A surprising number of TV's most popular shows, from CBS's 'The Big Bang Theory' to NBC's 'The Voice,' come from one source. Backstage at the busiest studio in America.
Burbank, Calif.
"Casablanca" was shot at the Warner Bros. studio lot here, as were "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Million Dollar Baby." But while movies may confer glamour and prestige, it's television that pays the bills. (click below to read more)
Film favorites like Casablanca", "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Million Dollar Baby" were shot at Warner Brothers Studios. But while movies may confer glamour and prestige, it's television that pays the bills. Amy Chozick joins the News Hub to discuss.
Today, the Warner lot is Hollywood's most prolific TV factory, cranking out dozens of shows a year. This collection of 30 soundstages on 112 acres is the epicenter of Warner Bros. Television Group, the largest TV supplier in the U.S. by a wide margin, and a robust exporter of television all over the world. Currently, it produces 56 shows for American television, 26 of which will be on the broadcast networks this fall.
"Movies come in and they're like a rich visiting uncle, but we know where our bread is buttered," says Jon Gilbert, president of Warner Bros. Studio Facilities.
This is where "Friends" and "The West Wing" were made. Active shows from Warner Bros. Television include "Two and a Half Men, on CBS, TNT's "Southland," Fox's "Fringe," NBC's "The Voice," ABC's "The Bachelor" and, in daytime, "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." Big-name producers Jerry Bruckheimer and J.J. Abrams are under contract.
In mid-August the lot is bustling with back-to-school giddiness as new and returning TV shows go back into production. On a recent afternoon, the writers and cast of "The Big Bang Theory" hugged and chatted about their summer vacations before sitting down at the first table read of the show's fifth season. Co-creator Chuck Lorre sat at the head of the table as jokes about hemorrhoid cream drew big laughs. Mr. Lorre is also back in production on "Two and a Half Men" with new star Ashton Kutcher after actor Charlie Sheen was fired from the show last spring.
Actor Zachary Levi, in costume as the crime fighter Chuck Bartowski in NBC's "Chuck," stopped in to say hi to a friend during the live studio recording of new CBS sitcom "2 Broke Girls." A horse used in that show grazed near the commissary.
As sound editors labored to put the finishing touches on the coming movie "J. Edgar," with Leonardo DiCaprio as the former FBI director, the Showtime series "Shameless" used the long linoleum corridors outside the sound-editing rooms to stand in for a senior citizens' home.
"We just put some elderly people in the hallways and they kept sound-editing," says line producer Michael Hissrich.
Warner Bros. has a costume department the size of two football fields, with four miles of pipe rail on which hang hundreds of Samurai outfits, Hawaiian shirts and cheerleading garb (college and pro). There's also a sizable section devoted to wicked stiletto heels labeled "hooker shoes."
Producers have access to a 150,000-square-foot props and upholstery department. Warner boasts that more than 60% of all upholstery on TV comes from here.
Other studios depend on the steady cash flow of television production, and some have bigger hits. But Warner's operations, by sheer volume and infrastructure, make it the standard of manufacturing efficiency, if not sexiness: General Motors in the 1960s.
Warner's perennial success in television is especially notable because unlike four of its five major competitors, it is unattached to a major broadcast network. Universal has NBC, Disney has ABC, 20th Century Fox has Fox; what was Paramount is now part of CBS. Sony has no network. Warner has a half-interest, with CBS, in the CW, which as a network is dwarfed by the others. Nine of Warner's shows this fall are on the CW network; by comparison, all 25 CBS-produced broadcast shows air on CBS or the CW.
The Big Four networks have a huge incentive to buy programs from their corporate siblings, so they can profit both from advertising revenue and from owning the shows, which down the line translates into the real pot of gold: revenue from reruns, foreign and DVD sales, on-demand and streaming. The share of new network shows produced by sibling studios rose from 50% in 2006 to a record 77% in 2010, according to a study by Nomura Equity Research.
So Warner TV sells to everybody, and must hustle extra hard to do so.
"You have to be everybody's second-favorite supplier," says Bruce Rosenblum, president of Warner Bros. Television Group.
For Warner Bros. to entice rival companies to buy its programs, it has had to open its checkbook to secure hugely expensive deals with the industry's top producers. Peter Roth, president of Warner Bros. TV, has assembled or retained a cadre of the biggest-name producers in the business. Mr. Lorre, "E.R." and "West Wing" veteran John Wells, Mr. Bruckheimer and "Lost" creator Mr. Abrams, among others, all have exclusive TV development deals with Warner Bros. In March, Warner Bros. signed an eight-figure multiyear deal with "Everwood" and "Brothers & Sisters" executive producer Greg Berlanti. Deals often come with annual fees and overhead as well as a hefty portion of revenue from syndication and DVD sales.
In an area of the Burbank lot dubbed "Lorrewood," Mr. Lorre controls three soundstages, 24, 25 and 26, devoted to his sitcoms, "Mike and Molly," "The Big Bang Theory" and "Two and a Half Men."
Warner Bros. gives producers the ability to develop a show and then shop it around to the highest-bidding network, rather than developing a show within the confines of a specific network's brand. "If you come up with a show, [Mr. Roth] will say 'Where should we go with it?' and then have it fit that decision, rather than making that decision years before the show is even created," says Mr. Abrams. He currently has three shows with Warner Bros.—Fox's "Fringe," CBS's coming thriller "Person of Interest" and Fox's midseason mystery "Alcatraz."
Despite a need at CBS to buy the majority of its shows from CBS Television Studios, its two most heavily promoted series this fall—"2 Broke Girls," about waitresses in Brooklyn, and "Person of Interest," about a billionaire who tries to stop crimes before they happen—come from Warner Bros.
"We develop with everybody, and ultimately at the end of the day when there's a jump ball, it's going to come—it's going to be a CBS-owned show. But at the same time, it's silly to cut out the creative community," CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves recently told investors.
On the lot, the resources are extensive. The outdoor space has replicas of the Chicago L (built for "E.R."), a suburban enclave of 11 homes, a Main Street USA, a church and a wooded area known as "The Jungle" that served as the yard in "The Waltons," the Louisiana bayou in "True Blood" and, originally, the set of a 1956 Alan Ladd gun-running picture, "Santiago."
A NASA-like control room monitors the air conditioning on each soundstage, adjusting the temperature depending on producers' and stars' preferences. Ms. DeGeneres is on hiatus but she still likes her 32,264-square-foot studio—complete with a gift shop selling Ellen T-shirts and koozies—particularly chilly. "Comedians usually like cold stages," Mr. Gilbert says.
The back lot gets so crowded this time of year that productions must work "on a bell." When "Chuck," for example, is shooting a scene close to the CW's new series "Hart of Dixie," a siren-like bell alerts the adjacent production to keep quiet. On a recent afternoon, "Hart of Dixie" transformed a grassy area into small-town Alabama. American flags made in the studio's upholstery department festoon storefronts and Spanish moss from the greenery department drips over trees.
When tourists on a $49 "VIP" studio tour spotted "Mentalist" star Simon Baker in costume as investigator Patrick Jane, they snapped pictures. He waved. "They should get their $50 worth," Mr. Baker says.
Productions must share. "Hart of Dixie" and ABC Family's "Pretty Little Liars" had to negotiate the use of the lot's lagoon. The bar in Showtime's "Shameless" serves as the hardware store in "Hart of Dixie" and everyone fights over a row of New York tenements known as "Hennesy Street" after Dale Hennesy, who built the set for "Annie."
"What we think of as America is in some degree what we see on the back lots of Warner Bros. It's the Platonic ideal of small-town America," says Bruno Heller, executive producer of "The Mentalist."
One danger for Warner is that its scale and its ambition to find the next big broad comedy can lead it to take fewer risks than other studios and wind up with forgettable fare. For every "Friends," there's a handful of shows like NBC's "The Paul Reiser Show" and ABC's "Hank" that ended after a few episodes. Warner Bros. had 8½ series canceled last season, more than any other studio, according to the Nomura study.
Warner's success also has encouraged competitors to try to emulate it by selling shows to competing networks. 20th Century Fox owns ABC's hit sitcom "Modern Family" and has new shows this fall on NBC and ABC. Fox's "House" is made by NBCUniversal's Universal Media Studios.
"One of the goals for the next few years is to really build that [Universal Media] studio, not only to supply great shows for the NBC network, but to also sell and program shows on competitive networks," says NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt. Two of NBC's recent successes, "The Voice" and "Harry's Law," come from Warner Bros. None of its six new shows this fall do.
Warner Bros., known for Cagney and Bogart crime dramas in its old-movie heyday, got its TV start mostly in Westerns like "Cheyenne" and "Maverick." Later came "Dukes of Hazzard," then "Night Court" and "Murphy Brown," but the TV studio really kicked into high gear in 1993, when it fully merged its TV operations with Lorimar Television and put the latter's president, Mr. Moonves, now of CBS, in charge. Lorimar already had hits like "Dallas," "Perfect Strangers" and "Full House." Mr. Moonves's team developed "E.R." and "Friends," among others.
In 1999, Mr. Roth, who previously ran 20th Century Fox Television, began using the windfall profits from "Friends" to build a roster of TV producers. One of his first contracts was with Mr. Lorre, who, after struggling for a few years, in 2003 co-created "Two and a Half Men," the current No. 1 sitcom on TV and a 10-figure property for the studio.
Last year Warner Bros. sold Mr. Lorre's "The Big Bang Theory" into syndication for $2 million per episode; $1.5 million was from sibling TBS, but it was an all-time record for a rerun sale. "Friends" still brings in tens of millions annually in domestic syndication deals and has made the studio roughly $4 billion in revenue since it premiered on NBC in 1994.
To combat broadcast TV's declining viewership, Warner Bros. has in recent years made a bigger push into cable. Its TV units provide shows to Time Warner-owned cable networks like TNT, TBS and Cartoon Network and others. These shows don't typically sell into syndication, but they can bring in big revenue overseas.
"An international buyer looks at 'Rizzoli and Isles' exactly the same as a broadcast show," says Jeffrey R. Schlesinger, president of Warner Bros. International Television.
Cable productions have also put the Burbank lot to year-round use. Broadcast shows go on hiatus in the spring and big-budget movies are often out on location. "It used to be from March to June you could shoot a cannon through this place," says Danny Kahn, executive director of the Studio Tour Department.
With nearly every inch of the studio seen on the big or small screen before, producers must be creative.
In one episode of "The Mentalist," set designers brought in white tablecloths and candles and turned a barn in the "Jungle" into a high-end Napa Valley restaurant. Then it became a gold-mining supply store.
"The next episode, it was the inside of a crystal-meth factory," says line producer Matthew Carlisle.
A Tour of the Other Studios
Paramount Pictures
Established: 1912 No. of soundstages: 29 Size: 62 acres History: Located in Old Hollywood behind its famous Melrose and Bronson Gates, its sets and stages hosted "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Rear Window."
Sony Pictures
Established: 1915 No. of soundstages: 18 Size: 44.5 acres History: The old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Culver City have the world's second-largest sound stage. Stage 15 is 42,000 square feet and is best known for "The Wizard of Oz." "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune" bring the studio big dollars and lots of visitors.
Disney
Established: 1940 No. of soundstages: 7 Size: 51 acres History: Originally built with revenue from the 1937 release of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Disney CEO Michael Eisner commissioned buildings from famous architects Michael Graves and Robert Stern during his tenure. Stage 2 is named after Julie Andrews, who filmed "Mary Poppins" there in 1964.
20th Century Fox
Established: 1928 No. of soundstages: 15 Size: 50 acres History: This lot has Art Deco touches and a glamorous West L.A. location. "The Sound of Music," "Cleopatra" and the original 1968 "Planet of the Apes" come from 20th Century Fox. The building 80 had child actors' classrooms where Shirley Temple studied.
Universal Studios
Established: 1914 No. of soundstages: 30 Size: 391 acres, including a theme park and "CityWalk" retail area History: Visitors can see the original Bates Motel from "Psycho," dinosaurs from "Jurassic Park" and the faux shark from "Jaws." Also shot here: "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Spartacus."
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