, in conjunction with Televisa and RAI, in Mexico. And our third show, Defying Gravity, began shooting in January in Vancouver, with CTV in Canada, Prosieben in Germany and the BBC in the U.K.
What we tried to do was hedge the financing risk by creating another mechanism of producing U.S. series that doesn’t rely on spending tens of millions of dollars every year on pilots, 90 percent of which never see the on pilots, 90 percent of which never see the light of day. There is a lot of waster in that traditional big-studio model. We came up with this more cost-efficient way. We go directly to 13 episodes so the series doesn’t get cancelled on episode four. It’s an asset that we can sell around the world: we can also sell DVDs.
FtvS was the first major U.S. studio to do this. We can sell these series in the U.S. at a lower cost than the traditional license fee because a lot of the financing is already in place. And with the economy as it is right now, we are getting significant interest from pretty much every network on everything that we are doing. We [came up with this business plan] about two years ago; it’s not something we just now decided to do, given the sour state of the economy. We realized that, given how the networks-advertising model was going we needed to do something different and provide networks with programming that;s on a par, in terns of quality with the traditional studio show, but at a fraction of the price.

WS: You produced Mental in association with the Fox international channels
Emiliano Calemzuk: I think the Fox international Channels group is one of the smartest and most innovative international media organizations of today, so trying this out with them was a no-brainer. This was a win-win situation for the international channels group and for our studio. They needed programming that they could buy cost-effectively and distribute across all t heir channels around the world. We needed some financing to get the show in motion, which is FOX Telecolombia. So we said, “We’ll show you how we produce a U.S. series. We’ll do it in Colombia. You come in with part of the financing and then you keep distribution for some territories.” So it was a great model for them and a great Model for us, and I think the show is truly outstanding.