Getting on
the Air
A Look at the Creative Arts Emmys
By Alexandra
Komisaruk
Lights, camera, webcast. Add a talented production team and cut a three-and-a-half hour presentation down to an hour for HBO Plus, and you have the Creative Arts Emmys 2000. Thanks in large
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The present Awards show was shaped, in part, by the Prime Time Emmys. After Michael received two Emmy nominations in 1982 for Fame, one for Dramatic Series Editing and the other for title design in an "Area Award," Michael attended an awards dinner. It was a relatively unstructured affair. That same year, he also attended the prime time awards. It struck him as a shame that
there wasn’t a similar ceremony for the craft awards. Some years later, he became Governor of the Editor’s Peer Group of the Television Academy. When he and a number of fellow Peer Group Governors, including John Moffitt, suggested televising the Creative Arts Awards, Meryl Marshall, the President of the Television Academy, asked Michael and John to produce the event. For the past three years, they have done just that.
I met with Michael at the Post Group where he was working with producer Spike Jones Jr. and editor Randy Magalski on this year’s Awards. "In ‘98, John Moffitt and I set out with Spike Jones Jr. and we did the first television show that the Creative Arts had, with one exception, in its history," Michael recounted.
The challenge in such a broadcast is to keep the Awards accessible and interesting, while also giving the honorees their due. "There are really two elements involved. You have to acknowledge the people getting the awards. At the same time you have to make it an entertainment show that can be appealing to the general public who don’t really understand what the Creative Arts are all about in the first place," Michael explains. "That first year, for example, I cut a musical montage which opened the show and tried to touch on all the different crafts," he says. The edited show ran for an hour on the TVLand cable network.
"Then [in ‘99] we decided we really had to take it up a notch. So we said, ‘Let’s try to make it as much like the Prime Time Awards as we possibly can.’ We got a terrific crew,
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I hope we can raise the bar again next time." |
This year, Michael’s goal was to include all the winners and presenters as well as several montages – quite a challenge considering that sixty awards are given, many more than the Oscars or Prime Time Emmys. "We always have every winner on camera. And as many sound bites as we possibly can. But obviously they have to be condensed," Michael explains. "We still want to do the entertainment part of the show, which is the stars and the comedy routines that have been written for them. But we cut them down, too. So it’s walk-
ing that fine line of trying to make sure that it’s still an entertainment piece but at the same time allowing that all of the people are given the proper recognition."
The show was also broadcast live in its entirety on the web, at iCast.com. Reports indicate that those who viewed the webcast via cable modem or DSL were able to watch it full-screen with few technical glitches.
In discussing the show’s direction, Michael is optimistic. "I’m very thrilled with it. I think that overall we’ve got a higher quality show than last year. Each year we seem to get a little bit better and I hope we can raise the bar again next time. The challenge, of course, is to do it with the budget that we’re given. Hope-fully, we’ll be able to have the same kind of team that we had this year and I suspect we will, because the Academy is very supportive of this effort."
Alexandra Komisaruk is a Guild member and also a member of the WGA.
She can be reached via email
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 21, No. 5 - September/October 2000
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