It's no picnic making a TV broadcast that lives up to a live event. Just ask the helmer of the Oscars.
Or ask
Marty Callner, the director of the live HBO broadcast of
Will Ferrell's Broadway outing "You're Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush," skedded for March 14.
He'll have about 10 cameras in the house or in the wings, trying to capture the show for TV auds without proving too much of a distraction to theatergoers in the Cort Theater. And after several weeks of preparation, he'll be editing on the fly.
"If you make a cut too early to be safe, you're anticipating, but if it's too late, you've missed a joke," Callner says.
The director has a long history with televised live events, starting with early HBO specials from
Robert Klein, George Carlin and
Robin Williams, among others. He also directed the broadcast of the
Justin Timberlake concert HBO aired last year, as well as musicvideos from Twisted Sister, Whitesnake and ZZ Top.
Legit telecasts can be a pricey endeavor, especially on Broadway, with its long-standing legit work rules. Callner estimates such programs can range between $500,000 and $2 million, with the Ferrell special falling on the higher end of that spectrum.
Since the theatrical lights are designed for only the live audience in the house, a new lighting plot must be determined for the special, accommodating camera angles without changing the theatrical feel of the event.
On the other hand, with a live broadcast post-production costs are essentially nil (although Callner will be able to go back and tweak his editing for future airings, if he really fouls something up in the moment).
Broadway fare he translated to TV includes the 1981 revival of "Camelot" and
John Leguizamo's 2002 show "Sexaholix: A Love Story."
"My goal for that one was to give each character its own camera angle," Callner says.
For a few moments in "You're Welcome America," he'll occasionally break the fourth wall for closeups of Ferrell-as-Bush facial expressions, giving viewers at home the chance to see Ferrell's face from a straight-on angle instead of the profile seen by theater auds.
"Two eyes are funnier than one," Callner says.
Even with all the talk about the undisclosed megabudget of the tuner "Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark" -- said to be north of $35 million -- there's at least one participant with nothing to lose.
That's Marvel Entertainment. In the annual earnings report announced by the company last week, chief financial officer
Kenneth West reiterated that Marvel, the company whose line of comicbooks launched Spidey in the 1960s, doesn't have a penny in the show.
What it has instead is gross participation in the tuner, set to open in February 2010. Not to mention a stake in merchandise revenues -- "which some of these shows do significant business in," West noted in his comments on the report.
Can a comicbook adaptation be far behind?
Contact Gordon Cox at
gordon.cox@variety.com