PBS’ Future Sees Starz
Ah, the movie package deal. When I was growing up my brain was irreversibly scarred by one such arrangement. Channel 44, a local independent, had made a deal with American International Pictures for the broadcast rights to most of their back catalog. Every movie Roger Corman ever made was was in that package (BUCKET OF BLOOD! TEENAGE CAVEMAN! THE TERROR! LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS!) along with ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES, THE KILLER SHREWS et. al. For years I marveled at their strange film buying tastes. Eventually I realized that stations will want to buy one movie, say LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, and the distributor will insist on throwing in all the other crap they can at fire-sale prices.
HBO and Showtime and Starz operate in a similar manner. Keep an eye on Showtime and see how much of their library is Paramount films. Even HDNet movies has one of these deals, which is why so much of their 25-years-out-of-date catalog has the Orion logo on it.
Therefore, the new KCET Saturday Night Movie seems very familiar to me. KCET is the local PBS station and, as Daily Variety reports:
…(it will) feature classic titles… Pics will air unedited and with just one interruption, with (Martin) Sheen providing information and historical perspective on the pics.
Series will bow May 5 with “East of Eden,” followed by “Amadeus” (May 12), “The Grifters” (May 19), “Chariots of Fire” (May 26), “Blade Runner” (June 2), “Body Heat” (June 9), “Cool Hand Luke” (June 16), “Coma” (June 23), and “Superman” (June 30). KCET has also snagged rights to air “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Strangers on a Train” and “Bonnie and Clyde.”
If you don’t want to look it up, they’re all Warner Brothers pictures. This is your chance to see COMA and BODY HEAT on PBS! And this is PBS’s chance to become TCM. Only difference is there will be a half-hour fundraising break in the middle of the show. Which would mean, by the way, that AMADEUS would end some time around 2:00am.
Why is WB even bothering with PBS? Don’t they have a network?
Pic package stems from a deal between KCET and Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution. It reps the latest innovative pact struck by WBDCD topper Eric Frankel, who’s had to come up with new ways to sell the studio’s pics in the wake of the broadcast nets largely abandoning features.
It’s cheaper to make your own reality show than it is to buy the rights to a movie. At least from WB. I bet that Corman would have undercut them in a heartbeat.