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commercials and music videos – that he felt like a documentary treatment was a no-brainer. “It actually felt like it was a better documentary than it was a book,” he says, adding the book was a bigger hit with business and advertising execs than the general public. “I didn’t write the book to be a New York Times bestseller and a summer read. I wanted it to be more of a cultural guideline on how culture affects business.” With the documentary, Stoute is aiming to branch out and reach college age students and their parents with his proposition that a ‘tanning’ effect has rendered young demographics colorblind, making ethnically specific marketing campaigns irrelevant. Book adaptations have aided National Geographic Channels president Howard T. Owens’ reinvention of the cable network. NGC’s docudrama versions of Bill O’Reilly’s books Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever and Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot scored big ratings for the network, with the latter averaging nearly 3.4 million viewers. “In addition to being an evocative and provocative title, Killing Kennedy also had a
built-in fan base and a writer and personality in Bill O’Reilly,” he says. “Those three things lined up perfectly for what we deemed to be a special recipe and it’s worked for us.”
James
In both Kennedy and Lincoln, NGC opted to frame the films as thrillers – an approach that was inspired by O’Reilly’s book in the case of the Tom Hanks-narrated Lincoln. Writer Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers) used a line from the book – “John Wilkes Booth has less than 12 days to live”
– to frame the story around the period leading up to Booth’s assassination of the president. Kennedy was originally conceived as a documentary but the network decided to take a chance on developing it as a scripted docudrama. A doc adaptation also risked blending in with several other Kennedy TV projects timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his assassination last November. “There are probably 30 documentaries on the JFK assassination that didn’t require underlying IP because there’s so much information out there,” says Owens. “What makes it different? Who has access to a real-life character that hasn’t talked on camera before? The cost of entry is lower. You’re not taking the bet that you are with scripted and thus you’re not so in need of an iconic title.” NGC is now prepping Killing Jesus, again from an O’Reilly book. “Everyone is doing historical nonfiction and there seems to be a rush into that,” he adds. “We’re looking for what hasn’t been done. What are boundaries that haven’t been explored? What are stories about people that have not been told that you want to hear about? That’s what we’re looking for now from agents.” •
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