David W. Zucker and Rola Bauer embraced the chaos at a Monte-Carlo TV Festival session, Monday. The duo did a keynote sit-down with Deadline entitled: ‘Embracing the Chaos: TV Thru The Multiverse’. Zucker is Chief Creative Officer, Scott Free, and Rola Bauer, a well-known face in international TV, is now an exec producing Amazon MGM Studios projects.
Inevitably in a session about industry tumult, AI came up. “I think most people in Hollywood have their heads stuck in the sand right now,” Zucker said. “There is so much fear.”
He added: “I talked to one writer who was certain that he had gotten AI notes from an executive. And I talked to one other exec, and one other agent who said it’s hard to ingest new scripts now because [they] don’t know where they came from.”
Zucker and Bauer worked together on Pillars Of The Earth and are now partnering on Pompeii: A Day Of Fire. It is written by Michael Hirst (Vikings). “He digs really deep into the research,” Bauer said of the scribe. “He gravitated to the story and said: ‘I want it to feel visceral. I want you, when you’re watching it, to be very worried about what’s happening to our Earth.’” The bible and first scripts are being worked up.
Talk turned to co-production. At the NEM TV market in Dubrovnik last week, Frank Spotnitz suggested co-pros are getting harder because of the rise of nationalism. “If [a project] is French, it’s got to be really French. If it’s British, it’s got to be really British. It’s very hard to find something editorially that makes buyers from two different countries feel confident,” he said.
Bauer, who is a veteran of the co-pro scene, said the model can still work. “If you have the right editorially minded partners and distributors, then you will fulfill their needs, because they need events.” Finding the stories and IP that have cultural relevance across borders, and then attaching the right writers, directors and team is the challenge, she said: “That’s what our responsibility is as producers.”
As the conversation moved to streamer trends, Zucker said the SVODs are now looking for traditional fare. “We’re seeing a pivot by all the streamers to go back toward what the network television stations used to do quite successfully, which was traditional franchise drama,” he said.
“You see a show like The Pitt, and it can be done in Los Angeles on a particular kind of budget and on a reliable schedule. Why? Because [exec producer] John Wells knows how to make that show. And I’d say the best news of that is, if we get to make more of those, maybe we’ll begin to demonstrate to the streamers that there is another way.”