主题：凯文.史派西：论电视行业与创意人才 -- 万年看客

When I took over the Old Vic a decade ago the way we did it was, we set up Old Vic/New Voices – our program to support those entering this industry as a career. And instead of separating them like many theaters, television and film programs do, training writers separately, putting directors on a specific course etc; we wanted to bring them all together in groups, because I believe that’s how drama is made.

We united writers, producers, directors and actors and helped them learn to collaborate, to develop, produce and realize their work together. It was an experiment but creatively fulfilling and has turned into such a successful one that (as an example), 28 productions at the Edinburgh Fringe this year will have been written, directed produced or performed by alumni of the Old Vic/New Voices program.

But we wanted to go further. We also had a social responsibility within our neighborhood. So we also created community plays. We went out to every school, community center/youth group and invited them in to the Old Vic. We built a creative sanctuary for kids who found it hard to communicate, where traditional education was uninspiring or who struggled in their relationships with their peers. I can only tell you how satisfying it is to hear from teachers that the boy who has never been able to concentrate in class suddenly has a sense of focus, or the girl wrestling with her identity now has the words to express how she’s feeling.

And here is my absolute conviction. This kind of program for young people is not just about whether they go into the arts. It’s not just about finding the next generation of David Leans or Stephen Bochco’s. It’s also about our society. I believe culture is not a luxury item, it is a necessity. Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence. But for those who do have a passion for the arts and have a voice - I believe that we have a responsibility to seek them out, because if we don’t they may never find their way over the walls we’ve built so effectively around our theater’s, networks and studios and we may lose their stories forever.

By the way - I said a little while ago that my first job in television was doing those episodics but that’s not actually true. Writing this speech I remembered that my very first job in television happened when I was 17. I had a summer job where I was picked up in a truck, in the San Fernando Valley in California, thrown into the back of this flatbed, with about 8 other guys and then driven out to Orange County, given a map of an area in some neighborhood and we had to go – door-to-door - to sell . . . On Subscription Television (one of the very first pay-cable systems). I kid you not but our opening line had to be, (Knock, knock, knock) . . . “Hi, have you turned On yet?” Alot of doors got slammed in my face. But little did I know that I was being innovative about television even as far back as 1976.

Now if there is anything about the character I play on ‘House of Cards’ - Francis Underwood – that suspect people might admire is that he too has embraced a sense of total abandon: abandonment to the rules. He has no allegiances, to party, to titles, to forms, to names, to labels: he doesn't care whether it’s Democrats, Republicans, ideology or conviction. What he sees is opportunity and the chance to move forward. Okay, he’s a bit diabolical but he’s also very effective.

So like Francis, I’ve come here today with no ideology – and I’m not viewing todays event as a television event. It seems to me since audiences are no longer making those kinds of distinctions, why should we? So lets throw the labels out. Or as Francis might say, “at least let’s broaden the definitions – and if we have to call ourselves anything then aren’t we all just storytellers?”

House of Cards - creatively - actually follows the model more often employed here in Great Britain. The television industry in this country has never really embraced the pilot season so looked to by the networks in the United States as a worthwhile effort. Now, of course we went to all the major networks with House of Cards and every single one was very interested in the idea… but every one of them wanted us to do a pilot first.

It wasn’t out of arrogance that David Fincher, Beau Willimon and I were not interested in having to audition the idea, it was that we wanted to start to tell a story that would take a long time to tell. We were creating a sophisticated, multi-layered story with complex characters who would reveal themselves over time and relationships that would take space to play out.

The obligation of a pilot - from the writing perspective - is that you have to spend about 45 minutes establishing all the characters, create arbitrary cliff-hangers and generally prove that what you are setting out to do will work. Netflix was the only network that said, “We believe in you. We’ve run our data and it tells us that our audience would watch this series. We don’t need you to do a pilot. How many episodes do you want to do?” And we said . . . “Two seasons?” By comparison, last year 113 pilots were made. 35 of those were chosen to go to air. 13 of those were renewed, but there’s not many of those left. This year 146 pilots were shot. 56 have gone to series and we don’t know the outcome of those yet. The cost of these pilots was somewhere between 300/400 million dollars each year. Makes our House of Card’s deal for 2 seasons look really cost effective.

Clearly the success of the Netflix model - releasing the entire season of ‘House of Cards’ at once has proved one thing - the audience wants the control. They want freedom. If they want to binge - as they’ve been doing on ‘House of Cards’ - then we should let them binge. Many people have stopped me on the street to say, “Thanks - you sucked three days out of my life”. And through this new form of distribution, I think we have demonstrated that we have learned the lesson that the music industry didn't learn: Give people what they want - when they want it - in the form they want it in - at a reasonable price - and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it; well, some will still steal it, but I believe this new model can take a bite out of piracy.

We get what audiences want - they want quality. We get what the talent wants - artistic freedom. And the only way to protect talent and the quality of our work is for us to be innovative. And we also get what the corporations want, what the studios want, what the networks want - they want to make money and we need them to be profitable so they can continue to fund high quality production. They want the highest possible audiences with the greatest impact. We all get it. The challenge is can we create an environment where executives, those who live in data and numbers, are emboldened and empowered to support our mission; to have an environment with leadership that is willing to take risks, experiment, be prepared to fail by aiming higher rather than playing it safe.

It’s like Steve Jobs. Why did he continually cite Henry Ford as an inspiration? Because Ford anticipated that people didn’t know they needed and wanted a car until he invented one. And we didn’t know we needed and wanted all that Apple has brought to our lives until Steve Jobs put it in our laps and hands.

We need to be that innovative. In some ways we need to be better than the audience. We need to surprise, break boundaries and take viewers to new places. We need to give them better quality. We might not disrupt the status quo overnight, but we can mould structures at the center of our businesses; because if we really put talent at the heart of everything we do, we might just be able to have greater highs across a broader spectrum of the industry. That’s what I believe.

Bringing us right up to date we've just seen the release of the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad - capturing a huge audience and sending the media world into a frenzy of excitement about the Netflix effect. But this example also teaches us I believe another important lesson for the networks - and it’s about patience - a much overlooked quality needed in creative development and a virtue not found as a rule in network executives, hidebound for decades by pressure to find sure fire hits - quickly.

Breaking Bad was a slow starter, ratings wise and its biggest gains came after the series debuted on Netflix in late 2011. Early viewers of the network airing helped spread word, giving more awareness than those first season ratings suggested, while the Netflix streaming and clever scheduling of repeats by AMC began to win more fans and build anticipation. AMC believed in the show (even though it only got an original order of 6 or 7 episodes), because Mad Men had taught them that shows can take time to find an audience and that positive buzz and quality of audience were as important as sheer numbers when building a brand.

What Breaking Bad's rather late-in-life explosion in audience teaches us is that these shows need to be treated as assets to be nurtured, protected from the quick network trigger that can bail on a show before it has the chance to find its feet. After all - The Sopranos audience took four seasons to reach its apex, Seinfeld took a nearly five-year route to big time ratings - its first four seasons didn't even get it into the Nielson top 30.

And it requires guts to stick with a show when the numbers don't come, courage not to buckle under the pressure from the executive floor. But history proves that commitment to ideas and keeping faith in the talent has to be preferable to a pilot system that just throws everything at the wall in the hope that something sticks. If an audience is bonding to a show, however small that audience is to begin with, isn’t it worth investing the time to help it find its true potential? And if that means ripping up the rulebook and scheduling in a different way, or playing with windows to build excitement and availability, then we should be prepared to try anything.

It takes every artistic medium a number of decades to find it’s footing and be recognized as a legitimate art form. Novels were not taken seriously at first because they were not poetry. Photography was seen as inferior to painting for its first 50 years. It took decades for film to graduate from cheap nickelodeon entertainment for the masses to something considered to be a fine art (Buster Keaton is now seen as a genius, but at the time was a vaudevillian clown in the flickers).

As for David Lean - no one paid any attention to his warning in 1990. No one took him seriously that night. The film industry didn't believe that television could ever become its biggest competitor. And yet it would be only 8 years later that ‘The Sopranos’ would debut on HBO; and the tide of actors, directors and writers seeking and finding a more fertile playground than the film industry was offering would begin. I do not think anyone today - 15 years later - (in terms of character driven drama) can argue that television has not indeed taken over. So it’s really only in the past decade or so that television has finally been seen as a legitimate art form. Mostly because these pioneers in cable took chances and those stories found audiences thirsting for more sophisticated narratives & characters than the movie theaters were offering them.

The warp-speed of technological advancement - the Internet, streaming, multi-platforming - happens to have coincided with the recognition of TV as an art form. So you have this incredible confluence of a medium coming into its own JUST AS the technology for that medium is drastically shifting. Studios and networks who ignore either shift - whether the increasing sophistication of story telling, or the constantly shifting sands of technological advancement - will be left behind. And if they fail to hear these warnings, audiences will evolve faster than they will. They will seek the stories and content-providers who give them what they demand - complex, smart stories available whenever they want, on whatever device they want, wherever they want. Netflix and other similar services have succeeded because they have married good content with a forward-thinking approach to viewing habits and appetites.

The risk at this juncture is becoming too institutionalized, too schematic - thinking that something which is working NOW will necessarily work a year from now. The curse of success is that the stakes get higher. Careers are made, salaries increase, and people have reputations and track records to protect. The end result is a shift toward conservatism, away from risk-taking. And if there is one thing that overlaps between business and art, it's that in the long run, THE RISK-TAKERS ARE REWARDED.