So who needs a core audience? Just look at Skiffy.
They
have a core audience and they are getting the ratings they need. The fact that you aren't a
part of that audience, and that the material they air is not
your idea of science fiction means nothing to them.
Because the recent and surprising (to Warner Brothers) success of the B5 DVDs may have the power to change minds at The WB?
There is no "Warner Bros." and DVD sales are not going to impress The WB. Look, you sell 200,000 copies of a DVD boxed set, and you've got a solid hit. Attract 200,000 households to watch your TV show and you're headed for cancellation. You basically need a couple of million viewers to attract enough advertising to make a profit on broadcast television - at a minimum. (You need 15 to 20 million to be considered a big hit.) But you
don't need millions of people to show up at U.S. theaters to make a profit on a modestly budgeted SF film. At $7 or $8 a ticket domestic, plus overseas, plus ancillary income from home video, pay per view, premium cable, broadcast TV and cable and broadcast reruns, you can reach break even and get into the black a lot faster and with a lot fewer warm bodies with a feature film than with a TV series.
So, again, if The WB does not see
B5 as attracting millions of the kind of viewers they are already delivering to their advertisers, they ain't going to be interested in the show just because it sells well on DVD. Look at it this way: no matter how well
The Man Show does in the ratings, there is no way in Hell that either Oxygen or Lifetime are going to pick up that series from Comdey Central.
It wouldn't matter in either case if the two networks and the studio that produces
The Man Show were all owned by the same parent company. When a show doesn't work for your audience, it doesn't work.
Chris:
No, there almost certainly
isn't a script at this stage. The normal progression is pitch meeting, treatment (for which the studio pays), first script draft (for which the studio also pays.) But before you go into pitch your story or write a treatment, you have to have an idea of what your story
is, and what it
isn't - which could provide one reason for checking to see if someone like Jason Carter might be interested.
You mean like "Dune"?
No.
Not talking about
The Lord of the Rings, either. Those are
adaptations of existing works, but they do actually make my point. Neither of them was amenable to being adapted into a movie of approximately two hours length. The nature of the stories is such that they
cannot be told that way - not in any way that is at all faithful to the originals. That's why both Lynch's
Dune and Bakshi's
LotR were failures, commercially and artisitically. They sucked becuase nobody involved with them was smart enough to realize that they couldn't be done the way they were doing them.
In the case of the next
B5 project(s), if they come to JMS with one idea (mini-series) he will select a storyline from the known events of the story timeline that would work at mini-series length. If they want a feature film he's going to pick a
different storyline that will fit that format. The studio is
not going to come to him and say, "Let's do the Teep War. It will either be a mini series or a feature film, we haven't decided yet." If they did, JMS would either say, "No, that story can't be padded out to mini-series length" or "No, that story
has to be a mini-series, I
can't do that in two hours, if you want a feature film, it will have to be X".
(Except that we know that he wrote a treatment for a Teep War feature film back in 1998, so I doubt he'd consider that as a mini.)
Yes, you're the only one.
Yeah... Keep telling yourself that. :devil:
Regards,
Joe
