MPH Is Picking Up Speed in the Documentary Field

On a recent afternoon, Jim Milio and Melissa Jo Peltier were in the editing room trying to piece together their upcoming documentary “Exodus 1947” even while searching for an expert on miracles to interview on-camera for a two-part look at “The End of the World,” due later in the year for the History Channel. Then a call came in from partner Mark Hufnail in New York about footage he had just shot in Egypt for “Curse of the Pharaohs,” set to air in January on History Channel’s “In Search of History” series.

It’s all just a day in the life of Los Angeles-based MPH Entertainment. In a little more than two years, this small, independent commercial documentary production company has become a major player in the now booming business of creating cable documentaries--increasingly the prime-time staple of many cable schedules. Ken Burnses they’re not, but the production team of Milio, Peltier and Hufnail at MPH has earned respect among independent producers and become a key source of inexpensive documentaries.

While broadcast networks still serve up mostly dramas and sitcoms, many cable channels have found they can snare viewers by going wall-to-wall with real-life stories on popular, oft-visited themes: mysteries, heroes, villains, wars, disasters, UFOs and behind-the-scenes looks at almost anything. Viewers keep tuning in, so producers constantly scramble to cobble together new shows.

“It wasn’t that long ago that ‘documentary’ was a really dirty word in this business,” said Milio, producer and director for six seasons on the CBS series “Rescue 911.” Now, making shows at the rate of one every two weeks, he and his colleagues sometimes race through projects at a paramedic’s pace.

“I landed and put it into Avids [editing stations] within a few hours,” said Hufnail, a former vice president of production at Columbia Pictures Television, referring to the Egypt footage.

Peltier, who has been a segment producer on three of NBC’s “Ancient Prophecies” and a writer on A&E;’s well-received two-part look at the Titanic in 1994, said that fieldwork normally isn’t done so close to the air date, but that advance work on the Egyptian shoot took longer than expected, including such things as lining up a small platoon of armed guards to follow the crew and keep an eye out for terrorists.

But she hopes the fresh footage of antiquities experts poking around in the tombs gives the show an extra dimension of relevancy. Indeed, showing telegenic experts--about ancient Egypt, miracles or whatever--is the trick of the commercial documentarian’s trade.

“We try to find the equivalent of the best professors you had in college, people who kept you intrigued,” said Milio.

The experts perform another important function: They keep production costs down, with fees rarely topping $600. Most commercial documentaries are made for not much more than $100,000 an hour, compared with broadcast-network drama and sitcom budgets averaging about $1.5 million per hour.

Even so, Milio and his colleagues wince at the expression “talking-head slide shows,” a pejorative applied to their genre not too many years ago when budgets were even smaller. This season’s shows as a whole evince steady gains in production values. Still, there are critics.

“It’s wrong to call them documentaries,” said Leo Braudy, Bing professor of English and a commentator on popular culture at USC. “They’re really compilation films, made with archival footage, presented in the most titillating, sensational manner.”

The question of exactly what constitutes a documentary is the source of ongoing quibbling in the documentary community. The International Documentary Assn., for instance, has a policy against sponsoring works that contain dramatizations, which are fairly common in the prime-time cable shows.

Milio said his shows largely fit the common definition of a good documentary: a true story that is well-told. Even then, he added, he usually keeps reenactments of historical events to a minimum.

“If you don’t have the real big bucks to do them perfectly, they come off as looking kind of hokey anyway,” Milio said. Instead, he will use impressionistic visual metaphors showing, for instance, a few seconds of hands pulling on rigging, or a point-of-view shot of someone walking on deck for a documentary on pirates.

When it comes to recapturing the past, few filmmakers have done it as well as Emmy-winner Burns, who effectively blends period music, artistically edited footage of old photos and illustrations, painstakingly culled source material--and, of course, grants from General Motors Corp.--to turn out award-winning PBS programs.

Network programmers were stunned five years ago when Burns’ “Civil War” averaged an 8.8 rating--roughly what CBS achieved in a recent week as the top commercial network. His “Lewis & Clark” last season pulled a 6.3 average compared with the high 4s for top-rated commercial documentaries in the past year.

Thus, documentaries pack the lineups of Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, A&E; and, less so, Sci-Fi and Lifetime. Discovery Communications Inc. Senior Vice President Mike Quattrone said his company’s cable outlets--Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, Animal Planet and Travel Channel--have nearly 600 hours of documentaries in production. Budgets for the four channels’ original prime-time programming pushed past $200 million in 1998, with production companies like MPH competing for assignments.

MPH started with a splash 2 1/2 years ago with a four-hour A&E; miniseries “Las Vegas: Gamble in the Desert,” which revisited the colorful casino owners and mobsters who built the entertainment mecca. The show drew strong ratings and earned MPH favorable attention.

“They are a scrappy bunch,” said Michael Cascio, A&E;’s vice president of documentary programming. “They bring a lot of production value; they have experience with a lot of different type of programs; and they bring a sense of style.”

The show led to a string of successful projects, including A&E;’s “Sea Tales,” Discovery Channel’s “Eco-Challenge Australia” and several hours for History Channel’s “In Search of History” series. About 60% of MPH’s work is assigned by networks, with the producers pitching the rest.

Popular interest in the turn of the millennium has already prompted a spate of shows that are in the works. A&E;, for example, will air “2000: The Road to Rapture,” examining some Christians’ expectation of being swept bodily into heaven sometime soon.

“The Rapture is a huge phenomenon,” said Bram Roos, president of FilmRoos, another major Hollywood documentary producer. “There are about eight bestsellers on the subject.”

There are plenty of angles on the millennium for every producer in the business, and MPH Entertainment will have “The End of the World,” which, will recount past waves of interest in end-time events.

“We’ll have people sewing themselves into death shrouds and waiting on the mountain for Christ to appear,” said Peltier.

As is often the case, the network ordered changes after Susan Werbe, History Channel’s programming director, saw a rough cut of “The End of the World” and decided that it looked too dark. So a second hour was ordered to wrap things up on an upbeat note--hence the search for the expert on miracles.

“At the last millennium, there was a lot of gloom and doom,” Milio said. “We’re going to end the world, but we’ll bring it back the next night.”