By Mike Reynolds
Picking up from VideoAge‘s Water Cooler feature, published on December 17, 2020.
Since COVID hit, Hollywood producer Howard Gordon (pictured above) has noted that, “there’s a lot of talk and a lot of development,” but nothing is official or concrete. He also revealed that he hasn’t quite gotten his “sea legs yet,” explaining that he hasn’t been “in production since the last season of Homeland, so it’s been a while and things are really changing… I’m figuring out the market. The move by Warner [to release its 2021 film slate on HBO Max]… it’s unrecognizable.”
Homeland was an adaptation of the successful Israeli series Prisoners of War, and it is assumed that the next likely project from Gordon and production partner Alex Gansa will be a return, not just to Showtime, but to another Israel-centric story, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, from novelist Nathan Englander. The story centers on a spy, Prisoner Z, who has betrayed his country and is now being held in a secret prison in the Negev desert.
“I have other stuff brewing,” Gordon told VideoAge, “but nothing has been sold or locked in yet, that’s why it’s a little premature” to confirm what his next project will actually be.
“The business model that sustained the business for so long… It was pretty durable, but it hasn’t been disrupted like this… certainly not in all the time I’ve been doing this, and I’ve been doing it for a while,” he said, noting that his first credit was as a writer on The Wizard in1986.
Asked if he gets nervous about whether his next project will live up to expectations, Gordon explained that he trusts his vision after so many years in the industry. “The same metric that got me interested and the same curiosity that was compelling me to get into a project still holds, as it always did,” he said. “I assume that if I’m intrigued by it or if I’m interested in it, I hope the buyers are interested in it and an audience, in turn, will be interested.
“I find that the matrix of success now is so different. What constitutes a successful show? Once upon a time there were lines that you could draw based on ratings, but now I don’t know. Is it creatively successful? Is it successful in foreign? (With) oblique metrics used by the streamers you don’t know if it’s an outright hit.”
While his “home” for the past few years has been at Showtime, in the last few years cable and traditional terrestrial television has found competition from streaming services. Asked if he would join the ranks of creators who have gone the streaming route, Gordon didn’t rule it out. However, as a viewer, he acknowledged, “I’m not a fan of consuming shows that way, watching shows that way. Bingeing is such a gross word! In the context of food, it’s gluttonous and also one doesn’t binge a meal with other people, you eat with other people as a communal enterprise. Watching a story on your own time and at your own pace makes the experience a little more like a solo, rather than a collective, experience. That’s my general observation from a general cultural perspective.” Nonetheless, he admitted with a smile, that as a creator, “I’m as desperate to sell as anyone.”
Whatever the next green-lit project turns out to be, Gordon admitted, “I’ve never tried to be reactive, or anticipate what the market will bear and it’s not always to my benefit.”
In addition to having, “a taste” for a project, he acknowledged, “you have to be a bit of a masochist. On one hand you have to love crisis, because there’s always something going on. You have to embrace, particularly at the start, a pilot, and then the first year of the show. Of course, obviously, with some success, you get a lot smarter and people get a lot less intrusive.
“You really do have to keep your own counsel and at the same time stay open to the collaboration, both to your fellow writers and your actors and directors and the studio, and you have budget issues. You have so many moving parts and so many things that can go wrong and it only takes one bad casting choice, or you hire the wrong director… There are so many things that have to go right to make something work. You’re really doing so many things at the same time and you have plenty of obstacles and ruts, turns, and hills along the way,” he concluded.
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