Reality TV Questions Answered

Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.

Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke.

Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???

Biagio: This episode. It’s episode 80 and we’re answering your reality TV questions. How do pro stay creative even when dealing with foul moods? Should you work with a distributor before selling your show to a TV network? How does what you worry about change as you become more successful? What’s the fastest way for a new producer to sell an unscripted TV show? And basically just this like humming ball. Music courtesy Dave Pelman music. Dave. Hey everybody. She’s joke, he’s Biagio, we’re married. We make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same.

Joke: Hopefully by teaming up with us.

Biagio: Well, welcome to our 80th podcast episode. We always laugh because we never thought we’d probably make it too far past ten, but so many of you have have reached out with so many kind words, and we’ve met so many great people and I don’t know, I think we’re just going to keep doing it forever now. Right. So 80 is this is 80 of a million or something.

Joke: I know, but we skipped two weeks ago and I feel like we we did really good for a long time without skipping. But I feel like now we’re getting to the point where it’s like, but but it is really nice when we meet people who actually listen to it. So we do so because listen, right now it’s just the two of us on the couch in the living room on a Sunday night and the kids are in bed. So it’s kind of like this, is anybody even going to hear this?

Biagio: I know well, well, we know from the stats that actually thousands of people hear it, which is great, but.

Joke: It’s different when it’s just like a number on the screen. And when you actually meet someone who’s like, oh, I listen to your podcast. And then I immediately get embarrassed.

Biagio: Right, right. Well, you know, listen, I think the, the the long, the long and short of it is and it’s feeling more like the long of it is that Babylon here that, you know, we’ve gotten such great feedback from so many of you and and again, we’ve met really good people. So we’re going to keep going. And for our 80th, we want to do something special. So we reached out to those of you who are on our newsletter and said, do you have any questions or feedback or thoughts you’d like to us to handle on her 80th and we got way too many to do to put them all on this episode. So thank you so much to everybody who wrote back. There were a lot of emails, and we sort of comb through them with our our assistant and we picked three. It’s really for because one person asked two questions that were sort of tied to each other that we thought we could dive into this episode if we didn’t get to your question this time, we’ll see if we can get to it down the line. But thanks to all of you who reached out, we’re going to go ahead and bust in our first one. Our first question comes from Greg, and Greg asks, you know what helps to boost your mind? If you ever end up in a creative slump? Well, like creative slump. Us never. Right, honey?

Joke: All the time.

Biagio: Listen, you are. When you are a professional creative, you probably end up feeling like you spend most of your time in a creative slump, and anybody who tells you otherwise is lying. And it’s not because you’re not a creative person, and it’s not because you’re burned out by your job. The fact of the matter is that you’re, you know, when you have those muscles turn down all the time, it’s easy to get tired and fatigued, and that’s when you have to sit down and be a professional. You used to have this this acting teacher, John Homer, on our TV show Scream Queens, who said, you know, you know what? Great actors, you know, when the lights go on, so do they. And what he was getting at with that was that it didn’t matter whether they were having a good day or a bad day or whatever, you know, when it was time to work, you got to work. So what do we do when maybe we have to be creative and yet that uses it flowing. Okay, you’re going to really laugh at this one. I don’t think I’ve ever admitted this in public.

Joke: Oh, my God, I don’t even know where you’re going.

Biagio: I know, but it’s true. It’s one thing that I still do. Years ago, we had gotten some coupon from iTunes. Joe got a coupon from iTunes or. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it wasn’t. I was somewhere else. It was like you would download, like 53. And a couple of the ones I downloaded were these these ones from a woman named Shakti Wayne.

Joke: Oh, my.

Biagio: I know you’re laugh, but I still do it to this day. And there’s one. It’s called like, creativity or creative thoughts. I don’t know, it’s it’s some kind of binaural music.

Joke: But that’s not Shakti Queen.

Biagio: Yeah that’s Shakti Wayne.

Joke: It’s Shakti Queen wrote the book.

Biagio: You’re right. It’s not Shakti grain, it’s Kelly howl.

Joke: Kelly.

Biagio: Kelly howl. Sorry, Shakti. You know Kelly Shakti Wayne wrote a book about years ago called Creative Visualization.

Joke: Did you read it?

Biagio: That’s it, I wrote it. No, I read it. I read years ago. My goodness. It is hell. It is late on a Sunday night after a long week. But but so I listen. Kelly Howell so I listened to these this MP3 from Kelly Howell. And it’s basically just this, like, humming bomb. I can’t even describe what it sounds like. It just basically it just chefs out the world. But I gotta say, like, usually within 3 or 4 minutes I’m writing away no matter what my, my day has come. So I put on the headphones and I listen to to Kelly Howell. And that seems to help me get through the the writer’s block.

Joke: So for the record, it’s not how I do things.

Biagio: No, no, this is not hey, we all do things different, right? The question was about how do we handle it? And this is one thing we work a little bit differently on.

Joke: Yeah. So Biagio puts on these headphones and goes out.

Unidentified Voice: Oh oh.

Joke: And I think it depends, you know what part of the process we’re in in terms of creativity. If we have you know, we have a show in mind and we’re developing a show for a certain network, then a lot of times it’s just, you know, researching or getting inspiration from great movies and other great TV shows and thinking about that and being inspired by techniques and that kind of stuff. But when it’s coming up with TV shows and or titles or those kinds of things, to me it’s just about diving in and researching, and I could get lost for hours on Google. But, there are times when, you know, you come across a phrase or a saying and then then that inspires you to get going on something else. So, yeah, I think it just depends, you know, like with the writer, looking at a blank page is a scariest thing. So you just start writing even though it might all go in the waste bin. But, eventually you start writing good stuff. Sometimes I feel it’s kind of like that, you know, you just start throwing ideas at the wall and researching and seeing, you know, what starts developing into something that’s big.

Biagio: Yeah. Now, this might be a little bit confusing because we keep talking about writing. And as you all know, we’re unscripted documentarians and reality TV producers. But we still need to write out, you know, treatments, you know, for ideas. We have concepts.

Joke: You still have to come up with a concept. Even though survivor in its current state is a reality show, people are put on an island, you cast real people, you put them on an island, you know, in the beginning stage, someone had to go, what if we put 16 people on an island? We made them compete. Okay, then what happens? How did they get there? Oh, we come up with tribes and then, you know, we put them through challenges. What could we call those things? How? I don’t know, how about reward challenges? Immunity challenges, you know, and we give them what what do they walk around with? You know, all that stuff you still have to come up with. You still have to write down. Right? So it’s not so much writing as in terms of dialog or interior exterior as it is about writing down concepts. Conceptualizations.

Biagio: Yeah. Now I want to talk. I’ll tell you there’s something. There’s another thing. This is, again, this is a personal thing for me. And it drives Joe crazy. Because another way that I’m often, you know, it need to be creative when we’re up against when we’re up against a deadline, especially on a pilot or a sizzle reel is editing. Because I still, as many of you know from some of the podcast, I still do a lot of editing on our shows, especially on episode ones, pilots sizzle reels, and I can’t just put on headphones and go home on home for that because I’m actually editing music and and picking stuff. And I will say, joke will tell you, I can be a mopar, I can be a little bit mopey. I can be like, it can take me a minute to get to a point where I feel like I’m really in the editing flow, and it’s certainly gotten harder since we’ve had kids and, you know, and during the day, we’re sort of dealing with running the company and executive producer things, and then it’s like, oh, at night now I need to turn on these, these editing muscles. And I for me, there’s a couple of ways that I’m able to get to a point where I get really excited about editing. The first is going to sound totally counterintuitive, but it’s making a great graphic. This is just me. This is just this is just something. But like, I feel like if I can create a great title card or a great graphic something, even if it’s a lower third or or just a really cool looking title card, it’s going to get used either in the show or the pitch. There’s something about the process of creating the graphic. I feel like my subconscious just slips into its own little zone, and and if I make something that gets me really excited like that, one thing can give me enough creative energy to get through the whole edit. It’s really weird. I’m really weird like that, and I find that if I don’t do that, if I’m just like, no, I’m just going to buckle down and edit that, I that it’s much harder for me to get to a place where I’m happy with my work. So now I’ve just kind of given up and I go, I just got to do like a creative graphic or title first when I’m at a and that’s weird. That’s me. But, but, but that, that tends to work for me.

Joke: Here’s the thing. If anyone has any great tricks for it, I’ll take them because I think it’s something we all struggle with. So yeah. Hey, that’s kind of where we’re at, but I’m more than happy to try new things.

Biagio: All right, next up, we’re going to take two questions from Beth. Beth, your questions were great. And I think they probably speak to a lot of questions. People who listen to the show have. And they’re there are questions that I don’t think we’ve really dealt with in a major way on any previous podcast. So, Beth, we answered both your questions and and we’ll send you double swag. How about that? So your first question about the first question, is it better to sell your show directly to a network or a distribution company? Pros and cons. If you did partner with a distribution company and they are pitching it to the network for North America, is the deal less attractive to the network and why?

Joke: So bachelor’s kind of hit on something that pretty much every production company is dealing with and networks are dealing with. And so if any of you have been paying attention to what’s happening in the industry is a lot of production companies are being bought by bigger kind of multinational organizations like shine and the mall. They came together. ITV, you know. Red arrow. So anyway, there’s there’s lots of different companies buying up smaller companies. And the the goal with that is for these companies to be able to hold on to format rights, right. To be able to hold on to the ownership, the IP of the show with IP, I mean, intellectual property, so that then these bigger distribution companies can then go sell that IP, whether it’s format or the tape, meaning the actual TV show overseas and make more money there. This all sounds fantastic. And at one point we were in a first look deal with a bigger company so that we could also try that. And so there were two shows, two different networks that we got the network excited about buying. But the company we teamed up with, a distribution company as studio said, no, we own the IP, so we need to make a deal with the network where the studio still keeps the IP. Both instances, the studio slash distribution company and the network could not come to a deal. Thankfully, said studio allowed us to take those shows outside of the deal and sell to the network directly.

Biagio: Which was really nice, by the way, because they did not have to do that.

Joke: They did not have to do that and they never really do so. So thankfully, us as the little guy, the production company was able to still get to make the show instead of blowing the deal. But yes, this is very is very difficult. So if you sell to a distribution company first, and their entire point in the deal is to hold on to the IP, which again, I’d love to do as well. But if you do that, it’s going to be harder to get to network to agree to that. Now, the good news is, is that some of these distribution companies have gotten, you know, savvier in terms of like, okay, we know that’s not always going to happen, and maybe there’s a way we can work it out. And sometimes you hear about a deal like that happening, but most of the time the network is still insisting on owning, owning the show and the format so they can sell it overseas. The hope is that that pendulum is going to swing back the other way. It hasn’t yet. Maybe in the next couple of years, that comes back to the content creators and the distribution companies. But yeah, it is it is it is absolutely something to be aware of. If you decide to team up with a distribution company, just ask them right up front. Is that a deal breaker for you? Like what will you be asking for the network if the network wants to own the IP, does that mean it kills the deal?

Biagio: I would say my personal opinion jokes. Feel free to disagree, especially if you’re just starting out and you want the closest thing to a sure thing you’re ever going to get because it’s already really difficult to sell a show. I think I would sell the network without the idea of attaching a distribution company ahead of time, right?

Joke: But that’s also easier said than done, right? So I think another thing to keep in mind is a lot of people think like, oh, I’ll sell the idea to distribution company, and distribution company will sell it overseas first. It’ll get made there. I’ll make money off of that, and then we’ll import that idea to the United States. It happens. It usually comes either from a, you know, Talpa or in the mall kind of, you know, really formulated an idea from the Netherlands. And then obviously a lot of shows from Great Britain like Pop Idol, which became American Idol and, you know, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent anyway, those shows. But those are foreign, you know, few and far between. What happens most of the time is when you try to sell a format to an overseas company. They want to know that it’s been produced in North America. They want to be able to show, look, it’s been on this network. It helps them sell it overseas. So in another situation, we actually sold a format to Germany before it was ever produced. Here. They paid a holding agreement on it, and they were going to try and get us set up overseas. In the meantime, we got a network here in North America interested. They ended up not closing the deal with us because they couldn’t own the IP. And what they were offering just became, you know, they were like, well, we’ll license it from you. But for such a low budget that, you know, it just wouldn’t cover the cost of the show. And so then overseas, they were like, well, unless you get it produced in America, we can’t do a whole lot with the format over here. So again, it’s like a catch 22. I think that this really leads into your next question, which is, you know, who if if you are a no name producer. Well, yeah.

Biagio: Let me, let me, let me read the question, which starts out with something that I thought was hilarious, but so starts with Beth writes discuss the middleman. Most of your audience is a no name producer. They need a known entity to show credibility to the network or purchaser that the content ordered will be delivered on time. So most of us will partner with a middleman. Right? Are these entities production studios, well known names and entertainment producer agents, distribution companies, investors. Which is so funny because I’ve never in my life thought of us as middlemen are the companies that we teamed with as middlemen. But I can see why. If you knew that the business might seem that way because you’re like, well, this is my idea, I can’t get it directly to network. There is be someone in the middle. I’m going to take the first part of this and then joke. We’ll give a much more sane answer than I’m about to give, but here’s here’s my take on it. No television network, for the most part, 99% of the time is going to make a TV show without a production company. Does it almost always a production company? Who makes the show for the network? Anybody else you attach to your show is just baggage. When you’re just starting out, people attach everybody you know and the kitchen sink to the project, thinking it’s going to help to sell. And to be completely honest with you, when you’re just starting out, just like us when we were first starting out, the people that can help you the most are an established production company. And I’m not just saying that because we are established production company. I would say that because I honestly believe that’s the truth, that when we were young and we teamed up with production companies who were willing to champion our shows, they weren’t really the middlemen. They were our mentors. They actually taught us how the business worked and gave us the skills we needed to launch our own production company. So in my mind, the most straight ahead, you know, easy way to break into business when you’re just starting out and you’re quote unquote, a no name producer is to team up with a production company who’s willing to teach you and willing to give you the tools you need to go off and start your own production company one day, which I’ve never had a problem with. I think there’s plenty of work to go around for everybody. Joke. Please feel free to to comment, question or argue with me.

Joke: No argument, I think. I think to really specifically go through to different entities that she asked about as production studios. Again, there are studios and then there are production companies to studios are kind of more of those bigger international must hold on to IP, intellectual property rights, ownership to the show. And again, if you want to team up with them, that’s fine. But please, you know, be upfront with them about what happens if the network doesn’t want to settle for not owning the IP. Will the studio come to a deal? Will the studio allow you then to make a deal directly with the network? Just figure that stuff out? Well known names in entertainment as attachment don’t really do much. Agents would never be called unquote. Attached agents are literally your agent, your representative. So if you find an agent who is willing to vouch for you, push for you, get you through the door, then that’s great. I mean, our first agent, you know, was fantastic at doing that. And and, you know, got yelled at by network executives for pushing for us too hard. And then it was for us to prove ourselves. And then they would go and apologize to the agents saying, you were right. Distribution companies, same thing as the studios, right? They have a tendency for their, you know, business plan to hold on to IP and that might get you in trouble with the network or, you know, not be able to get you that deal. Investors again, you know, if you have, you know, what was that the patronage of the old days. Like if you have a sugar daddy, a business sugar daddy who wants to give you money to, to to make stuff, you know, to be that patron of the arts, then by all means, you know, celebrate those moments. There will be lots of people listening who’ll be jealous that you have that person and they don’t. I would love one of those people. But if you are talking about investors who are going to want to piece of the return on their investment, then this is not the business. So yes, the middleman is the production company, but I think Biagio said it correctly. It’s there is a lot to learn and I will never forget one day when I was taking a UCLA extension meeting, just in the hopes of meeting professionals, and I was like, I got this, you know, Biagio and I produced a pilot, just the two of us in my parents kitchen. And, you know, we got this. We can make TV shows ourselves. And then, you know, you team up with someone because that’s the only way you can get your foot in the door. And then you see everything that goes into it and you’re like, oh, wow. Yeah, I got a lot to learn. So, you know, it’s not just the politics. I think it’s also, you know, legal liability insurance. There’s a lot before a network will hand you cash and say, all right, now go make me a show. So learn from the best team up with the people that are willing to teach and that you get along with. And that’s the way to kind of deal with that quote unquote middleman. Think of the more as what Biagio said and mentors.

Biagio: Yeah, but Beth, I think those were great questions. And, Beth, you’ve also inspired a future podcast. I don’t know when we’re going to do it, but I’ve been forever. I’ve wanted to do one called so you Think you want a production company?

Joke: Well, I think it leads to the next question, doesn’t it? Wasn’t the third question about Johnny. Okay. What’s the third question?

Biagio: Yeah. So the third question comes from Johnny. What are some things you used to worry about in the early days that don’t matter now?

Joke: Johnny, I hate to break it to you. I have only gotten more and more worries.

Biagio: Yeah, boy, I tell you, it’s funny because you’d think. Oh, yeah, boy, we used to worry about that, this or that, and it wasn’t important. Oh no, oh no. What you find out is that you’re not worried about nearly enough.

Joke: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what did I used to worry about. I don’t worry about anymore, you know, I guess what or not, I got the last Diet Coke from the fridge. Now I just go and buy me another one. I don’t know, like, honestly, there wasn’t all the things we used to worry about. You know, how to make a good show, how to get someone to notice, how to keep improving and upping your skills. We still worry about all those same things every day. And now we add on, you know, great. We have people whose livelihoods depend on us selling another show. And, you know, we got to keep the lights on. And we have, you know, a lease in our office we have to pay for. And, oh, yeah, we’re doing shows that, you know, involve real people all the time. So there’s moral and ethical things and legal things and liability things and people who really want to work hard for you. And you have to tell them, you’ve got to go home, man. I don’t want you driving home this tired. So, you know, here’s an Uber because this is crazy. You know, you have to think about so many things. And at the same time, you know, keep pushing the envelope and yeah. So listen, once we learn from our mentors slash middlemen, we saw how much there was to it. And then once we got our own production company set up, we quickly realized there is so much more. And with every show, there’s new things to worry about. So, Johnny, I really, really appreciated that question and I hope I didn’t blow it for you with this answer. But yeah, the the the higher up you go in this business, the more you’re going to have to worry about.

Biagio: It’s true. But I will tell you, we did a podcast a few episodes back, and I don’t know if anybody listened to it because it had the strangest title ever, but it’s one of the best. I feel like it’s one of the best pieces of advice we ever got in this industry. And that advice is that pressure is a privilege actually came from John Holmes. Same thing Kojo talked about earlier in this episode. And I’ll never forget that pressure is a privilege, because if you’re not feeling any pressure, it means nobody trusts you enough to give you anything important to do. And so I think that as you get more quote unquote successful, the reality is you feel more and more pressure and you have to stop and acknowledge that to be able to be in a position where you feel that pressure really is a privilege, much as John Holmes said. And yeah, I worry about just a heck of a lot more now, but I do. I listen, I want to thank everybody who said in these questions because I think that it’s it’s good for us to be reminded of what it is you want to know, you know, and you know, some things that maybe we’ve missed over the course of these 80 podcast episodes. And I know some of you are new, so if you haven’t heard all the podcast episodes, some of them have seemingly silly names like pressure is a privilege, although I think you should all go listen to that one, because it’s some of the best advice we ever got. But the point is, we want to keep giving you a new, fresh information. And I was happy that so many of you wrote in with your questions. And if we didn’t answer them in this episode, we will see if maybe we can pick some of them from episodes down the line. And that’s it. You know, as always, you know why we started this podcast? To meet cool people, to share information that nobody would give us when we were starting out. And if you would like to pitch to us to give you a pathway to do that, which of course is just to go to any one of our websites. But the easiest is producing unscripted. Com sign up for the newsletter and follow the directions following the directions. It’s an important part of that equation. So there are a couple of hoops to jump through, but it’s just to make sure that the people who are submitting to us are seriously submitting and not just sending silly one liners.

Joke: And that’s about it.

Biagio: And that’s about it. So thank you to all of you who’ve kept us going over these 80. Here’s to at least 80 more. Whoa. I know I’m already thinking about our 100th. We’re gonna have to do something special. It’s about it’s less than a year away now, so I don’t know what we’re going to do for 100. I’m sure at some point we’ll put out a request I would love to do, like some kind of live show or or like some kind of, like, invite some people into the office and recorded or something. I know, just do something. I’d like to do something bigger, you know. I don’t know what yet. We’re still we still got 20, still got 20 episodes and at least 40 weeks before we get to that. But it’s never too early. Start thinking about it. Who knows why this is episode 80, so we’ll just wrap this one up. Thanks, everyone for listening.

Joke: Thank you. It’s getting late on a Sunday night, so y’all have a good night. Good day. Whenever you’re listening to this good morning jog. Good morning commute I don’t know, but I appreciate I appreciate it. We both do and talk to you on the next one.

Biagio: See you in two weeks.

Announcer: By Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.