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Kim Manners passed away

D

Dorian Thompson

Admiral
Admiral
Kim Manners, long time director of the X-Files and current director/producer of the CW's "Supernatural" has passed away last night. He was apparently diagnosed with lung cancer at the beginning of SPN's current season in September and didn't make the knowledge public. Jim Beaver posted on his MySpace page just today that Mr. Manners had passed and that he was in mourning. I'm sure the entire cast is. Kim was a funny, warm individual with a delightfully twisted sense of humor.

Rest in peace, Mr. Manners. :(
 
Whoa... blessings and peace upon his family and friends. :(

Any idea how this will affect "Supernatural" itself?
 
There are other directors on staff. One of them will have to take the episodes he was slotted to direct. I'm sure the show will continue. Kim Manners was co-executive producer. Someone else will have to take over his duties. It's a pretty close cast and staff. The staff all took pay cuts so they could continue to work on the show and not lay anyone off after the frakking CW cut their budget in favor of Gossip Girl and 90210. :rolleyes: Jim Beaver won't be the only one in mourning there. It'll be a sad time for them. Even on the gag reels you could see how much fun the cast had with him.

It's a shame. Jim Beaver's wife passed away from lung cancer, too, just a few years ago. He has a daughter barely 10 years old. It must really hit home with him. Lung cancer can be very fast progressing. Sad business, that. :(
 
Man, that's terrible. Kim was one of the best directors on the show (his work on "In my Time of Dying" was outstanding in particular.)

My sincerest condolences to his family and friends

R.I.P. Kim :(
 
My favorite SN director as well, I know because those episodes were good enough for me to check who did them. sad...
 
Manners directed what I consider the single most perfect episode of the series--"In My Time of Dying" when their father passed away.
 
Dorian Thompson said:
Manners directed what I consider the single most perfect episode of the series--"In My Time of Dying" when their father passed away.
Click to expand...
That was a great episode. And I love the coffee shot.

Of course as a huge fan of Supernatural this sucks, though of course they have other talent directors he was teh visual producer of the show and it was his style that other directors followed.

I had just watch the Pasley footage from season one, and his response about how he got into Supernatural was one of the funniest bits. "I read for Sam".

But I can't not mention his fantastic work on the X-Files, where you could see what he was capable of doing with a budget. Between him and Rob Bowman the X-Files was the best directed show on during its run.
 
I loved the gag reel for season two when Jared kept winking at him off camera and saying, "I love you, Kim. No more old jokes." That was some great stuff. :) It was Kim who had the idea to throw the bucket of ice cold water on the two of them during that take when they crawled down the manhole. :lol: That'll wake you up in the morning!
 
Dorian- you mentioned SPN paycuts. Did Jense and Jared take on paycuts to help out? Is that what you meant?
 
I don't know if the cast had to take pay cuts (they certainly didn't get raises) but the crew went on record as having all accepted pay cuts so that no one would get laid off. They all wanted to continue working together. Dawn Ostroff cut all the scripted shows' budgets except for her precious Gossip Girl. :scream: Gossip Girl got an increase from last season so that they could produce two additional episodes. CW loves it because it has such a high (for CW) young female demo....until it aired against a new House for the first time last week. Hee hee hee hee hee. :evil: It's young female demo literally fell by half. Supernatural has had higher ratings all season (and most of last season, too) but Ostroff and CW increased GG's budget because of the high 18-34 female demo for GG.

Formerly high female demo. Now it's the same as Supernatural's 18-34 demo. :devil: Two many Nielsen people over 35 and with dangling reproductive organs watching SPN. Not enough young girls, believe it or not.

Sorry, but it ticks me off that Kim Manners got his budget cut but Gossip Girl gets thousands upon thousands to spend on its wardrobe budget.
 
And while SPN can be campy it also produces some excellent drama that hits on stuff a lot of other shows don't have the balls to touch.
 
I hadn't heard that the production staff took pay cuts (a good number of them are protected by labor contracts), but things like overtime (something that happens a lot) can be cut dramatically and losing a good chunk of that would hurt almost everyone in production from the grips to the stars.

All shows have what are called set costs. Those are the costs that are going to hit each and every episode. Say SN total budget is 1.2 million an episode. Fixed costs might be 800,000. That leaves 400,000 for specific set construction, locations permits, specific episode casting, special effects, ect.

So basically the fixed costs haven't changed, but the money allotted to each individual episode is less.

So what you will see to cover that loss is fewer extras, fewer speaking roles, smaller sets, fewer locations, less special effects (or just poorer quality), cheaper guest actors, less overtime (so you might get stuck with bad takes), ect.

It just makes it harder for writers, directors and producers to tell a show that they would like to.
 
I agree. Not a lot of shows would have its main hero admit to having enjoyed torturing other souls after he spoke of the "slicing and carving." shudder Some of the teenyboppers were screaming that they didn't like that, but I appreciated it myself. It's a very human reaction to prolonged torture and abuse.

Mswood, a lot of the lower end production people chose to take less to make it work. They were speaking about it at one of the recent cons. Jobs could have been lost. It's part of the reason they can make do with less per episode.
 
Well in fairness to Gossip Girls (Did I just type that), even last weeks huge hit they still outscored us in the 18-34 demo group, and certainly did much higher in the specific female 18-34 group.

In fact even all the scripted hours best us in the female 18-34 demo. And we only beat Privileged in the overall 18-34 demo.

But if its ratings stay the same (compared to the rest of the line up) expect them to finally get a nice budget cut (though I expect the show will move first).
 
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