Disney Cranks to Meet Its TV Mandate

It’s crunch time at Walt Disney Co.’s television studio.

To stock its newly acquired ABC network with shows, Disney is scrambling to churn out television production in such short order that some in Hollywood wonder whether the studio has bitten off more than it can chew.

Since completing its purchase of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. in February, Disney has been ramping up its TV animation division to fill a block on Saturday morning at a time when children’s programming is hot and animators and artists are in brisk demand. The WB, United Paramount and USA networks are adding segments and DreamWorks SKG is stockpiling talent.

Disney also plans to produce roughly 17 TV movies, up from just four last year, for an all-new but still-unnamed Disney Saturday night offering on ABC.

And it has about 15 pilots competing for slots on the networks’ fall prime-time schedules--nearly double the number last year--in a Hollywood-wide acceleration in television that is helping to drive up prices.

“We’re not set up to do it all,” said Dean Valentine, president of network television and TV animation at Disney. “We don’t have the infrastructure. But it’s coming together.”

Valentine has hired David Neuman from Whittle Communications’ Channel One as his new head of network programming, though Neuman does not start until May 1, after pilot season. To take up the slack, Dean Valentine

Valentine two weeks ago brought in Peter Aronson, formerly with Witt-Thomas Productions, as a consultant to supervise pilots.

Meanwhile, Valentine is learning the animation business, which he was promoted to oversee last summer after two top executives resigned to join DreamWorks. Valentine is searching for an executive to run animation.

In prime time, Valentine is no doubt looking to put his stamp on a roster whose biggest scores, “Ellen” and “Home Improvement” on ABC, are left over from a previous regime. But the riches for Disney and others may be few. With a record 140 or so pilots being produced by all studios for the six TV networks this year, up from last year’s 115, the talent pool is stretched so thin that some Hollywood executives worry about another season barren of hits--and profits.

Some of the increase stems from the two new buyers, WB and UPN.

But the bigger orders for Disney pilots, Valentine said, result from its return to producing one-hour dramas this year--an attempt to cultivate writers winning critical acclaim with shows like “Chicago Hope” and “ER” that are bringing increasing returns from overseas and cable sales. Five of Disney’s 15 pilots are dramas.

Though ABC ordered a whopping six pilots from Disney, Valentine denies that he benefited from any mandate to favor the parent company. One source even claims that turf fights broke out between Disney and ABC over which writers would be attached to Disney shows.

“I didn’t get any breaks,” Valentine said, adding that supplying hits to ABC already had made a strong bond between the two companies. “Most of these projects were in development for two years. It’s self-destructive for a studio to have all their business with one network. It’s bad for writers and talent. And no one knows it better than Michael Eisner.”

When Disney announced its purchase of Capital Cities, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner promised that the ABC network would remain open to all suppliers of television programs rather than tilting heavily to Disney fare.

Stocking ABC with Disney programs is tempting. If the shows are successful, ABC wins and Disney makes a bundle off rerun rights. But the losses are multiplied if the shows bomb.

This year, ABC’s prime-time development slate leans heavily on Disney and two other studios it has partnerships with, Brillstein/Grey and DreamWorks. Together they account for about half of ABC’s 29 pilots.

Disney is supplying the most, although Valentine doubts that more than three will be picked up for the fall.

The studio has developed surprisingly few pilots for the other major networks--only three, following in the pattern of Twentieth Television, which is developing half of the 14 pilots for its sister Fox network and only four for the majors. Why help the competition? Or so the theory goes.

Executives at competing networks worry about what is known as “self-dealing”--that Disney would take a successful show off a rival network in the fifth year, when rights revert back to a producer, and feed it to ABC.

Sources say NBC is threatening to scuttle its deal with Disney for a high-priced pilot called “Little Monsters” because the studio refuses to give the network the protection it wants in the fifth year. NBC failed to order any pilots from Warner Bros. last year, after the studio refused to renegotiate deals for “Friends” and “ER” giving the network fifth-year protection.

But some sources say NBC mostly is sore that ABC poached its executive development ranks of Jamie McDermott, who may become president of ABC Entertainment in June. “This feud has reached the board levels and we haven’t heard the end of it,” said one executive.

Some television executives question the economic merits of Disney’s developing so many shows for the fledgling networks, which account for the studio’s remaining five pilots. Valentine cites the teen demographic target of WB in particular as lucrative and fitting with Disney’s family image. Shows targeting teens, such as NBC’s “Saved by the Bell,” have made a fortune in syndication. Such shows, along with the Saturday morning fare, can also create library for the Disney Channel and the new cable networks ABC is expected to start under cable hotshot Geraldine Laybourne.

Valentine has been signing animation talent at a steady clip recently, hoping to revive ABC’s Saturday morning ratings. He said Disney will fill two hours of ABC’s four-to-five-hour block.

In an unusual move, Valentine tapped an outside production company, Nelvana, to work on one of its series, “Gargoyles.” Although sources say he had trouble getting shows like “The Mighty Ducks” and “The Jungle Book’s Jungle Cubs” on track, some outsiders see Valentine’s recruitment of independent writers and animators as a shift in the hidebound “factory” mentality of Disney.

Some call it the “Nickelodeonizing” of Disney. Valentine in recent weeks has bought Jumbo Pictures, the producer of the “Doug” series, formerly on Nickelodeon, and signed production deals with the two co-creators of the cable channel’s top-ranked show, “Rugrats.”

“I wouldn’t say we were trying to be like Nick,” Valentine said. “But I want the writing to be smart and contemporary--to have the texture of 1996 rather than 1953. There has been a historical perception that Disney is a factory, but the people we are making deals with are helping make Disney the first stop for animators and writers and not the last.”

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How the Studios Stack Up

In the race for time slots in the networks’ fall prime-time schedules, the studios have produced a record 140 pilots. While the orders change hourly and negotiations are ongoing over the next several weeks, the rough counts are in. Here are the network orders for pilots from the major studios:

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ABC CBS NBC Fox UPN WB Total Columbia TriStar 1 5 3 8 2 1 20 Warner Bros. 3 4 4 2 0 4 17 Disney 6 2 0 1 2 4 15 Twentiety Century Fox 3 1 1 7 0 2 14 Universal 2 6 2 2 0 0 12 Paramount 4 1 3 1 3 0 12

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Sources: Studios and networks