TELEVISION

Cable hits on replay

The networks are finding it pays to share the buzz by hitching a summer series to a blockbuster movie's coattails.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

Jun 13 2004

TV viewers will get the chance over the next few weeks to explore the eating habits of medieval Brits, watch a team of little people clad in jockey outfits hurling dodgeballs at sumo wrestlers, see contestants eating wolf entrails, and witness a "Rocky" wannabe getting pummeled in a Philadelphia boxing ring.

It may sound like typical reality fare but these days, the inspiration for an increasing number of television shows is the movies.

Continually on the prowl for pop culture hooks, cable networks this summer believe that the best way to ensure success for their reality-based programs is with an assist from Hollywood-style fantasy.

Latching onto the familiar is nothing new for TV, which has functioned like a cathode ray echo chamber almost since its inception, when Fred Allen famously quipped "Imitation is the sincerest form of television." Anything emanating even the whiff of a hit inevitably spawns knockoffs. But as competition continues to multiply, cable networks hungry for programming have begun tapping a new vein of material by piggybacking their shows with marketing efforts devoted to event feature films. For example:

GSN (formerly the Gameshow Network and now positioning itself as the Network for Games) is launching "Extreme Dodgeball" at 10 p.m. Tuesday, just three days before Fox releases the Ben Stiller-Vince Vaughn comedy "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story."

The History Channel airs a two-hour documentary "The Quest for King Arthur" next Sunday, timed to the July 7 opening of Touchstone's big-budget epic "King Arthur."

The Sci-Fi Channel is capitalizing on the attention devoted to Fox's "The Day After Tomorrow" with its own natural disaster movie, "Post Impact," starring Dean Cain, which encores at 7 p.m. Thursday.

Two new reality-based series ("Scream Play" at 8 tonight on E! and "Into Character" premiering at 7 p.m. Wednesday on AMC) prove that cable networks aren't just hitching their wagons to current films. Both shows allow ordinary film fans to take on challenges inspired by scenes from classic pictures such as "Rocky," "The Karate Kid," "The Natural," "Dirty Dancing," "La Bamba," "Dances With Wolves" and "The Mummy."

"Scream Play" creator Joel Klein, formerly a supervising producer on NBC's hit "Fear Factor," thinks that movie references will layer his show's thrills and chills with at least some measure of emotional context.

"There's a stunt we're going to do tomorrow that comes from 'Dances With Wolves,' " he says. "It's the scene right after the buffalo kill when they pull out one of the organs and eat it. Well, that's how we're going to do the organ eating, because it's based on the fact that it actually took place in the movie."

By injecting iconic movie elements into the stunt game mold, Klein believes "Scream Play" will fit comfortably within E! network's showbiz-centric brand. "You can't just put someone in a coffin and cover them with cockroaches without some reason. So this way, we do it by showing a clip of 'The Mummy,' and people can be like, 'Oh, that's why it's on E!' "

"Into Character" has less of a "Fear Factor" feel but rather seems to emulate BBC America and TLC's "Faking It," an unscripted series that offers average folks a chance to become someone quite different, at least for a brief moment. So an episode of "Into Character" will send a fan of "Bring It On" to a cheerleading camp in Florida, which sounds similar to a "Faking It" episode that featured a bookish Harvard grad student who learned how to be an NFL cheerleader.

The new show's creator and executive producer, Riaz Patel, insists his show evolved independently from those earlier ones. And besides, he insists, "I think the payoff is a little richer here because when you have the beer-guzzling guy on 'Faking It' who wants to be a sommelier, the stakes are fairly high for him. But when you have two people trying to pull off the lifts of Baby and Johnny from 'Dirty Dancing,' then you've got millions of people who know what it feels like to want to do that too, so I think the resonance is much deeper."

TV programmers have long scanned the pop culture horizon for buzz-worthy events. Anniversaries, holidays, celebrity deaths and, every four years, the Olympics — all serve as timely pegs on which to hang programming. But when it comes to focusing mass awareness on previously neglected topics, few phenomena can match the publicity generated by movie marketing campaigns.

Jack Valenti, president and CEO of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, recently set the average marketing budget for a Hollywood movie at just under $40 million, and executives like GSN President Rich Cronin know just how much public awareness that can buy. "I'm sure Fox is spending a fortune marketing their 'Dodgeball' movie. We're spending several million marketing our summer lineup, which includes 'Dodgeball.' So I think we help each other by just getting it out there: See the movie, watch the TV series, live the dodgeball lifestyle."

Before he was aware of the movie, Cronin was mulling producing a "Revenge of the Nerds" twist on the famously traumatizing sport. "Last fall we were thinking, 'What kind of comedic competition can we produce as a companion show for our 'National Lampoon's Greek Games' [a contest pitting fictional sororities and fraternities in athletic competitions, all pegged to take advantage of the publicity accompanying the Summer Olympics in Athens]. We started doing some research and found that dodgeball is having this resurgence; it's becoming like the new softball."

Cronin's interest was further whetted when he noticed fliers for new dodgeball leagues at all the college campuses he visited with his teenage daughter. TV commercials, a dodgeball-themed "South Park" episode and the discovery of a Los Angeles dodgeball league further solidified his hunch that the game was about to break out, but Cronin greenlighted the series only after learning about the movie.

"The thing that really got us going was when we read that there is going to be a dodgeball movie with Ben Stiller." Their response, he says, was, "Perfect: Dodgeball is in the zeitgeist; it fits perfectly with our 'National Lampoon's Greek Games'; there's a summer movie about dodgeball — that's when we put 'Extreme Dodgeball' into development."

Cable networks also value big movies because they bestow instant relevance on already-produced titles that have been gathering dust. GSN was able to repurpose old "Gong Show" episodes it owned by interviewing George Clooney when he was out promoting "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," about game show host Chuck Barris, then using the clips for "wraparound" commentary for the network's "Confessions of a Gong Show Marathon."

Highbrow content providers are also happy to take advantage of spillover interest sparked by movie marketing blitzes. The History Channel, for example, has perfected the art and science of crafting piggyback programming tied to blockbuster movies. In May, the channel correctly counted on Brad Pitt and company to stir interest in ancient Greek culture and scheduled its two-hour "True Story of Troy" special. And when Colin Farrell pops up in the "Alexander the Great" biopic in November, the network will be ready with its own two-hour documentary about the Greek conqueror.

"We keep track of all the movie releases coming up over the next couple of years and try to plan our programming around them," says History Channel Vice President Peter Gaffney, who oversees scheduling and acquisitions. "Sometimes we get lucky. With 'King Arthur,' we already were working on a special without knowing about the movie. We heard about the film when we were deciding where to put the special, and it turned out we could put it on right around the release of the film.

"Whenever our schedule allows, we try to ride the crest of the publicity that the movie is getting. 'Troy' had millions of dollars of advertising. We aired our show the opening weekend and it did very well for us."

Amid the current cycle of ancient epics, it's clearly halcyon times for the History Channel. "We're taking advantage of a current trend where there have been more and more historical films being made," Gaffney says. "People will go see the movie, or they'll see the advertising, and they'll want to know: 'Did they really wear those clothes at that time, or what did they really eat, or was that really true?' All the things you'll see in the movie, they'll want to know the real story behind them, so we've created an unofficial franchise where we show the true story of the film or the time it was set in. It works very well for us."