ATLAS PLOUGHS DEVELOPMENT FURROW
Bruce David Klein (below), president and executive producer of New York-based Atlas Media, is looking to develop a 360-degree strategy for his company’s growth. David Jenkinson reports.
Atlas Media is one of America’s most distinctive producers, making a variety of non-scripted television for the US cable market. It produces around 150 hours of original non-fiction programming a year.
Formed in 1989, the company has always produced non-fiction, and in the increasingly diverse digital world is now adapting that content to work across a variety of new platforms.
Klein says: “I founded the company in 1989 as a reaction to the Voice of God documentary and at the start of the cable revolution. In the past couple of years we’ve started to see the sort of revolution that happened with cable in the digital space, which has prompted us to focus on new areas of development.”
Those new areas include the launch of a theatrical and a digital division, both of which are staffing up and pushing out new work.
Atlas Media’s theatrical film division hit the ground running with two projects. The first, Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise (below), has received critical acclaim, playing in 100 cinemas around the US.
The second production, Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead, is a feature-length documentary that looks at the unlikely friendship of Robert Blecker, one of the country’s most impassioned crusaders for capital punishment, and Daryl Holton, a mass-murderer awaiting execution on Tennessee’s death row. It is set to debut in October.
Klein says: “Within 12 months we want to double the output of our theatrical division. We see this as a great area for growth and are out there looking for stories that demand more than a 60-minute TV hour.”
Further expansion is coming through publishing. “We have a series called Doctor G: Medical Examiner (below), which has been the top-rated show on Discovery Health here in the US for four years,” says Klein. “It also appears in another 60 top markets, and there is a web presence.
“In October, we created a book called How Not to Die: Surprising Lessons on Living Longer, Safer and Healthier from America’s Favourite Medical Examiner. It went out at auction and the publishers went nuts. It is coming out on October 14, and we are going to have a website that feeds into the book, the show and a range of other things we are doing.”
The publishing operation, like all television production, is subject to the scrutiny of a new digital division that is working hard to enhance all Atlas properties for digital. “It is probably the only division in our company that literally willed itself into existence because of people wanting us to do stuff,” adds Klein. “I was very cautious of ‘new media’ following the 1999/2000 internet bubble.
“We set up a digital division last year and it is doing amazingly well. We are really working on how to make everything fit together into one virtuous circle.
“One of the new projects that will be tasked to work across platforms is a series for National Geographic called Who Knew? With Marshall Brain. It is a ‘high-end factory/engineering science tech show’ where we really go in deep and peel the onion on how things are made, engineered and tested. Internationally, it will be known as Engineered. Beyond is rolling it out this year.
“We are also working on a huge royals project with a unique twist. We know royals always do well. The British royals take up 99% of all the royal ink in the world but there are 16 other royal families that do equally strange, goofy and interesting things. We have a unique hook for telling the stories. That was just greenlit.”
Klein also reports an increase in conversations around branded entertainment, saying he is increasingly talking to brands about how to create franchises that integrate their message. But he still believes traditional television has a long race to run.
“In my lifetime I am still going to make most of my money the way I am making it today. I view digital and emerging media as ancillary income, just the way we used to view international and publishing. Until it is 50% of my business, that’s the way I will continue to think of it,” says Klein.
