Production Changes Quotes

When you're on a long running series, you reach a very rarefied, high oxygen area and after a while to keep a show on the air they have to make some very drastic changes.

Any show in its first season goes through multiple changes. There is little or no difference to changing the cast on a talk show.

Musicals are written and then rewritten. Those things used to happen on the road. Now they are done in New York during preview performances.

Both TV and movies seem to be produced in a more similar way as time goes on. It used to be that movies were much bigger productions on every level and took much longer to shoot. I liked that. But with the advent of digital, everything can be done much quicker and cheaper, and that seems to be the goal of most movies and TV these days.

Honestly, it's a sad truth, but whenever a show is about to go off air, you start getting hints because the work environment and quality changes.

It's like live action if you reshot every scene a million times after finishing the movie. Because even apparently by the very end, a few weeks before they were screening it for the world premiere, they were making changes. That's just simply something you can't do on live action.

Maybe if I'd gone in younger, I wouldn't have had that feeling, but I've seen an enormous amount of changes since the early-'70s in how this stuff is shot. I did the first TV movie ever shot in 18 days; before this film the normal length of shooting a TV movie was between 21 and 26 days. We shot a full-up, two-hour TV movie in 18 days with Donald Sutherland playing the lead, who had never worked on television before.

Some of the biggest changes that have happened are behind the scenes, in the way we produce the magazine. E.g., much of our production has been brought in-house via desktop publishing.

The matter of consulting experienced workers, of keeping all the workers informed of changes in production and wage methods, and how the changes are arrived at, seems to me the most important duty in the whole field of management.