How MCA Rediscovered Movieland's Golden Lode By Peter J. Schuyten (Page 2) By making movies for TV, the company could spread its overhead costs over twelve months and enhance its creative capabilities by putting some of television's best writers, producers, and directors under permanent contract. Very quickly, the company also latched onto a way of using "World Premiere" as a selling tool to get new business. Normally, selling a new series is a long, drawn-out process. A producer goes to a network with an idea for the series. If the network likes the idea, it pays for a script. If it likes the script, it pays for a pilot. If it likes the pilot, it orders thirteen episodes-roughly half a year's supply-with an option to renew. Flying in the back door. The very first "World Premiere" movie, "Fame Is the Name of the Game," cut short this process by becoming a kind of "back-door pilot." A fanciful number about a magazine-publishing company, it subsequently became a series running as "The Name of the Game" for four years. Since then, of the 116 "World Premieres" made for NBC, thirty-one have become series, including such current hits as "Rockford," "Columbo," "McCloud," and "Emergency." In one series after another, MCA's producers have kept seeking new vehicles to ride in the race against boredom. "The Name of the Game" series, for example, featured not one but three leading men-a reporter, a publisher, and an editor-in-chief-and each week the viewer was treated to a ninety-minute episode built around one of these characters. The innovation also made production sense: the shows' ambitious plot lines would have made production logistics impossible with the same actor playing the lead every week. Having determined that the public would, quite literally, sit still for a series that alternated three leading men, MCA enlarged on the idea by creating a series that alternated three entirely different shows week after week. Debuting in 1969, "The Bold Ones" featured unrelated segments called "The Doctors," "The Lawyers," and "The Protectors," each with its own cast of characters, settings, and story line. The new system offered unique advantages over the regular series approach. By having different shows rotating to fill a single time slot, MCA multiplies its chances of keeping the series alive and holding onto a valuable piece of air time. If one of the shows doesn't catch on, it can be dropped and a suitable replacement plugged in. A new beat for the deputy. The success of "The Bold Ones" prompted MCA to try out another idea, the so-called mini-series. The company divided the TV season into four parts and ran four short series, each presented in six consecutive episodes in one time slot. Two of the mini-series failed, but one, "Night Gallery," was successful enough to run later as a full-length series of its own. Another, featuring a character named Sam McCloud, a Taos, New Mexico, deputy sheriff assigned to the New York City Police Department for training, was saved and reappeared the following season as part of the "Sunday Mystery Movie," which included "Columbo" and "McMillan & Wife." Now in their sixth season, this trio is still going strong, but MCA's attempts to build it into a consistent quartet have been thwarted as one segment after another has failed to measure up to the originals. In its quest for new forms, MCA had been trying since 1968 to sell the commercial networks on the idea of serializing a novel. Public television, of course, has shown with such presentations as "The Forsythe Saga" that the novel has at least some viewer appeal, but the other networks were unconvinced of the commercial potential. Last year, MCA finally scored with the concept when it produced, and ABC ran, a twelve-part series called "Rich Man, Poor Man," based on Irwin Shaw's novel of the same name. It was so successful that this year MCA is producing several novels for an NBC show called "Best Sellers." A nine-part serialized version of Taylor Caldwell's Captains and the Kings led off in September and will be followed by Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle, Robert Ludlum's The Rhinemann Exchange, and Norman Bogner's Seventh Avenue. Frank Price says it took him a year of scouting to find properties that would work in this form. "The right kind of novel for this kind of treatment has to be very much involved in human relationships," he says. "Suspense plots, courtroom dramas don't work. You need to get the audience involved with the characters. Anna Karenina would be fine, but don't try Six Days of the Condor. Anything with a lot of plot twists and turns has to be done in one evening." Price's operation is now working on a TV version of James A. Michener's Centennial, chronicling American life from prehistory to the present, which will stretch the form to full capacity. The program has been sold to NBC. That maddening Sunday night. As with the "back-door pilot," MCA discovered that the serialized novel also offered unplanned opportunities. After the original run of "Rich Man, Poor Man," the company spun it off into a kind of prime-time weekly soap opera. This season MCA is strongly represented in virtually every market segment on television. For the family hour-8:00 to 9:00 P.M. every night-there are "Bionic Woman," "Baa Baa Black Sheep," "Six Million Dollar Man," "Gemini Man," and "Emergency." For later viewing MCA produces "Best Sellers," "Rich Man, Poor Man II," "Switch," "Baretta," "Rockford," "Delvecchio," and "Kojak." The company produces the only rotating series on the air ("Sunday Mystery Movie") and is making several "World Premieres" for NBC. The only program format that has recently eluded MCA's creative talents is the half-hour situation comedy. Last year the company tried to break into that market with "Fay," a farce about a middle-aged divorcee, which flopped immediately. This fall's entry, "Holmes & Yoyo," is a slapstick comedy about a couple of cops, one of whom is a robot. If there is an irony in MCA's success, it occurs when two or more of the company's shows end up competing for the same audience. One Sunday last month, "Six Million Dollar Man" on ABC appeared opposite the Universal Pictures release Earthquake on NBC, which was still running when "Kojak" came on over CBS, which in turn overlapped "Quincy" on NBC, which was still going strong when "Delvecchio" began on CBS. The networks get off cheap. With all these successes, one might assume that MCA was making a bundle from the networks. It may come as a surprise to most people outside the industry that very few prime-time series-"Columbo" being one of the exceptions-make back their production costs on the networks sale. As the business has evolved, a producer does not literally "sell" a show to a network but rather rents it for a license fee. Typically, a network licensing fee covers only about 75 percent of a show's costs, including overhead. An average one-hour series episode costs MCA $400,000 to make. Since a series now runs twenty-two episodes a season, it represents a net loss of $2.2 million. And since MCA last season produced the equivalent of fourteen one-hour series for the networks, it lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million on television production. But the total market for a show comprises more than just the original network sale. There are, for instance, the Canadian and overseas markets where shows are sold for the same season they are shown in the U.S. International sales generally make up the 25 percent differential between what MCA spends to make its shows and what the networks pay to license them. Because international sales are so important. MCA has its programs dubbed in French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese. In Mexico City alone, four dubbing studios work full time just to supply the Spanish-speaking Latin-American markets with shows that are currently on American TV. Predictably, show titles are sometimes changed to increase their appeal to foreign viewers. Thus "Six Million Dollar Man" becomes "El Hombre Nuclear" in Mexico, and "Kojak" is known to its German fans as "Einsatz (literally "Engagement") in Manhattan." In addition to first-run products, MCA also peddles just about every show and movie it has ever made to the overseas market. Stripping Marcus Welby. In most cases, MCA has to wait to make a profit on a series until it is able to syndicate the shows in the U.S. Once a program has been aired twice by the network that ordered it, the producer is free to license the show for syndication to individual stations. A local station is generally not interested in picking up a syndicated series until about a hundred episodes, or some five seasons' worth, are "in the can." The station usually wants to air five episodes a week, following a practice known in the trade as "stripping" (as in to strip in "Marcus Welby, M.D." at 4:00 P.M. every weekday afternoon). At that rate, the stations run off a five-year series in less that five months. But they have the right to run each episode six times, or enough for more than two years of strip programming. Syndicating is a classic case of charging what the market will bear. There are over 200 geographical markets in the country, but for syndication purposes the top seventy-five are the most important-they provide 80 percent of the dollars. The price varies widely according to population, the number of stations looking for product (especially independent stations), and other competitive factors. A popular one-hour series being syndicated for stripping for the first time will sell for more than $20,000 an episode in New York City, the nation's No. 1 market. But the price will drop to about $3,000 after the top twenty markets, and very small markets will get it for a few hundred dollars. The cumulative sale per episode can total $140,000 to $180,000, or $14 million to $18 million for a 100-program package. As the numbers suggest, the dollars involved are impressive for MCA, which every year has two or three "new" shows going into syndication. But MCA executives, who like to think of their company as the Tiffany of the syndication business, never simply accept a market as it exists. In the same way that Wasserman encourages his creative people to develop new products, Frank Price and his counterpart in syndication sales, Lou Friedland, prod their subordinates to develop new market dimensions that will generate additional revenues. << Page 1    Page 3 >>