A Word from Leo

IN DEFENSE OF PASSION

By Leo Eaton
December, 2004

I’ve been in this crazy television business a terrifyingly long time. It doesn’t seem so far back when I was a fresh-faced third assistant director, chasing Roger Moore out of his dressing-room and down to the set on The Saint. Then, just two years later, I had my first directing gig for Gerry (of Thunderbirds fame) Anderson’s ‘supermarionation’ series’ Captain Scarlet & The Mysterons and Joe 90. It’s funny how many of these British series from the 1960s have now achieved cult status around the world. We didn’t think we were making television history. We were simply doing what we loved.

WHY IS PASSION A FOUR-LETTER WORD?

More than 35 years later, the majority of us who make documentary television programs for broadcast are doing what we love - but it’s not always wise to admit it. The TV climate is so different today. The channel executives who control our destiny tend to frown at the idea of the passionate filmmaker. In a modern multi-channel cable-TV universe, the philosophy of ‘stack them high & sell them cheap’ leaves little room for a labor of love. In the UK, execs often sneer at those of us who make films as a ‘lifestyle choice’ – in other words we make our living doing what we love. We’re told that lifestyle choices have no place in the cut-throat competitive environment of today’s television industry. Yet if we don’t love what we do, why spend a lifetime doing it? I’m glad to say I made such a lifestyle choice 40 years ago and it still provides two square meals a day and a roof over my head, along with some of the most exciting adventures any lifetime can offer.

THE NETWORK EXEC

Of course those of us who survive the winds of change that blow so frequently through our industry learn some tricks along the way, like tacking with those winds, balancing the conflicting demands of passion, profit, artistry, broadcaster and audience. The best network executives and commissioning editors are well aware that successful programs occur when a filmmaker’s talent and passion is properly harnessed to the needs of a particular network or audience. Like a good book editor with a talented writer, a good exec can prune and focus, cajole and critique, improving even the best producer’s work.

But where are these good execs? Unfortunately too many have become little more than speed bumps, stop signs and diversions on the road from concept to finished program. Bless them, it’s not their fault (I’ve been one myself). Television—especially factual cable TV—is the goddess who eats her young. Many execs have limited program-making experience yet directly manage up to 100 hours of television with tight schedules, tight budgets, inexperienced producers (needing greater hand-holding) and bosses who constantly bully them to bring in that new break-through hit, the one show that’ll allow them to claim the honor of being ‘the fastest growing cable network in the US’—for a while. Everyone is afraid, that ratings won’t hold up, that advertisers will pull out if audience demographics aren’t exactly right, that they’ll somehow miss the next ‘big thing’.

THE NEXT ‘BIG THING’

Every few months a new buzz-word sweeps through our industry like a pandemic. At one nature channel, the mot-de-jour is charismatic mega-fauna, conjuring up visions of dancing polar bears and wisecracking gorillas. Others seek an alchemical mixture of drama & documentary that’s now termed ‘hybrid reality’, the perfect combination of charismatic characters and compelling stories to become the next Dog, the Bounty Hunter, the Apprentice or whatever reality show is currently creating water-cooler buzz. Of course old lags recall what young execs forget, that there’s nothing new under the sun and the next big thing has been around several times already. Take hybrid reality! Hands up those who’ve seen Flaherty’s silent masterpiece Nanook of the North or his later Man of Aran!

Break-through shows are serendipity, seldom planned. Who could anticipate the success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? When Martin & Chris Kratt and I first created Kratts’ Creatures, we didn’t think we were creating a host-active wildlife programming style that would lead to shows like Crocodile Hunter, The Jeff Corwin Experience and MTV’s Wild Boyz. We were just doing what we loved to do.

Networks say they want groundbreaking shows but no-one can predict a hit until after the event, so it takes courage to commission outside the box. Most play it safe. And without a huge hit, a producer’s success on one channel seldom translates elsewhere since each cablenet inhabits its own unique universe. As few execs stick around long, the network game of musical chairs also means producers seldom pitch to the same exec. When execs change, it’s often back to Square One.

Break-through shows aren’t planned by audience research and development committees; they happen because people with passion for their ideas are willing to walk through fire to get them on the screen. But that gets old after a while. If passion & creativity isn’t fed and watered, it wastes away. Little wonder we lose much of our most original talent, those unwilling or unable to fit within the formulas crafted by audience research.

STRIP-MINING SUBJECT AREAS

A senior cable exec once told me that the difference between a great show and an ‘okay’ show was a pain-in-the-ass producer (for ‘pain-in-the-ass’ read ‘passionate and committed’). Since his audience couldn’t tell the difference, why should he put up with the hassle when there were so many others who could do an ‘okay’ job? But I believe ‘good enough’ is not good enough and audiences do know the difference, if only on a subconscious level. It’s one more reason why TV audiences are eroding.

TV has become video muzac, something to watch with half one’s mind while doing something else. Factual programming is now designed to appeal to the short attention span of such an audience. But is this a good thing? In the short run it may keep advertisers happy and network execs and producers gainfully employed but in the long run we’re killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The mass-production needed to slake cable’s ravenous appetites is strip-mining so many different subject areas – history, science & forensics, archeology, travel and many more. Anyone who has walked a strip-mined mountainside knows how the land is sucked dry; there’s nothing left. That’s what an oversaturation of simplistic documentary and increasingly grotesque reality does to our industry.

PASSIONATE PRODUCER Vs NETWORK EXEC – CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

It’s probably too late to reverse the decline in television as we know it today; the disease has spread too far. But network and cablenet are simply pipelines for distribution. Whatever may evolve in coming years as the primary means of content distribution, producers will still provide the passion while gatekeepers—the execs—will still control the flow. Can documentary and factual programming recover the high ground?

Producers who are content to simply mass-produce programming do themselves and their industry no favor, simply accelerating its decline, while networks and cablenets (or their descendants) who insist on micromanaging producers to fit rigid formats eventually poison their own food supply. The best original producers are either ignored or—even worse—co-opted to deliver variations on a theme, remakes of copy-cat formats until all passion and originality has withered.

Today our industry rewards vertical integration and corporate conglomeration. Individual producers & small production companies coalesce into larger production companies which in turn coalesce into media powerhouses. In this world where predatory capitalism runs amok, success in the marketplace is the only measure of value. But program making is passionate art rather than industrial process and the tug-o-war between artists and those who commission and profit from them is as old as history. I’m sure the cave painters at Lascaux in France twenty thousand years ago caught hell from their execs (the tribal priests) whenever the totem animals they painted so far underground didn’t attract enough real animals to feed the tribe. Substitute ‘enough HHs in the demographic to sell advertised product’ and it sounds just like TV. A dozen or so millennia later, Michelangelo had some trouble with his commissioning exec (Pope Julius ll) during a ceiling renovation in the Sistine Chapel, a Renaissance version of HGTV’s Divine Design.

SO! WHAT’S NEXT?

In the decades I’ve been at this game, I’ve seen the pendulum of control swing backwards & forwards between the two ends of the TV spectrum, between producers and distributors/marketers. When it swings too far to one extreme, our industry and our craft (although I prefer to call it art) suffers. Right now the factual gatekeepers have most of the power and—with some notable exceptions—mass production, exploitation and mediocrity rule. Not that we producers are any angels when we have the power, forgetful of audience realities, demanding unnecessarily high budgets and insisting on telling stories in a dozen hours that would be better told in two. But each side needs the other, working at their best game. Television is at its best when the pendulum is in the center, power balanced between those with the passion to create and execs who don’t underestimate their audience, micromanage their producers or insist on mass-producing programs to emulate the success of the last ‘big thing.’ So let’s hear it for producers—and execs—with the passion and courage to make a lifestyle choice. Together they can save the world—or at least our industry. And who knows, some of what we’re producing today may have achieved cult status 35 years from now.