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Originally published in Current, Aug. 19, 2002
Risks—artistic and other
Maybe because there are never wacky camera angles on programs that come out of Boston, some might claim that ’GBH is not a risk-taker. But back in 1980, for instance, the series World re-enacted the punishment of a Saudi woman in "Death of a Princess." She committed adultery?
Yes, and I believe at the behest of her uncle she was shot and her lover was beheaded.
We told it as the story of a journalist trying to get at that story. At its heart was the culture that supported this punishment and particularly Saudi male power.
It was co-produced with a British producer, Anthony Thomas; I think for Central Television.
What happened when the Saudis learned about the program?
It ran in Britain two or three weeks before it ran in the United States. When it ran in Britain, the Saudis broke off diplomatic relations with Britain. PBS’s plan to broadcast it became known to the U.S. government, and the State Department applied pressure to PBS not to run the program.
Mobil Oil Co., which was underwriting Masterpiece Theatre, viewed the program with displeasure and took out an ad in the New York Times condemning public television for what it regarded as an outrageous offense to an important American interest.
This was of course, right around the time that the oil crisis was in full swing, as I recall, so there was a lot of apprehension. We broadcast it anyway.
Did Mobil executives get over it as quickly as they were inflamed?
I suppose so. You could take the view that Mobil went public so that the Saudis would know that they had done the right thing. They were themselves sophisticated enough to realize that however bad it might be to broadcast it, it would be worse to have it pulled as a result of pressure—that’s just wild speculation.
We may have worried that Mobil would do something in retaliation, but in fact they never did anything that I’m aware of. We were prepared to accept whatever consequences came from broadcasting it. Even to the extent that I believe we booked transponder time to distribute it ourselves in the event that PBS turned timorous.
One effect of the efforts by the State Department, the Saudis and Mobil was to make the controversy a national story. So when it was broadcast, it got a huge audience—four or five times the size it would have gotten if nobody had said anything.
What made the show worthy of that risk to you?
What was the risk?
Being compromised by government interference.
No, the risk was that public television would in some way be punished for publishing the truth.
If we had yielded to the pressure and not told the story when it was true, what would be the place of public television? What would remain for it to do? It would be an after-school service.
There was no possibility of losing in this situation. Either we would broadcast and confirm the value of public television, or we would learn early on that public television wasn’t a place you wanted to be.
That’s certainly different from the artistic risk-taking that producers like to talk about. It must have qualified as risky to undertake Vietnam: A Television History, the 13-hour series that ’GBH did when the wounds of the war were so raw. It aired in 1983. How much resistance did you encounter to entering this minefield of a topic?
The risk was in the idea. The prevailing opinion was that Americans didn’t want to hear about it. You could say the risk we took was that we would raise this money and expend this effort and nobody would care. That was the risk.
It turned out that people actually were interested in the topic and were ready to think about it and talk about it.
As for financial risk-taking, does ’GBH have formal rules about how much of a production’s budget must be nailed down before you start to work? Have those rules changed over the years?
We tend not to be a big financial risk-taker. We tend to know how we’re going to cover our risks. We may not want to go at risk, but we know if we do, and we’re caught out, then we know how we’re going to make good.
If we raise 80 or 90 percent of the budget, and we think we have a real prospect of raising the balance, and that if we delay it may become more costly or we may lose opportunities we now have to do it, we’ll say that we guarantee it. We have a reserve from which we can earmark 10 percent, 20 percent, sometimes more, of a budget, so that we can commit to production earlier. We still try to raise the money to close the gap, but if we can’t, we’ll draw upon that reserve.
In that sense, we don’t enter into production until we know where 100 percent of the funding could come from.
We just heard from your colleague Lance Ozier that two-thirds of WGBH’s corporate underwriting is up in the air; contracts have expired. What do you expect to happen to your production slate as a result of the downturn in the economy?
Every year, series come up for renewals and underwriters drop out.
So it’s just a period of uncertainty?
Yes. As far as I’m aware, there’s no great peril to our ongoing series.
There is one exception to this, which is ironic: We lost eBay as an underwriter for Antiques Roadshow. That’s a $2 million gap. The way the funding was sequenced, eBay has dropped out of the year that is currently in production. We will reduce our deliverables to the minimum—I think 16 episodes instead of 24. We’ll carry eight over to next year, and produce eight more next year, unless we get additional funding.
I say it’s ironic because the program with the most severe funding issues is the one that PBS has no money in, and it’s not interested in putting money in. Why should it be difficult to get funding for Antiques Roadshow? I don’t have an answer to that, but apparently it is.
Is the recession affecting the limited series you’ve got under way now?
The lifecycle of a program from idea to broadcast is usually five to seven years. It’s a little hard to locate the effect of today’s economy on processes like that. Obviously in the long run, a prolonged recession and business downturn has an effect on a whole battery of things that support public television—from viewer generosity to foundation portfolios to corporation advertising budgets.
Introduction
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