Posted by PTravel on 09/10/06 22:58

"nobody special" <msu1049321@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1157927973.758072.99430@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
> I had a friend try to pitch a show to them. Discovery has a small
> number of "favorite son" production companies that feed product into
> them. Your only real hope is to go thru one of them, and once you do,
> they basically make you sign over the idea and most of the control over
> the idea to them (as well as most of the profits). You get a small
> piece of it unless you can retain some producer credits on it.
> Discovery and TLC get many more pitches than they know what to do with,
> so they cherry-pick the very best packages, those where the production
> values will be the highest, where the visuals will be stunning, where
> you can get celebrity hosts or narrators, that sort of thing. On the
> reality show front, they look to over-hype the interpersonal conflict
> aspect, what I call the "American Chopper Effect". It's not enough to
> have a story full of heroism, adventure, personal sacrifice, high-tech
> and science, the principal characters involved have to drop everything
> and get to a near-fistfight at least once an episode, or Discovery
> isn't interested.

I don't want to say too much about what I'm doing, but it's not full-form
series format -- it's something else that I haven't ever seen used on
Discovery but that I suspect might be useful to them. I read the article
cited in the other posts -- rather depressing, but encouraging at least to
this extent: my production gear is directly comparable to the article
author's.

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