Any news on Cawley's Buck Rogers and Wild Wild West remakes?

[Captain Robert April]

^ Them too.

[Maurice]

You need up-front capital investment to make the show. Therein lies the trick. Sponsors generally pay to have the advertising alongside a program. They don't usually pay up-front so you can make it.

[stonester1]

Gotta wonder if the above poster speaks of the pompatus of love....

[Captain Robert April]

He's a joker, he's a smoker, he's a midnight toker...

[chardman]

Maurice wrote:

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You need up-front capital investment to make the show. Therein lies the trick. Sponsors generally pay to have the advertising alongside a program. They don't usually pay up-front so you can make it.

They do when it comes to daytime broadcast television. Virtually every program aired during the daytime, be it a talk show, a game show, or a soap opera, declares at some point: "The following companies or individuals have provided production assistance (and/or prizes), in exchange for the following promotional consideration" which is followed by a flurry of very short bundled ads. In other words, these folks collectively paid most or all of a show's production costs up front, with the understanding that they'd all get these brief bundled advertisements in return. Ads that are actually a part of the show, and will air every time this episode airs, independent of what the network or local broadcaster would normally charge for the equivalent commercial time.

[Maurice]

Daytime TV isn't a business I know as well as some other parts of the TV business, but the quote you post doesn't say anything about paying up-front for the production. Prizes are provided when someone wins, not before the show is made. Production assistance sounds like providing prizes to show on the set, items to appear in the production, etc., not up-front capital investment to build sets, hire crew, etc. Please feel free to educate me if you have some references to how this works that I'm unaware of.

[Maurice]

Captain Robert April wrote:

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He's a joker, he's a smoker, he's a midnight toker...

You guys are about 38 years late. Where humor is concerned, better never than late.

BTW, the "Maurice" in that song is a reference to the song "Enter Maurice" on an even earlier album.

[chardman]

Production assistance sounds like providing prizes to show on the set, items to appear in the production, etc., not up-front capital investment to build sets, hire crew, etc. Please feel free to educate me if you have some references to how this works that I'm unaware of.

No, "Production Assistance" sounds like they provide assistance in the production itself, which is exactly what it usually refers to. I wish I could provide some documentation to back this up. but this is one of those things that the industry doesn't like to share, and tends to be a bit hush-hush about. (I know about it because of a friend who used to work for Tribune Broadcasting, which is one of the nation's leading syndicators).

Some of the ins and outs of it can be found in the Promotional Consideration Rule of the FCC (Sections 508/908). You might be able to find this online, though I just tried a quick search, and came up dry. (The FCC online document database and search engine really SUCKS!) I know a pdf of it is available somewhere online (or at least used to be) because I used to have a copy of it which I know I downloaded from a .gov website of some kind.

Anyhow...

The kind of bundled advertising used by daytime broadcast shows often pays for most all of the production costs of a show, entirely up front. In the case of syndicated shows (and syndication is still very prevalent in daytime TV) this permits the producers of a show to sell their show to broadcasters at little or no cost, thereby assuring wide market coverage, not only for their show, but for the sponsors who paid for the bundled advertising within it. The bigger the market distribution, the more the bundled "Production Assistance ads" are worth. And because these ads are contained in the body of the program itself, it doesn't use up any of the usual ad breaks for local broadcasters to exploit.

I mean, you don't think that most of those syndicated daytime talk shows are on the air because they're all that popular, do you? They're on the air because they're dirt cheap to local broadcasters, and even though they don't command very good ad rate prices for a broadcaster to exploit, they're so cheap that those smaller ad rates often generate much higher overall profits for the broadcasters than the pricey syndicated reruns of more popular network shows like "Friends" or "Everybody Loves Raymond". Heck, even older syndicated mainstays like "Afl" and "Facts of Life" are still pretty expensive compared to ultra inexpensive fare like "Judge Joe Brown" and "The Wendy Williams Show".

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Maurice wrote:

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You guys are about 38 years late. Where humor is concerned, better never than late.

BTW, the "Maurice" in that song is a reference to the song "Enter Maurice" on an even earlier album.

Great. Now if we could explain "pompatus..."

[GSchnitzer]

Dennis wrote:

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Great. Now if we could explain "pompatus..."

Pompatus would appear to be a lyric from *another* much older song, misheard by Steve Miller. The word from that older song "The Letter" written and sung by the late Vernon Green, is puppetutes--women who are half puppet and half prostitute. Green was discussing the advanatages of having "puppetutes of love."

More at Cecil Adams' column The Straight Dope here:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...mpatus-of-love

[Tom]

Kickstarter does not work. Either you don't get enough pledges (as in this case) or money gets pledged, but when it comes time to collect then it fails. I have seen this happen to a couple start-up studios looking to film a pilot. Getting reliable sponsor and investors in these economic times is very very difficult.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Tom wrote:

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Kickstarter does not work.

It works for about four out of ten projects.

[Tom]

Dennis wrote:

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It works for about four out of ten projects.

The lucky ones.. It's always worth a shot though, just don't count on it.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Four out of ten. If I could get those odds out of the state lottery I'd feel silly calling it gambling.

It's like anything else - there's some luck involved, but ultimately you have to be offering something that people feel a strong desire to support beyond a momentary "that's cool" impulse and some lip service.

[andriech]

Well, as the Buck Rogers' series has gotten a lot of chat here, I'm going to address the other part of the question.

Cawley Entertainment Company/Retro Film Studios LLC is going to start filming their first "Back to the Wild Wild West" episode from November 1-10, 2011. It will either be "The Night of the Golden Spike" or "The Night of the Bloody Terror". Final decision on that is still pending.....