People change. Animals don’t.

That is the simple formula to keep in mind if you are in the business of selling documentaries on the international market. As documentary directors, producers, commissioning editors and funders gather in Toronto to discuss ‘hot docs’ this month, lukewarm or simmering docs – the films which continue to sell, year in, year out in steady, but unspectacular fashion – may attract less attention, but they contribute to the bottom line.

In a selective survey, Canadian producers, distributors and broadcasters confirmed the oft-cited maxim about which documentary films have legs: two aren’t enough, four are best, preferably with sharp claws. Animals rule, and outlast humans in most competitions for screen time in tv documentary slots. Science, particularly when it relates to flying machines or guys digging up old bones, is also always popular.

The joke that no one has actually shot a frame of new wildlife footage in years – everyone is simply recutting existing footage – doesn’t alter the reality that documentary viewers around the world usually don’t want to see films about things that happened to humans 10, 20 or 30 years ago (unless there are explosions or pyramids involved). They’d rather watch Eisenhower-era llamas.

Although there have been significant developments in human relations, political alignments, demography and the length of sideburns in the past few decades, animals have stubbornly resisted trends, thereby contributing to their seemingly endless rerun potential. There’s little chance, after all, that the mating patterns of the hyena have altered significantly since 1971 – or at least not so we’d notice.

Leslie Elliott, sales executive for b.c.-based T.H.A. Media, seconds that notion. ‘People are always asking us for wildlife titles, which we don’t have.’ Elliott works with a very small collection of Canadian titles; their bread and butter is material from such offshore suppliers as Channel 4 and cte ‘who are constantly churning out new stuff.’

Appetite for the ‘new’

For many, the appetite for the new has intensified in the last few years, making it even less likely that older documentaries will continue to sell.

Jean Vezina and his colleagues at The Multimedia Group of Canada label the current environment as extremely competitive, and focus almost exclusively on new material. Good current affairs-type programs have a life of two years – maybe. However, documentaries shot in a way that won’t date them quickly (they cite the Turning Sixteen series as an example) stand to have a longer shelf life.

Although the rise of specialty channels worldwide has seen archives open up to satisfy demand, the huge volume of new documentary production feeds broadcaster needs with product that can be more easily promoted (e.g. one British participant at the Banff Television Festival last year described his domestic competition: more than 1,000 documentaries compete in the annual u.k. equivalent of the Gemini Awards).

Spanning demographics

Sarah Irwin, manager of marketing and sales for CBC International Sales, says, ‘there seems to be little doubt that wildlife episodes of The Nature of Things are hands-down winners,’ with the top dog, so to speak, being the 1985 production Return of the Sea Otter, a half-hour program that is so popular it is used regularly by cbc to represent and promote the series.

cbc cites the fact that this and other such titles (like Crying Wolf, produced in 1990 and updated last year) ‘span audience demographics (very few programs appeal to everyone!) and because they are so beautifully produced they inform in the best way – you’re learning while you’re being entertained.’

‘Canadian’ a tough sell

Paul Black of Great North Releasing in Edmonton is finding the going tough for Canadian documentaries. The reality for him, as a seller, is that ‘overseas broadcasters are growing up (even small, local broadcasters are producing their own mini-docs) and don’t want to see Canadian stories. I need something that has international flair – I’m very picky.’

On the social issue side, he names Cristine Richey’s acclaimed doc In the Gutter and Other Good Places (about homeless Calgary men who make their living scouring dumpsters for refundable bottles and cans) as a film which keeps selling. The reason: ‘You wouldn’t really know it’s set in Calgaryevery country has poor people, and these characters are so eccentric and unique it works.’

Two-legged winners

Some succeed without heading off to the wilderness, Toronto’s Rhombus Media being one of the most notable examples. Specializing in music-related programs, Rhombus has carved out a spot for itself that has broadcasters waiting for the next installment in, for example, the company’s decade-long output of films on 20th century composers.

But Sheena Macdonald, president of Rhombus International, underlines that the documentaries are ‘good stories, good dramas that really humanize the composers.’

Even Rhombus, however, hasn’t resisted the siren song of the wild – whales, to be precise. One of its stalwarts is Whalesong, a decade-old production that combines nature and music. ‘The oddity of a very formal concert, held in a whale aquarium is a crazy idea that works – Europeans love it.’

Quest for evergreen

With a huge backlist, the National Film Board can fill most requests, but the size of its wildlife collection — anchored by the extraordinary work of Bill Mason – is nowhere near as large as some believe.

Joanne Leduc, director of the nfb’s International Division, mentions older anthropological documentaries (‘films which capture irreplaceable glimpses of now-lost or dramatically changed cultures – like the 25-year-old Netsilik Eskimo series, one episode of which just sold to South African television’) and films such as The Lost Pharaoh: The Search for Akhenaten (a 1980 documentary which sold twice to Discovery in the u.s. and twice to a&e) as hard workers for her and her sales team.

Steady science sellers don’t have to deal with spectacular subjects: ‘1957’s Honey Bees and Pollination – buyers in France tell us nothing else as valuable on the subject has been produced since.’

Of course producers hope to come up with some new ‘evergreen’ titles that will bring them returns for many years to come.

Tom Perlmutter, senior producer for Barna-Alper Productions in Toronto says his company has only had a corporate presence at mip-tv for several years, and so they are only now poised for major sales efforts on the international scene.

But in planning The Body: Inside Stories, a 26-part series of human science documentaries, which they produce for Discovery Canada, they’ve kept their eye on a quality that adds to potential longevity: solid storytelling. ‘The crucial message we’re getting from the marketplace is they want strong storieswhat sells the science is stories.’

Another producer expressed bitterness over what he sees as the limited perspective of television programmers. ‘There are great documentaries, films that stand repeat viewing, that just aren’t seen on tv anymore, I suppose because broadcasters think people won’t watch them. I can watch a (Frederick) Wiseman film or a (Donald) Brittain film several times over, and not be put off because they are now somehow dated. But perhaps that is precisely because their origins are cinematic. They weren’t conceived of simply as disposable television.’

Tragedy of the one-off

Les Harris, whose Toronto company Canamedia has been a fixture on the international front for years, says the most successful series for him (‘it has sold continuously since I made it 20 years ago’) is a three-part history of aviation, Chabot Solo, told through the eyes of the oldest aviator in the world. 444 Days to Freedom, his film on the Iran hostage crisis of 1980, has had recent requests because of the hostage-taking in Peru.

But he decries the fate of standalones: ‘It’s becoming more and more difficult to make one-off documentaries today, the money is just not there – one has to start looking at series. It’s a bloody tragedy.’

But even for purveyors of staid, traditional series about animals, there may be ominous, sexual clouds on the horizon. Rhombus’ Macdonald notices, as she flips channels in her hotel room on international sales trips, that ‘there’s a lot more sex in wildlife films now.’ So monkeys and humans are equal: until recent years, neither were copulating on tv.

(gerry flahive is a documentary producer at the National Film Board of Canada in Toronto.)