gave pitchers the floor

Some Symposium ’94 workshops may have been like one hand clapping, but Sunday morning’s Meet the Channel Panel was made up of new specialty channel executives giving clear instructions to the sro production industry crowd:

Tailor your proposals to fit the themes of each channel; don’t panic because you’re trying to meet a Jan. 1, 1995 launch schedule; and please, please stop calling us in offices that are under construction.

Dubbed ‘the morning after the night before session’ by moderator Heather Marshall, cbc’s manager of program contracts and development for in-house production, the 10 a.m. forum consisted of 90 minutes of information from specialty channel execs and a half-hour of pitches from the audience.

At the head table were Barbara Barde, vice-president, programming at Lifestyle Television; Paul Gratton, station manager at Bravo!; Trina McQueen, president and general manager of The Discovery Channel; Janice Platt, vice-president of programming for Life Network (formerly YOU: Your Channel); Pierre Roy, president and ceo of Premier Choix:tvec (operator of Arts et Divertissement); Lisa de Wilde, president of Moviepix; and Phyllis Yaffe, president and ceo of Showcase.

Panelists spoke out against producers blanketing the channels with proposals that don’t reflect the themes of the individual services.

All specialty channels are not created equal, said Bravo!’s Gratton. Simply changing the addressee on the cover letter and sending a package to every service could do more harm than good, he warned.

‘We are receiving so many pitches that are inappropriate, and it’s really a sort of a black mark (against the proposer) when we get them,’ said Gratton.

Likewise, McQueen reinforced that Discovery, like the other channels, would be ‘pig-headed, bloody-minded, and rigorously insufferable about the themes.’

Panelists reassured producers that proposals will be examined, accepted, and produced long after the January ’95 launch date, and requested that they please fax or write but not call the offices, which are in states of organized chaos.

The morning’s highlight came with the pitches, as presenters struggled to detail their projects in five minutes or less in front of an audience of peers.

One or two calmly-presented and focused presentations met with favorable responses, but overall, the pitches left something to be desired, Gratton told Playback following the session.

‘When you say, `What is the series?’ and they say `It could be this or it could be that,’ that’s a sure sign you’re talking to someone who hasn’t done this often,’ he says.

But, he adds, the Symposium pitch format is awkward and the time allowed too short for a full presentation.

He was entertained by one would-be producer who sang Pavarotti to illustrate how his show of short clips about ‘average people’ imitating the rich and famous might work.