Focus On: John Morayniss
Thu, May 17th 2007
LOS ANGELES - Blueprint Entertainment has
certainly come a long way since its humble beginnings five years ago as
a two-person operation in Century City. Formed by former Alliance
Atlantis executives John Morayniss and Noreen Halpern, the company has
become a key player in the North American television market, producing
a range of series and TV movies for U.S. and Canadian networks. And
further growth is on the horizon, with the production company having
recently acquired a significant stake in the Canadian outfit Oasis
International. "We felt we needed to get into the distribution side of
the business," explains Morayniss, the chairman and CEO of Blueprint.
"We've had a long-term relationship with Oasis, almost since the start
of Blueprint. They've sold a number of our shows, and they have a track
record of selling an eclectic mix of programming, from scripted series
to kids' programming, animation, reality, factual, movies. We felt that
having worked with them, it seemed like a nice fit to bring our two
companies together."
Blueprint was able to make its investment in Oasis after having
received a financial injection of its own from Robert Lantos and Jeff
Sagansky. "I've known Robert for a long time because I worked at
Alliance when he was running it," Morayniss says. "He and Jeff had been
talking for some time about doing some business together. They knew
each other for years, because when Robert was running Alliance,
Sagansky was the entertainment president at CBS. Blueprint became the
vehicle for the two of them to get back into business together."
The multimillion-dollar investment will be used to accelerate the
company's growth, Morayniss says. This has included expanding its
production and development capabilities with the hiring of Marla
Ginsburg and Ellie Hannibal. In addition, Morayniss notes, "as part of
the Oasis acquisition we're putting in place a healthy credit facility
that will allow us to go after third-party projects, series, movies, a
mix of programming. We'll also look at other strategic acquisitions. I
don't think it's going at stop with Oasis in terms of acquiring
companies. We will look at libraries. We'll also look at other
strategic media companies, like for example, digital channels or some
interesting branded Internet channels."
The company has also recently set up a children's programming and
animation division, Blueprint Kids, under Frank Saperstein, following
its success with the BBC co-production Shoebox Zoo and the new animated series Iggy Arbuckle, for Teletoon in Canada and produced in association with National Geographic Kids Entertainment.
The bulk of the company's activities, however, are in the drama
area. "That's our expertise," Morayniss says; and also his heritage,
after having run the television division at Alliance Atlantis for a
number of years, working with Halpern on a range of series and TV
movies. "We both ended up leaving Alliance Atlantis at the start of its
wind-down (of drama production), which occurred shortly after CSI came into the company."
Morayniss and Halpern set up Blueprint Entertainment with a fair
bit of trepidation. "We didn't know if the phone was going to ring or
if anyone was going to return our calls. We decided, literally just
after we left Alliance Atlantis, to take a trip to NATPE. And the idea
was, let's go, tell (the networks) what our plans are, and then let's
take six months off and recharge. We'll come back and put a business
plan together, get business cards, do all the things you're supposed to
do when you start a company. Out of NATPE we got a TV movie off the
ground with MTV," Morayniss recalls, adding, "so we decided not to take
time off."
Morayniss says that while building the company over the last five
years has certainly been thrilling, he is excited to lead the venture
into its next stage of growth. "This business really supports people
that are creative and think outside the box. Even though we had very
little capital resources when we started, it was just the two of us and
our ideas, we found that people had faith in us. It was fun building
that, and now it's even more fun that we have backers, and now that
we've integrated a distribution company, we can do so much more. We're
an independent company so we work outside the typical studio system,
and that's fun too. We get to do things the studios don't want to do,
we get to look at the shows we want to look at, we get to work with
people we want to work with."
Excerpted from Worldscreen Weekly
|
