Looking at the big picture

Through its broadcasting and entertainment divisions, Montreal-based Astral Communications is a major player in the business of Canadian programming, but unlike independent producers, the company does not earn income or fees through program development.

How do programming and distribution fit into the bigger picture at Astral? Astral Entertainment Group senior vice-president Stephen Greenberg explains: ‘Astral Communications is composed of a retail group, a broadcast group and an entertainment group made up of a distribution and programming component, video wholesaling and technical services. From an operations standpoint, ‘all the (entertainment) groups have a fair amount of interweaving’.

From the top down

Looking at the big picture, Greenberg says, ‘A project that we’re involved in – developing and packaging – is something that will go through our laboratory or our post-production facility, which will go through our own video wholesaling companies – from the top down. Everything we do in programming looks to every other source in the company. That’s the symmetry of things as they come down.’

And how does the independent producer fit in? ‘(Projects) come at us in different disguises,’ says David Patterson, vice-president program development and financing at aeg.

‘The source of the idea generation,’ he says, ‘is not something for which we’ve found any particular pattern. It could be something we’ve developed ourselves, something we’ve developed at the idea stage, or something more developed.

Types of involvement

‘Once we’ve decided there is something we can do to assist a program and to create the program inherent in such an idea,’ says Patterson, ‘then we become involved in a couple of different ways that can be defined.

‘Firstly, development financing. We’re willing to consider, and we have participated in, risk financing with partners where we believe the combination of our involvement and the other partner’s involvement stands a reasonable chance of bringing a product to production. Therefore, we look for other partners like ourselves to be involved.

‘We don’t tend to be in the highly speculative, early, early stages of idea development,’ says Patterson. ‘Ideas tend to be already at a certain stage in terms of attachments and in terms of evolution when they come to us. It’s kind of important I think. We are not in the Telefilm-style development business, the sogic-style, not even the fund-style development end of the business.

‘Let me put it this way,’ he continues, ‘there’s always something unique about the package, the project, the idea, or property. It may well bethat we get involved in a very early stagebecause it’s a Brian Moore novel that we believe in very strongly.’

Back on the home front, Canadian producers should consider a number of issues before approaching Astral, says Patterson.

‘There are certain producers we work with regularly who know precisely when to come to us and when not tobecause they’re familiar with our strengths and areas of influence,’ he says. ‘It could be a producer with strong European connections, but looking for a US component. Or, it may be the reverse. There are also those producers from a financial packaging point of view who need assistance with every aspect of the project.

‘So the classic example would be the producer who has developed a project to the point where there’s a significant first licence available in Canada, perhaps with a traditional broadcaster like the cbc or Radio-Canada.

‘We then look at it to see if it will be available to our own networks (in the Astral Broadcasting Group). This is a very important consideration for us, we’re involved in the programming business. We are then in a position to speak to what is known as the back-end rights in Canada, syndication or ancillary rights like home video.

‘So the producer should consider the following: the value (of his or her project) in the Canadian marketplace, its value as an international coproduction, value in international distribution, and value in the US marketplace from a licensing point of view. Those are the areas where we believe we can make a difference, and if the producer believes (the project) has one or more of those qualities, he or she should be speaking to us,’ says Patterson.

Distribution rights

Greenberg says some producers seek only to sell Canadian distribution rights to Astral, either through the company’s Montreal or Toronto offices, since Astral is the largest distributor of tv programs and home video in Canada. (American programs sold in Canada through Astral’s Entertainment Programming Services include The Simpsons, L.A. Law, Seinfeld and more).

‘We’re driven by the marketplace, but generalities only last until you have a screenplay, specificsa cast, the director,’ says Greenberg. ‘Our measuring stick is to ask: `Is this a project which makes sense in multiple marketplaces?’ ‘

A film which works well on pay-tv can earn up to $200,000 through licencing fees to both the French- and English-language services.

Patterson, cofounder of Montreal’s Filmline International and president of Cinexus/Famous Players in Toronto, joined Astral in the fall of ’92. His credits include Ford: The Man and the Machine; Barnum, the miniseries; Champagne Charlie, a Canada/France coproduction produced for the CTV Television Network; and Dracula – The Series, distributed in over 110 markets in the US and overseas. He is a past chair of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and a member of the board of directors of the Banff Television Festival.

Leading names

He is yet another example of Astral’s policy of filling top management positions with some of the leading names in the business: Paris-based Canadian coproduction pioneer Denis Heroux heads up Astral’s operations in Europe, and Andre Bureau, past crtc chairman, is now vice-chair and president of Astral and ceo of Astral Broadcasting Group.

The feature-length animated tv movie David Copperfield, broadcast recently on nbc and cbc and coproduced by Cine-Groupe, Montreal, is probably the paradigm of the type of thing Astral does best, says Patterson.

Language and societal differences make mounting a live-action coproduction a major challenge. But animation is a tough sell, too, because the social role of animation in Europe and North America is vastly different.

Adult themes

‘In North America, it’s a Saturday morning children’s medium first and foremost; in Europe, it’s an adult medium, a much more serious medium with adult themes and situations,’ says Patterson.

Because Canada represents less than 5% of the world market, Greenberg says Canadians need to work with foreign and domestic partners for projects to become realities.

Greenberg says Astral has had a long history of trying to find the right partner, initially in France where the company first announced deals with Hachette, and later, with publicly owned sfp.

‘A kind of a warehousing/first-look arrangement,’ the deal with sfp didn’t go anywhere, partly because a ‘bloated sfp’ had been traumatized by the privatization of the tv production industry in France, says Greenberg.

Astral-Europa, a venture between Astral and Denis Heroux, followed next, ‘because Denis and (Astral) had a common point of view of projects and how to put them together. Denis is a special kind of person who long ago put his roots down in France,’ says Greenberg.

Astral cut its teeth on French-track coproductions. But new French quotas on English-language production mean ‘it’s not as simple doing a coproduction with France as it was a couple of years ago,’ says Greenberg.

Another Astral venture, a complicated arrangement with Warner Bros. International Television (headed by president Michael J. Solomon), was also shut down when the partners failed to reach a compromise.

The deal was supposed to combine Warner’s major creative strengths with Astral’s coproduction contacts. But money, disputed territories, and some say, world-class egos, got in the way.

Competing

‘By the end of the day, we realized we were competing with Warner and Lorimar Television,’ says Greenberg.

Not surprisingly, the Europeans didn’t want to give Warner/Astral the European distribution of rights to potential joint projects.

Subsequently, says Greenberg, Astral found itself being shut out on both sides ‘like the meat in the middle of the sandwich.’ In the US, Astral did not have access to Warner’s creative pool, and in Europe, where broadcasters had preferred dealing directly with Astral, Warner insisted on ownership of European distribution rights.

Says Greenberg: ‘We found for the eight months of this venture we ended up in real gridlock, spending an enormous amount of time and effort. The deal cost Astral lots of money. And projects with Warner, which were stymied because of back-end disagreements, are now proceeding without Warner participation.’

‘Business as usual’

Consequently, Astral and Heroux returned to ‘business as usual’ and have signed a new agreement for Europe. This has led to the formation of a new company, Astral Programming Enterprises.

Astral’s principal European broadcaster partners are TF1 (and with ctl-controlled Metropole 6) in France, RTL-Plus, Europool and Telepool in Germany, and rai in Italy.

Astral codevelops tv movies with the USA Network, with an eye to European distribution or coproduction, and has an ongoing relationship with Toronto-based Baton.

The Astral/Baton arrangement seeks to develop joint programming and a common search for subsequent financing.

mows for usa have generally come in at the $2 million range, with usa picking up more than half the tab. One such project is Breakthrough, a tv movie coproduced by Montreal’s Nicolas Clermont of Filmline International and Screen Partners in the u.k.

Astral is now exploring a similar relationship with Los Angeles-based Hearst Entertainment. In the past 15 months, Astral and Hearst have combined on four films, including Silent Witness starring Mia Korf, Amir Jamal Williams and Clark Johnson, and Hush Little Baby, produced by Julian Marks of Power Pictures, Toronto.

Astral was also active in the development and packaging of Crosswinds, a thriller from producer Justine Heroux of Montreal’s Cinevideo Plus.

Another thriller with Astral financing is Beyond Suspicion, shot in Vancouver by producer James Shavick for Saban, an l.a.-based distributor.

Most recently, Astral signed an agreement with two l.a.-based development executives, Paulo de Oliveira and Craig Roessler. Greenberg says the deal will help his company ‘step up its activities in developing television programming for the Canadian, US and European markets.’

Earlier associations

Roessler’s earlier associations were with Guber-Peters Entertainment and Twentieth Century Fox Television; de Oliveira has associations with The Disney Channel, Home Box Office and Norman Lear’s Embassy Productions.

As for international programming trends, Patterson says: ‘In television, long-form (films) is probably the area of greatest fertility at the moment because you are dealing with programs that have a beginning, a middle and an end which doesn’t extend over a period of 12 to 18 months.

‘There are also the kinds of pictures which don’t work well in Europe (for example, the typical US mow based on societal issues). Action-adventure works very well, suspense thrillers, erotic thrillers, mysteries all work well, and they also tend to work well in the States, because by and large, the American broadcasters can’t afford to produce them, especially the action-adventure genre. Consequently, there’s room for partnership, even in the American mind.’

Patterson says it’s becoming easier to cut a deal with American cable networks such as The LifeTime Network, usa and others as they begin to share content-control with other producers in Canada and Europe.

‘While we’re involved in a financial return,’ he says, ‘I want to be careful and say we have a very broad definition of financial return, because of the nature of the company. This definition includes a project’s library value and ongoing value for years and years. Not every company, perhaps hardly any company in this country, is in a position to take that broad a definition of commercial viability and back it with financial participation.’

Astral’s broadcast holdings include The Movie Network, the pay-per-view service Viewer’s Choice Canada, Family Channel, Super Ecran and Canal Famille. The company is also backing four new specialty licence applications – The Classics Channel, Arts et Divertissements, The Cartoon Network/Le Reseau Cartoon and a French-track pay-per view service. vcc is commited to investing $3 million over three years in the development of Canadian movies.

Astral Communications chairman, president and ceo Harold Greenberg reported in December revenues of $478.5 million for the 18-month period ending Aug. 31, 1993. Greenberg says 1993 was the best year in the company’s history.