A New Script for Women's Movies

Cable World, August 13, 2001 by Andrea Figler

"Our research department tells us that women are responsible for selecting what channels go into the home," says Ann Foley, EVP-East Coast programming at Showtime. "They pay the cable bill. They call the cable company. It's a significant portion of our audience and one that we want to serve."

As a result, Showtime says it's important to make or acquire films that target women. More than half of its movies debuted at the Television Critics Association last month focused on women's issues, female characters or heroines. One film, In the Time of the Butterflies, features a story based on the Mirabal sisters who helped bring down the government of Dominican Republic's dictator Rafael Leonid Trujillo in the early 1960s. While the plot addresses the political upheaval in that nation, the film focuses on the emotional hardship of the sisters, something that most any woman could identify with, said actress Salma Hayek, who is the movie's executive producer.

Showtime pays about $5 million on average per movie, Foley said.

And movie costs will only go higher as networks try to make a name for themselves, especially for channels targeting women, said Paige Orloff, VP of original movies for Starz Encore and Starz Pictures. Starz Encore shells out between $4 million and $8 million per movie, regardless of its target audience, she said. Home Box Office pays between $3 million to $16 million for any movie as well, said Keri Putnam, SVP of HBO Films.

If These Walls Could Talk, a movie about three women dealing with unexpected pregnancies that debuted five years ago, gave HBO its highest rating for an original movie to date, Putnam said. Since then, HBO has been making more programming targeting the female market overall.

Women's movies may not be every network's priority. Black Entertainment Television this summer shelved its plan to produce about ten films based on Arabesque romance author Francis Ray's novels. The network scaled back its efforts to target women via these made-for-television films in order to concentrate more on synergies with its merger with Viacom, a company spokesman said.

On the other hand, a mostly nonfiction network like Discovery Health is getting into the women's movie game.

"Our original research showed us that women were more likely to want to know about their health than men," says Donald Thoms, VP-production for Discovery Health. "And women watch television for the emotional value of it."

That convinced the network to shell out between $125,000 to $600,000 to make documentaries or dramas based on real-life stories of women facing difficult situations, similar to Lifetime. Thoms considers Lifetime his channel's demographic competitor.

"We're all kind of swimming in the same pond," he said, adding, "Women-targeted shows have not reached a plateau yet."