Real Screen: The Real Players

Ninth Street N.W. in Washington, D.C. is not the Croissette in Cannes, nor is the Marriot Renaissance Hotel in D.C. the Majestic or the Carlton on the Croissette. Those are the places where twice a year the television community gathers for MIP and MIPCOM, the two largest television markets.

However, about seven years ago a feisty little magazine out of Canada, devoted to the art of non-fiction film, decided that there needed to be a conference that dealt with the specific needs of documentary and life style program producers so they founded a conference called REAL SCREEN, after their magazine.

For five years now, I have attended. And I have watched the small conference grow every year to a larger event until this year was the largest ever. God willing and the creek don’t rise, next year will be even bigger.

It’s in Washington, D.C. because, hello!, this is where Discovery Networks, National Geographic and PBS all have their headquarters and those three companies are the largest consumers of non-fiction programming. Not to mention lifestyle.

About fifteen hundred people gathered here for the REAL SCREEN conference. There were some interesting seminars. But most of the time I was around the hotel lobby doing that wonderful thing that people do in business: schmoozing. [I need to look up the etymology of that word…]

It was a time to see old friends, like running into Janet Carlson, Vice President of Business Affairs at Discovery. We knew each other when I worked at DCI. Her extension was so close to mine that we often got each other’s messages. Years later, when I took on the role of a Producer for OFF TO WAR, she and I needed to work the deal and we were laughing at this year’s REAL SCREEN about the late night phone calls and all the drama that surrounded the first negotiation. Since then we’ve negotiated seven more hours for the program and it’s become MUCH easier – but that’s because of the groundwork we laid during those first weeks.

It was fun to run into John Ford, who heads programming for National Geographic Channel and a pleasure to see old friends and to meet new ones.

Mick Kaczorowski, who is Editorial Director for Animal Planet, threw a cocktail party the opening night of REAL SCREEN and did a magnificent job of introducing people to one another – all people that he felt should know one another. It was huge fun and, based on watching what happened following, enormously successful. He did a brilliant job of matchmaking folks.

Erol Morris, who won an Academy Award for his FOG OF WAR, opened the event with segments from his films that were enormously amusing and were coupled with his meandering, erratic but insightful comments.

It is a small world, relatively, this world of non-fiction and lifestyle program producers but these are the folks who fill all the cable channels with original programs. They, we, all work for dollars that would make Hollywood executives snicker. These are individuals who all work because of an inherent passion for the work they do. They cannot not do it.

It is in all these people’s blood. They are like actors. They must do what they do or they could not breathe. No one is famous, except in this small world.

Passion is why they all gather here in D.C. These are producers who turn out more hours of television than all the broadcast networks combined. They labor for small dollars, mostly out of love. They come from Vancouver and Toronto, from Minneapolis and Denver, Salt Lake City, New Orleans and New York. They come from London and Bristol and Los Angeles – not Hollywood.

They are individuals driven by a passion to do what they do and they gather here in D.C. once a year, so they can rub elbows with fellow producers who share their passions.

We all help convince one another we’re not mad to be doing what we do…