The director of The West Wing, Thomas Schlamme, enjoyed what was considered the best of times in television. Audiences were predictable and the budgets for him to direct series from E.R. and Sports Night to The West Wing and Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, were massive and growing.
Yet even as audiences fracture to different platforms and television budgets consequently shrink, Schlamme remains even more optimistic for his craft.
“People are using a business model where they made enormous amounts of money,” he says of television’s apparent malaise. “In fact, (now) you can actually have a fairly successful company just making less money.”
Schlamme recalls the downside of the boom budget times, when their drama based in a television network, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, didn’t work and “I literally felt I was bringing down the Western economy! Warner Bros came to us and said we were being hit,” he recalls. “I thought the yen was going to fall and the world would implode because of the budget we were spending on that show and we weren’t getting an audience.”
The series still broke even but, Schlamme adds, “They just weren’t able to print money off it and they were so mad at us they couldn’t print money because it looked like a show that could.”
Schlamme is directing Manhattan, a drama about the making of the atomic bomb and starring The Code’s Ashley Zukerman, for the WGN America cable network. Schlamme, who is earning the best reviews of his career for Manhattan after coming from the similarly revered series The Americans, says his optimism as a storyteller is because there “are just so many different avenues”.
“I remember if I had a project it used to be: Should we go to NBC or ABC?” he says. “Now it’s like we can go to five places I’ve never heard of and, no, they’re not going to give me as much money to make the show so I’ve got to come up with a way to make it). Now, much more is being demanded artistically of a television director than ever before,” he says.
Schlamme notes that the medium is becoming more sophisticated, particularly visually, compared to his early years in which there was a very limited television vocabulary and networks said, “You’re in somebody’s home, don’t do any fancy work, make them feel comfortable.”
Once The West Wing and HBO — with The Sopranos — changed the visual and narrative possibilities of television in the late 1990s, Schlamme says, “I felt like I was liberated as a director to use anything that was in my toolbox. And, in fact, if you really look at it, outside of big C-G (computer-generated) movies, movies have become safer and television has become more experimental.
“It’s a little bit, for me at least, in America, television is much more like independent filmmaking. You can actually be braver and in some ways the confinement of time actually opens up creativity rather than closes it.”
More Here: www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media
Michael Bodey – The Australian – November 09, 2015