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Hi, this is Frank Radice for Red Touch Media and this is our continuing series on The Future
of Content. And I'm talking to James Kanatas who is the head of programming for the new
El Rey network. So this is a pretty amazing job you've got. Tell me a little bit about
what it's like to launch this new network and work with Robert Rodriguez.
It's been a dream. You know, programming a network not around what the advertisers are,
from the beginning, but programming around Robert's style and sensibility and the psychographic
of what young people are really responding to has been, really, a unique opportunity.
Tell me a little bit about some of the programming on El Rey.
So it's a lot of what you'd expect from Robert Rodriguez. We've got, about two thirds of
the network is acquired series - X-Files, Dark Angel, Starsky & Hutch - and the, about
a third is acquired movies. Great John Carpenter movies like Escape from New York, or more
recent movies like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill. And then about ten percent of the grid, so
actually what's left is the original series. So we've got four originals this year, From
Dusk Till Dawn is our first flagship scripted series. After that we've got Matador produced
by Kurtzman and Orci, premiering in the summer. We've got Lucha Libre produced by Mark Burnett
in the back-half of the year and then a subculture docuseries produced by Vice Mexico and Scott
Gurney the EP of Dynasty. So anyone who's familiar with Robert, clearly
knows what Dusk Till Dawn is about. Tell me a little bit about Matador.
Yeah, Matador is a lot of fun. It's a guy who's a soccer player by day, secret agent
by night. And, the word matador of course means killer in Spanish. And it's going to
be a lot of fun. And Lucha Libre? Tell me a little bit about
that because the American audience may not be too familiar with that, but it's certainly
something that the Hispanic audience knows about.
Sure. The interesting opportunity with Lucha Libre is, we went and are partnering directly
with Triple A Lucha Libre out of Mexico, and combining a lot of the great mythological
underpinnings of Lucha Libre with Mark Burnett's kind of, live event producing savvy. And a
lot of creative queues that were taken come from other universes than wrestling entirely.
I'm going to stay mum on where those creative influences are coming from, but we're going
to do a lot of fun things with the mythology, with the masks, really transporting the US
those things that make Lucha Libre unique. And we'll be tweaking the things that we think
will help it resonate with the US audience where it hasn't before.
So you have a partner in Univision, and so there's sort of an inherent Hispanic level
of thought that goes into what it is that you do. But it's not a Hispanic network, it's
an English language network. How does that impact your thought process as you go to put
together the grid? Univision is a great partner. They run all
of our distribution and sales. They run our broadcast operations and various other functions,
but really, it was their desire to largely kind of stand back from the programming and
a lot of the marketing so that El Rey would be an incremental value to them. The goal
is not for El Rey and UniMás to compete, but for El Rey to really have its own unique
voice and be totally incremental. To the second part of your question about how Hispanic is
the network, how Hispanic is it not? I think the idea with El Rey is we're sort of beyond
borders at this point. You know, I think if you want to appeal to young America as a whole,
you need to make programming that looks like America, specifically young America. And you
need to be made by people behind the camera who reflect that same kind of demographic.
So I think when you look at the way that Robert has always made movies and the way we're making
series, it's just in who we're getting to make the show that's what it comes down to.
So the line that most resonates about the network, it seems to me is that it's a kick
*** network. How does that reflect in the programming?
Yeah, kick *** is something that we like to say. My mother probably doesn't like me to
say. But what, to me, a lot of what El Rey is is the sound and the spirit of the heroes
that Robert tends to celebrate in his movies, these guys who are sort of maverick-y. What
does that mean? You've got these guys who really live by their own code. They're rebels.
They're outsiders. They're Mulder and Scully, which is otherwise a police procedural, but
you've got these characters who are the outcasts and they have their own code. So, for me,
what a kick *** network means is a network that celebrates stories and characters who
live their own way and we celebrate that. And now, also reflected in that sort of style
is these theme weeks that you will have from some of the movies that you've also acquired.
Tell me about some of that. Yeah, we've got a lot of kung fu movies from
the Shaw brothers collection. And a lot of the themes that are so interesting in these
movies are themes like vengeance. So we're playing with a lot of those themes that we
think resonate really well. As well as things like...rip your heart out Valentine's Day.
Yeah, that's the way El Rey would celebrate Valentine's Day, is with Fright Night and
Dracula. So clearly you need to be thinking as a programmer
in a completely different way than anyone has ever programmed a network before. You
need to be thinking about, clearly, what is the brand and how would the brand do it? But
what is the audience and what do they expect from the brand of Robert Rodriguez?
Yeah. Staying true to Robert and what he tends to make and be into is always part of it.
But yeah, it's about counter programming. We're small right now. And the way we're going
to get noticed is by being a little bit noisy. And we've got to try some crazy things.
Congratulations and this is Frank Radice with James Kanatas the Head Programmer for the
El Rey Network, for the Red Touch Media series, The Future of Content. See you next time.