Heaven’s Gate
65 Transition
“Yes, I believe you are right. I hope she’ll do some guest appearances, though. Especially on Fashion Week. Leonard and Pam are popular,” Armand said. We didn’t have many meetings with the primary owner of CEN and all the rest of Lockhurst Media. We were minor shareholders, but Hearthstone Entertainment produced some very popular shows for CEN. We were canceling Redress. In fact, Jessica, Maggie, and Jess had already taped the last episode. It made a nice season and series finale. “I can’t say I’m as excited about losing you as the host of XX/XY, though,” Armand continued. Rose nudged me to indicate that I should answer him. I was the Executive Producer.
“Well, Mr. Lockhurst, I never really thought I was the right person to host this show. I was thankful to have lasted a season, let alone five. I’m not cut out to be Charles Knight,” I laughed. “On the other hand, Lee is gaining recognition and audience approval. I think if we announce it now and have him do two a week until the end of June that we will have a great segue into next year without losing any audience. He’ll get us back in the core of the audience we initially were going after. My audiences have been aging steadily.”
“That’s all true,” Armand said. “But I don’t like letting audiences go. How do we retain the audience you’ve built with something, shall we say, more adult?”
“We have a couple new pieces to put on the board,” Rose said. “Our production people are mostly still in their mid to late-twenties, what is now known as GenX. Our children, sociologists tell us, will be called Millennials. Even though we’re still in our twenties, we have acquired a lot of experience that might not have been available to other generations. We’ve seen the introduction of the Internet, compact discs, DVDs, desktop publishing, and Cable Television. We all have cell phones now. We conduct business through email. You have to be aware that already your tabloid and newspaper readers are aging. We believe we need to adopt some new technology and new entertainment concepts to keep this generation.” Armand was nodding his head.
“We’ve been keeping tabs on the demographics. You are right. In fact, your researcher has given us a good bit of usable data—which we paid for, by the way,” Armand laughed.
“We pay her for what she gives us, too. Sarah has a very successful consulting business going,” I laughed.
“What is the new direction for Hearthstone Entertainment?”
“We want to fill a daytime slot with another, younger women’s entertainment show,” Rose said. “Amber is ready for the big time and we’ve plotted out a show to follow Young Cooking’s timeslot in the morning. Amber will focus less on news and more on entertainment with segments on music, movies, and celebrities. We think the show should rerun in the evening after XX/XY. Then we plan to start producing scripted programs. We’ve stayed with rather free-flowing forms so far, even in our documentaries, but our head writer has some concepts for miniseries. The objective here is to create a miniseries that we could roll into a weekly show if it proved worthwhile. The problem with most miniseries so far has been that they run six episodes and die. There’s no way to capitalize on their success if they are good and unlike longer running serials, they have an escape hatch built in. You don’t ever have to produce more than the original six hours.”
“Those sound exciting. I like the way you are thinking. What about…?”
“The Internet,” Rose continued. I silently thanked her. I was sure that wasn’t what he was going to ask. “You know the CEN web presence is managed by Price Engineering. Courtney also developed the video editing suite that we use here at CEN and at many other television studios around the country. But she has always been a big believer in Internet Entertainment. This year we uncovered an online game that has developed into a dating website. While this might not be what CEN is looking for, I have a feeling it is the direction Lockhurst Media needs to move in order to capture a younger market for its tabloid journalism.”
“You phrased that so nicely,” Armand laughed. “You mean for our gossip columns. I can see where that will be something we want to follow up on separately. Now without cutting me off, what about Brian? How do we keep his fans?”
“Well, sir. I’m going back to cooking,” I said. “I still have a lot of work to do as EP for XX/XY and Fashion Week, even though we are canceling Redress. But this won’t be a daily show. We’re looking at a show for one of the most overlooked slots we have: Saturday date night. With the increasing access to DVD movies, Sarah has found that more and more twenty-somethings are staying in on Saturday nights with a bottle of wine and a movie. I think we can go after that market with a big time-block that is mostly untouched at the moment. We’ll call it Date Night In. It will combine our Internet and television presence. We announce the movie and the menu on our website each week in plenty of time for people to get the ingredients. Even allow them to comment and make suggestions. Then my date and I start out in the kitchen and guide the viewers through cooking their dinner. They’ll have the list of ingredients in advance so they can shop and be ready. At various breaks when things are cooking, we switch to watching the movie of the week. The show will run four hours by the time we get dinner, the movie, and commercials in. I’m really looking forward to it.”
“Damn! I think that might work.”
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
