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Master Burnett (dating Roma Downey)
« on: Apr 15th, 2004, 7:52am » |
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http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2004-04-14-apprentice-burne tt_x.htm
Master of 'The Apprentice'
By Gary Levin, USA TODAY
The casual viewer of The Apprentice might think Donald Trump is its chief executive. After all, the wispy-haired mogul says he's TV's biggest and highest-paid star, and he's the public face of what he calls the No. 1 show.
Mark Burnett has had a big impact on TV programming, rivaling name-brand drama producers like Steven Bochco.
By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY
But all of these claims are among Trump's usual embellishments. He's not the show's mastermind but a mere actor, paid a pittance in TV terms for his services. He consults NBC on who gets fired and who will be hired in tonight's two-hour finale (9 ET/PT). And it's the network that will sign the $250,000 paycheck of Trump's new employee.
No, the wizard of this television Oz is impresario Mark Burnett, 43, who four years ago crossed a grand "social experiment" with a game show patterned after a Swedish series and reshaped prime-time TV with Survivor.
The producer now claims two of the top five shows. His work can be seen on four of the six broadcast networks. And he rivals name-brand drama producers Steven Bochco and David E. Kelley in his impact on programming.
Consider Burnett's output:
•The Apprentice is this season's top new show, averaging 19.6 million viewers through last week, and could reach 30 million with tonight's finale. The show, already renewed for two more editions, has allowed NBC to breathe easier with the impending exit of Friends and to abandon its two-hour "must-see TV" Thursday comedy block after 20 years.
•Survivor, wrapping its eighth installment on CBS on May 9 (8 p.m. ET/PT), reinvented the reality genre for broadcast television, ushering in a wave of high-stakes adventure and dating shows in which contestants are eliminated each week.
•The Restaurant, a documentary-style soap about celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito's Italian eatery, begins a six-episode second season Monday (NBC, 10 p.m. ET/PT) with a tailor-made controversy. DiSpirito is in a bitter feud with the Manhattan restaurant's financial backer and countersued him last week; the fight is captured on camera.
•The Casino (Fox, June 8, Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT) features the owners, staff and guests of Las Vegas' fraying Golden Nugget hotel/casino, spruced up in hopes of reliving its glory days.
•The Contender (due early next year on NBC), a co-production with DreamWorks and Sylvester Stallone, aims to find the next boxing champion with yet another elimination-style contest. The network agreed to pay more than $2 million an episode, a record for a reality show.
He's also dabbling in scripted series, producing pilots for two new dramas and a proposed autobiographical sitcom, Commando Nanny, reflecting his unlikely path from British paratrooper to Beverly Hills caregiver.
THE BURNETT FILE
Age: 43
Born: Myland (East London), U.K.
Résumé: British paratrooper, Beverly Hills nanny, T-shirt and life insurance salesman, reality-TV impresario.
Projects: Eco- Challenge, Survivor, The Restaurant, The Apprentice, The Casino (June 8, Fox), The Contender (early 2005, NBC).
Personal: A divorced father of two boys, he recently began dating actress Roma Downey.
Passions: Religious conspiracies, extreme adventure sports.
Self-described fault: Opinionated.
Like Survivor and Apprentice, Contender will hew to Burnett's well-crafted formula: luscious visuals, savvy archetypal casting and climactic set pieces like those challenges, boardrooms and tribal councils, replete with corny catch-phrases ("The tribe has spoken," "You're fired").
The "unscripted drama" — his preferred term for reality shows — will focus on the struggles and rivalries of 16 would-be fighters from disadvantaged backgrounds as seen through the eyes of loved ones, capped with a weekly bout between a pair of them. A live finale will crown a champ of what is ambitiously planned as a new boxing federation.
Five years ago, while shooting the first season of Survivor on an island off Borneo, he couldn't have predicted the transforming effect the show would have on network TV. At the time, the medium relied on sitcoms, dramas, movies, newsmagazines and another, soon-to-fade phenomenon — quiz show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.
"I knew (Survivor) would get water-cooler buzz," he says. "I knew it would have a rabid cult following; I didn't know it would be rabid and massive."
Burnett cites author Joseph Campbell, whose musings on the mythology of heroes were an inspiration for Star Wars' George Lucas, as a catalyst for devising his shows, which focus on "death and rebirth," carefully constructed ceremonies and fear of exclusion.
"The philosophy of Survivor is to build a world and destroy exactly what you've built for personal gain, and The Apprentice is a kingdom: I've taken a castle and a throne, and the king (Trump) is saying, 'Off with your head.' " In each, the scheming, back-stabbing contestants are "so drawn to the horror of being excluded, of being killed, it's magnetic. What's really interesting about these types of shows is they're unpredictable, but in a very familiar setting."
In contrast, The Restaurant and The Casino— lacking those ritual executions — are more familiar soap operas, only with real people instead of paid actors.
TV executives who have worked with Burnett describe him as a phenom much like his twin hits. He's smart, charismatic, passionate, focused and persuasive. One network chief has likened him to P.T. Barnum in his tenacity at pitching fully conceived ideas; Burnett himself says he long ago visualized the look and detail of The Apprentice's dramatic boardroom scenes and how the vanquished Contender will make his exit.
"He's the ultimate salesman," NBC entertainment chief Jeff Zucker says. "He's just got great passion and a great ability to make you believe." Says WB co-CEO Jordan Levin: "It takes looking at The Apprentice, which on paper is a very dry idea, to reveal the talent that Mark brings to a project and (how he) makes selling lemonade on a corner exciting to watch."
Burnett edits hundreds of hours of footage from dozens of camera crews for each episode. A single hour of Survivor takes three days to film but nine weeks or more to edit, and each show employs a team of 300 to 400 — camera, sound and production crews, editors — with budgets far exceeding other reality shows. So far, none of his shows are filmed simultaneously: Casino recently wrapped, Apprentice 2 will be shot in early summer, the next Survivor afterward. As creator, part-owner and storyteller, Burnett makes millions from each.
His personal journey has its own unusual path. The former paratrooper, born in East London, moved to Los Angeles, eked out a living as a nanny for two years, then sold T-shirts on the beach in nearby Venice. He decided to combine his twin quests — getting rich and retaining his adventurer's background — in launching his first TV series, the grueling Eco-Challenge event.
Initially sold as a special to MTV's Doug Herzog ("He wouldn't take no for an answer, and only five minutes later I thought, 'We shouldn't be doing that!' "), the show later aired regularly on ESPN and USA. From there, he moved on to Survivor, and his career took off.
The two knocks most frequently leveled at Burnett are his shameless penchant for lying, especially to protect secret plot twists, which he calls "part of the job" and mere "gamesmanship," and an ego the size of Montana.
Just six weeks after Survivor premiered in June 2000, Burnett circulated a "manifesto" on what he deemed the future of television, likening himself to legends Norman Lear and Aaron Spelling. He also coveted a stab at producing CBS' lagging Early Show. He has largely backed up his bluster with performance, but his golden touch hasn't proved uninterrupted: Combat Missions, a military drill show for USA, didn't ignite. A bad script and questionable logistics killed proposed WB family road-trip comedy Are We There Yet?, which would have been filmed throughout Europe.
And his most audacious plan, Destination: Mir, in which contestants would train and compete for a spot on a Soyuz rocket, disintegrated along with the Russian space station, although he still hopes to revisit it one day.
But he's not content with his status as king of reality. Burnett's proposed scripted series for next season include Global Frequency, a WB drama about a rogue intelligence agency with X-Files undertones; and Eden, a fictionalized sort-of Survivor for NBC about a group marooned on an island.
He also has done a pilot for another CBS reality series called Recovery, in which former federal agents seek missing children. And fascinated with religious history, he has optioned feature-film rights to early Lewis Perdue novels The Da Vinci Legacy and Daughter of God, and expects to make God into his first try at the big screen.
But reality TV remains his stock in trade, even as viewers adjust their antennae to his storytelling tricks. Once shocked by charges that Survivor distorted events with editing, viewers have grown far more cynical.
Those taxicabs ferrying home The Apprentice's losers? They made U-turns when the cameras stopped rolling, because ousted contestants were sequestered in a nearby hotel until production finished. Many "customers" of The Restaurant and The Casino were culled from casting calls. Burnett brushes aside such quibbles.
"It was so new it caused questioning, and now people are more accepting of the journey. People now are just enjoying the art."
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