Post haste los angeles tv#

Melissa Lee comforted her son and daughter after a student opened fire in their suburban Kansas City high school, wounding an administrator and a police officer stationed there. “It’s a difficult business to start with, and then when you have our incredible market conditions on top of that, you’ve got a roller-coaster ride.MISSION, Kan. “There are absolutely no consolidations being considered at this time,” he says. Riot Santa Monica, for example, is wrapping up visuals on four pics, including “The Scorpion King,” “Queen of the Damned,” “Pluto Nash” and “Blade 2.”ĭespite its problems, Liberty Livewire has no current plans to shutter any of its other shops anytime soon, but doesn’t rule it out in the future, Chernoff says. In addition to its efforts at consolidation, Liberty is also building up its feature f/x operations. To help stave off costs, Liberty Livewire does not anticipate investing in any more of its houses, but will combine its resources, equipment and staffers and operate fewer facilities. Revenues fell to $147.7 million from $302 million during the same period. Once you’re at that point, you lose your clients.”Whatever it does, Liberty must improve its bottom line - a tough feat in a biz that already is plagued by low profit margins of 1% to 5%, if lucky.ĭuring its second quarter (third quarter earnings should be announced in the coming weeks), Liberty Livewire reported a net loss of $31 million, compared with a loss of $44.5 million a year earlier. If a company gets too large, it reaches a point where the clients don’t know which direction to turn.

“Liberty would like to keep our companies unique and prosper in the markets they serve. “The homogenizing of the Liberty companies is not our intention,” says Liberty Livewire Pictures Group prexy Larry Chernoff. Liberty Livewire says it understands this fear and has avoided stressing to clients that its companies are owned by Liberty. It can’t consolidate too much and create a large, one-stop shop for all of its clients’ post-production needs because filmmakers fear behemoths and tend to seek out boutiques, run by creatives they’ve worked with before, to handle their projects. While its pricing problems may have hurt the post biz, the creative community - which Liberty can’t afford to lose - is rejoicing.įurther belt-tightening puts Liberty Livewire in a dangerous position. The industry has never recovered from that and may never recover from that.” “By competing with each other and their competitors, it drove prices down. “That may work in the cable industry, but in our industry, that strategy had a bad effect on the business,” says one topper at a major post house. It’s the John Malone way of doing business: Let your own companies compete against each other. Liberty hasn’t centralized sales and marketing efforts between its post houses, with producers often getting bids from three different Liberty-owned companies at a time.Many of Liberty Livewire’s companies offer similar services and compete with one another, forcing Liberty to lower its prices rather than raise them.The notion that Liberty could treat its facilities equally and shift customers around to shops that had openings didn’t pan out, as clients left for other houses where they could control where their project would be worked on and by whom.

Post haste los angeles tv#

When the bottom fell out of the advertising and TV markets, Liberty Livewire’s companies were in a tough position. Liberty Media’s acquisitions locked it into the broadcast television and commercials businesses, with few clients coming from the film world.The move is surprising for a company that planned on dominating the highly competitive post-production world by acquiring the largest and most well-respected post facilities in Hollywood and London - including Todd-AO, Four Media, Soundelux, Encore Video, Hollywood Digital, Rushes, Soho Group and Company 3 - and hiking up prices.īut Liberty’s takeover strategy has been marred by problems:

At other facilities, staffers are being pinkslipped, and Liberty is selling off soundstages and other real estate in an effort to turn assets into cash.