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Highbrow or low slung, virtually all packagers operate with small flexible staffs, hire equipment and actors only as needed, produce completed films or live shows to order. This year some 300 packagers are providing 70% of the regularly scheduled network shows, a fact that to some critics explains many of TV's ills. With so much programing in the hands of outsiders, networks have little control; every rigged quiz started out as a packaged product. Some cozy alliances have been formed between the nets and packagers: NBC has traditionally catered to M.C.A. products, ABC to Warner's imitative westerns.
Buying Without Looking. The situation has given rise to a dangerous new breed of editorial irresponsibility: the purchase of shows sight unseen. Last spring, Packager Don Sharpe sold Mr. Lucky to CBS; at the time he had neither cast nor pilot—only a script that was later discarded. Independents can sucker networks into financing even the shabbiest of productions. NBC spent $1,300,000 to bankroll 26 episodes of a dreary filmed comedy called Love and Marriage, managed to get some of its money back only by plopping the show into a favorable time (Mon., 8-8:30 p.m. E.S.T.), and selling it to an advertiser (Noxzema) that had long been panting in the wings for such a time spot. Says onetime (1953-55) NBC President Sylvester L. ("Pat") Weaver, now chairman of McCann-Erickson International: "The networks today have abdicated to the Hollywood studios and to M.C.A." Adds McCann-Erickson's TV Boss C. Terence Clyne: "The networks are not creators or producers; they are editors and purchasers. More than 90% of TV investment is spent on the product of someone else's creativity."
But should the packagers be sent packing? Few think so. Tax-haunted Hollywood talents savor the capital-gains advantages of independent production. Adds NBC's Kintner: "We simply haven't enough creative brains and personnel to supply all the programs." Undoubtedly, there should be far more network-produced shows, but the real trouble is not that the networks buy from packagers, but that they do not exercise enough care in what they buy. Example: ABC bought the disastrous Adventures in Paradise from 20th Century-Fox, Alaskans, Bourbon Street Beat and Hawaiian Eye from Warner's—all without even seeing a pilot film. Says Adman Clyne: "Last spring we went over 200 finished pilots and another hundred ideas. We picked 40, put them on the air. Of those 40, we had confidence in only a dozen or so—and right now, I'd almost guarantee that less than ten will be renewed next fall."