All Crime,
All the Time
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (NOVEMBER 2001)
Crime
has been paying well enough for Court TV, the
fast-growing cable network launched in 1991 (and founded
by the now beleaguered Steven Brill) that under
chief executive Henry Schleiff has doubled its
reach to 60 million viewers in recent years, doling
out televised trials by day and original riffs on the
criminal justice system by night. But brand extension
pays, too, and the network is now giving the green light
to a variety of book-related projects it hopes will
parlay its courtroom dramas into bestseller material,
and vice versa. “We’re being very opportunistic, because
we have resources and experts that nobody else has,”
says Court TV General Counsel Doug Jacobs. “Books
are a great way for us to put our best foot forward.”
Book traffic flows in several directions at Court TV.
The company is actively seeking books and manuscripts
— primarily nonfiction — that it can develop as TV programming.
“We are very interested in books,” affirms Rosalie
Muskatt, Vice President for original movies, speaking
from the Toronto set of Court TV’s first original television
movie. That production, set to air in 2002, chronicles
the plight of a woman who has two young children and
is slammed with 20 years in prison under questionably
excessive drug laws. It typifies Court TV originals
in that it deals “with strong social issues that have
elements of American crime and justice,” Muskatt says.
“They need to be contemporary stories.” The network
aims to produce between two and four TV movies per year,
all in the same social-justice vein. “We’re also very
open to exploring established writers and working with
them on original ideas,” Muskatt adds.
Going the other direction, the network develops book
spin-offs based on its documentaries and other televised
or online content. Since Court TV is half owned by AOL
Time Warner (the other half is held by Liberty
Media), the AOL publishing family makes a natural
book partner. Earlier this year, for example, Time Warner
unit Little, Brown published The Smoking Gun,
a volume of documents taken from the Court TV-owned
website of the same name, which collects an amusing
array of “secret, surprising, and salacious” items through
freedom-of-information requests and other means, and
serves them to 600,000 visitors a month. (Featured document:
Burt Reynolds’ 1996 bankruptcy statement, disclosing
his $7,500 debt to two toupee companies.) There’s also
Shots in the Dark, a compendium of crime photography
published by Little, Brown in connection with a Court
TV documentary on the subject. And the Time Warner family
is set to publish a book called You Be the Judge,
based on summaries of trials and featuring an interactive
component that lets readers guess the verdict in each
case. Despite the AOL synergy, however, executives stress
that Court TV is open to deals with other houses. In
1999, says Jacobs, Kensington was invited to
raid the network’s library of trial stories for a series
of four books collecting the hottest cases in the archives.
On the classroom front, Court TV has renewed a deal
with Wadsworth International Thompson Learning,
which has licensed 25 Court TV documentaries as “added
value” for its textbooks. The network’s “Choices and
Consequences” effort feeds a number of teen-relevant
documentaries into classrooms, and the company may look
into publishing related textbooks for teens as well.
Elsewhere, discussions are burbling about a print version
of the material collected on Court TV’s website, which
includes extensive trial coverage (more than 700 cases
have aired to date), an archive of verdicts, and more
riveting, salacious documents (O.J. Simpson transcript,
anyone?). A subsidiary site, Crime Library, contains
a database with serial killers from Jack the Ripper
to Ted Bundy, ripe for repackaging in book form.
It can start to sound unsavory. But back on the set
in Toronto, Muskatt emphasizes that not just any drive-by
crime novel will do for a Court TV production. “I wish
we could just adapt a wonderful murder mystery,” she
says. “But that’s not our mandate. We’re hoping that
this movie will call attention to drug laws that need
to be looked at and changed. What we’re trying to do
across the board with our movies is to stimulate conversation.”
©2001
Publishing Trends
