Each year, the Producers Guild Of America (PGA) hold the Produced By Conference to discuss the state of the industry with film and TV powerhouses. This is the second half of a conversation with Peter Roth, President and Chief Content Officer, Warner Bros. Television Group and Toby Emmerich, Chairman, Warner Bros.
Emmerich maintains that filmmaking is a highly collaborative medium. However, there is only one (sometimes two) director who steers the creative vision. “For Warner Bros., directors like Clint Eastwood, Christopher Nolan, Todd Phillips, and James Wan drive that vision. Great directors are the lifeblood of a movie studio. Great directors also need great producers and great screenplays.”
Warner Bros. arguably took some big creative swings with Bradley Cooper on A Star is Born and John Chu on Crazy Rich Asians which paid of handsomely to both critical and commercial acclaim. The film studio has a Brain Trust comprised of a team of executives which collective shapes the movie production slate. Audiences are smarter about what movies will strike a chord with them. “I do believe in a communal intelligence and a communal IQ which feeds into the decisions the Brain Trust makes.”
Toby Emmerich (Photo by Mark Von Holden/Invision)
Bradley Cooper flexed his acting muscles on American Sniper. He secured the rights to the book and took them to Clint Eastwood. They each raised each other’s game in getting the film made. Years later, Cooper showed Emmerich a clip of him and Lady Gaga singing a song at the piano on his iPhone, Emmerich immediately felt the chemistry and “a star was born.” Risks are not a random lottery. They are measured and calculated.
“You take shots on people you believe in. The biggest movies in the history of the business are usually movies that the studio is afraid of. Titanic, arguably the highest grossing in history was made by two studios because one studio was frightened to make it alone and wanted a partner to hedge their bets,” said Emmerich.
The same is true in the television landscape according to Peter Roth. You need one voice at the center of a TV show to direct the vision. “It’s important to surround yourself with people who question and challenge your vision. The idea being how can we affect the best possible outcome,” said Roth. “What happens with Greg Berlanti. J.J. Abrams, Chuck Lorre, John Wells, Damon Lindelof, Julie Plec, Mindy Kaling, and Ava DuVernay, is that despite the healthy arguments and objections, they are the final arbiters of their visions; not the studio, not the network. The captain of that ship must prevail.”
It’s no secret that the film business is global and we can’t rely on domestic box office alone to make a film profitable. Most industry experts believe that China will become the most important box office in a few years according to Emmerich. “However, it’s a complicated and challenging market. Certain movies we think about how they might play in China in advance. Sometimes that question will sometimes influence how much you spend making the film.”
A Show For All Seasons
The television business is changing not only in terms of viewing platform, but also format. Netflix rarely allows a TV show to extend beyond three seasons. They order shorter episodes and smaller seasons. The traditional 26 episode season on broadcast networks is slowly adopting the streaming model. Roth laments this as a cynical trend. “I find it to be economically challenging. Rather than looking at a ‘home run, hit-driven’ business, now we’re playing for ‘singles and doubles.’ Multi-cam comedies seem to be in defiance of that trend. I think it’s incredibly disdainful towards the audience when networks cancel TV shows after two or three years. I don’t think they want to be dictated to in that fashion because of a business model run by algorithm rather than quality of execution.”
Roth quotes Steve Jobs in advising against this dangerous trend of networks telling audiences when they’ve had their fill of their favorite TV series, “Put product before profit.”
The streamers generate an immense amount of data on viewing habits. How does this inform what Warner Bros. greenlights? Despite the mountains of data, Roth claims that little of it is shared with them. The selective data that is, has little intrinsic value. We are people, not just eyeballs on screens.
“I sit through far-reaching lectures on mathematical algorithms on viewership and I glaze over them. I suppose they [streamers] are cynical enough to create content based on their data. I find this so disrespectful and disturbing. That is not the way we create television.”
Not every TV show has a linear passage from concept to screen. Some popular shows are canceled, while others need to be reconceived. Par of the course of being a studio head is watching their favorite TV shows not be renewed. “We invest ourselves so personally in each of these shows. They really are all like our babies. I thought Whiskey Cavalier was one of the best TV series canceled this year,” said Roth. The beauty of Warner Bros. is their ability to place canceled TV series on other platforms. This happened with Lucifer, Longmire, Fuller House, You, Riverdale and Supergirl. “Some of our biggest hits were TV shows that were discarded by other networks. We never give up on shows that we believe in.”
The Big Bang Theory was a truly iconic show of the last decade. Roth recounts that
Peter Roth (Photo by Mark Von Holden/Invision)
they shot an original pilot with Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, and another actress playing Penny. She was more street-smart and not nearly as appealing as the ‘All American girl next door’. Jim Burroughs, a veteran TV director who directed the ill-fated pilot missed the mark with the original actress. Chuck Lorre reconceived the character of Penny. “The conceit of the show was reworked. If these socially inept, geeky characters can get the girl, then there’s hope for us all. The complexion of the series changed to become the phenomenon that it is after Caley Cuoco was hired,” said Roth.
What Are You Looking For?
This is the most common question studio executives are asked.
A major studio like Warner Bros. has a broad remit in terms of what it is looking to produce. “We’re looking everything in terms of movie genres, We’re looking for a great western, a great musical, a great thriller, a great romantic comedy, a great horror film, a great mystery, a great animated family film, a great hybrid animated live-action family film,” said Emmerich. The studio will even consider genres declared dead or unfashionable. “Suddenly a movie in these ‘dead’ genres came out and suddenly everybody started making them again. Any genre that’s ever worked in theaters before can work again because we haven’t changed that much. The stories are the same.”
Emmerich attributes the resurgence of musicals to a renaissance in Broadway theater. Musicals rose to popularity after the “talkies” in the 1920s and 1930s.
Back in 1984, there were only three networks. 9 of the top 10 series on air were dramas. The broadcast networks were convinced that comedy was dead. Then the NBC President of the time Grant Tinker proclaimed “Yeah, comedy’s dead until there’s a funny one.” In 1986 came The Cosby Show. Cosby led the 6-year bull run until 1992. Then the question became “Is drama dead?”
