A New Script for Women's Movies

Cable World, August 13, 2001 by Andrea Figler

Forget those cheesy chicks-in-peril flicks. Cable networks are spending big to make sophisticated movies for women.

Among the films shown at this year's Cannes Film Festival was Faye Dunaway's The Yellow Bird. It was the Academy Award-winning actress's first attempt at directing, and the 18-minute short, adapted from a Tennessee Williams story, starred Hollywood veteran James Coburn.

While a lot of bold-face names were up front, one backer lurked behind the scenes: WE: Womens Entertainment, the cable network aimed squarely at female viewers.

Maybe a cable network's involvement shouldn't be surprising. WE began making investments, ranging from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to more than $2 million, in theatrical films last year, according to AMC Networks president Kate McEnroe, who oversees WE, formerly Romance Classics. The network sees The Yellow Bird as the first of three to five films it will help finance this year.

McEnroe is not looking to get invited to more Hollywood cocktail parties. She's looking for new kinds of films that appeal to discriminating female viewers. Many executives now believe that the made-for-TV movies that were a staple of the 1980s and still appear in endless reruns aren't enticing enough for time-pressed women juggling the demands of career and family.

For cable networks, the new script calls for spending more money on each movie, rather than producing a stream of forgettable titles.

Ever since they emerged in the 1970s, made-for-television movies aimed at women were a staple of network television. Such films often featured women in jeopardy and roped in large female audiences. A classic example was 1984's The Burning Bed, in which Farrah Fawcett starred as a battered woman who set her husband on fire; the film was one of the highest-rated TV movies of all time. But in the late 1990s, most of the broadcast networks dropped their weekly movie nights in favor of event-driven movies, generally targeting men.

A lot of the women-in-jeopardy movies moved to cable, which gobbled them up at first, creating a programming backbone for new networks dedicated to women such as Lifetime Television.

Attracting a women's audience has become important to more networks than ever because the female demographic has become sexier to advertisers. Networks point to research that shows women make 80% of financial decisions around the home--including paying the cable bill.

"I think the choices for women are increasing but I don't think that's terribly surprising when you look at all the economic clout women are yielding today," said AMC president McEnroe. "Advertisers and programmers look at this as a big opportunity."

Lifetime has grown to be the top-rated cable network in prime time in part because of its movies, which put a new spin on the old female-genre yarn.

"We've really been focused on ordinary women in extraordinary situations," said Dawn Tarnofsky-Ostroff, Lifetime's EVP-entertainment.

Lifetime is the top-rated cable channel for movies other than premium networks such as Home Box Office, according to a Lifetime-commissioned report by Applied Research & Consulting. And consumers are watching movies on the channel 5% more frequently this year-to-date compared with last year, the report found.

"Lifetime had a few [movies] that did very well and, in some ways, is benefiting from the fact that many other networks have abdicated the [made-for-television] market altogether," says Lisa Demberg, VP of movies and miniseries for Fox Television Studios, which makes movies for broadcast and cable networks.

Demberg says in the 1980s, a TV movie cost about $2.5 million or less. In the 1990s, costs rose to between $2.8 million and $3.2 million. Now movies cost upwards of $3 million and sometimes much more depending on the talent and effects involved.

Lifetime started off making about three movies a year, but has expanded to 12 annually for the past five years.

But while the network scores with these movies, Tarnofsky-Ostroff says Lifetime does not plan to increase the number of films it makes, focusing instead on the quality of its productions.

Tarnofsky-Ostroff says production costs have increased significantly since 1984, but only slightly in the past five years. She declined to say how much Lifetime is spending on its movies.

Female-oriented networks have to make the investment to have distinctive programming that's in tune with the viewers they're trying to attract and retain.

McEnroe says WE is backing movies because "there isn't content ... that has the vision coming from and for the voice of a woman." And the network's financial participation in films not only gives women more opportunity to produce and direct, but makes business sense, she says.

In addition to getting distinctive movies for the network, WE gets video-on-demand rights for the films and will keep a bigger cut as VOD develops into a substantial revenue stream.

Premium channels are also taking notice of the powerful demand for women's programming. Showtime has devoted one of its multiplex channels to women's programming.