THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 28, 1994 TAG: 9411240514
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 281 lines
On a late-winter afternoon in 1990, Tom Naughton played the dual roles of somebody and nobody. The latter part is one he's determined not to repeat.
The somebody was a top-flight television news producer. A public-TV series that Naughton conceived had just won a national award as the best investigative news show on TV. Naughton was at New York City's Roosevelt Hotel that day to collect his award.
What few in the crowd of TV's news elites realized then, however, was that the man they were cheering was out of work. Naughton's highly praised program, ``The Kwitny Report,'' had been canceled. It was too controversial for big-money sponsors.
Meanwhile, a promising project he'd seized next - a small-budget family film starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson - was slipping away because the Suffolk studio where he'd planned to produce it was going under.
So there Naughton was that March afternoon in New York, strolling past the Dan Rathers and Harry Smiths of the TV world. As he climbed to the ballroom stage to accept his award, he should have felt respected, important. Who knows? He may even have been hated by some of his envious peers.
But a worrisome old Mr. Nobody was nagging inside: ``What am I DOING? What have I DONE to my life?''
Fast forward to today.
If it's like any other Monday, Tom Naughton is dragging on his umpteenth Marlboro Light in the midst of his umpteenth phone call while somebody walks into his office for the umpteenth time with a question or note about one of the film projects he's immersed in right now.
In other words, the man is stretched. His company, New Dominion Pictures Inc. of Virginia Beach, produces two of the best-regarded documentary series on cable television: ``Archaeology'' and ``PaleoWorld.'' Both run on The Learning Channel.
If Naughton's plans gel, there will be many more TV series and other film projects for New Dominion.
These days, there's so much he feels he has to get done that he often just works through the nights.
His fourth-floor office in a drab Pacific Avenue office building is a testament to his get-it-and-go lifestyle. A box of Triscuits and a canister of processed cheese - lunch? breakfast? - sit on his cluttered desk. Newspapers are strewn across the floor. Two neckties are slung over a chair, on which an open satchel sits.
This fellow Tom Naughton, say people who work with him closely, is possessed.
``He has one of the most driven personalities I have ever met,'' said Bob Smith, president of Earworks Digital Audio Inc. of Virginia Beach, which does sound editing and provides original music for ``PaleoWorld.'' ``He makes things happen just by sheer tenacity.''
Naughton himself confides that he's probably - well - hyperactive.
But what the heck? He's happy.
For its premier season, ``Archaeology'' won a Cable Ace award as the nation's best cable-TV documentary series. Earlier this month, it was nominated for another Cable Ace for last year's second season. And if the critics have anything to do with it, ``PaleoWorld,'' a series about evolution that premiered this season, will reap its share of nominations when they're made next year.
Naughton and his partner, a native Quebecer named Nicolas Valcour, are running a $4 million-a-year operation that pound for pound may be the most global enterprise in Hampton Roads.
They dispatched film crews to six continents this year. To reach the archaeologists and paleontologists featured in the shows, their crews have tiptoed through mine fields and slogged through rainforests. They've turned in travel receipts covering everything from Japan Air Lines to a Jordanian camel driver.
In the documentary world, New Dominion is known for doing its high-quality shows quickly and relatively cheaply. At about $140,000 per half-hour episode, its production costs are as little as half what better-known documentary producers like National Geographic Society spend.
It's no wonder Naughton has several other TV projects in the works. He's not volunteering any details about them right now. But after one of his recent all-nighters drawing up a business plan for would-be investors, the 40-year-old talks like a man who's just getting started.
``I think,'' he said, ``our best years are ahead of us.''
Anybody who's worked with him closely isn't surprised that from those dark days of early 1990, the energetic, opportunistic Tom Naughton eventually re-emerged to get the better of him.
Jonathan Kwitny, the former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter whom Naughton transformed into a TV newsman on ``The Kwitny Report,'' calls him ``an organizational dynamo . . . I think he's a genius at what he does. If I ever got bankrolled to do television again, I'd call him and be down on my knees.''
Rick Tamburino, owner of Studio III Video Productions in Virginia Beach, gave Naughton his first big break in 1977 - hiring him as a 23-year-old production assistant. Tamburino said Naughton was unusually conscientious, sweating the details on every job, which back then was typically a TV commercial for some Hampton Roads car dealer.
``Even at that time, he was very imaginative, creative,'' Tamburino said. ``It was obvious he was going to go places.''
Boisterous, bulky Tom Naughton was born and raised in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, the third-oldest of eight kids. The family was as Irish and as Catholic as they come.
``Where I grew up, everybody older than my father spoke with a brogue,'' Naughton recalled. ``I didn't realize older people didn't all speak like that until I got out in the world.''
He attended Catholic schools from kindergarten on. In high school, at Marmion Military Academy, ``one class taught you to love thy neighbor. The other one taught you how to surround and . . . kill him. I'm not kidding.''
Naughton was a crew-cut accountant's son who loved the arts. He painted, sculpted and played piano and classical guitar. At St. Norbert College in Wisconsin he dabbled in conceptual art ``that was so personal and so esoteric that no one could understand it.'' In his senior year, he finally said to himself, ``This is not me.''
Fortunately, one of his college teachers had recognized his aimlessness and handed him a film camera. Naughton was immediately hooked.
He got his arts degree and promptly went to work for a Green Bay-area TV station. Within a year, his older brother, Jim, a Norfolk lawyer, was trying to talk him into moving to Virginia. That's what led in 1977 to his job with Studio III, then located in Norfolk.
Between commercials and industrial films over the next three years, Tamborino let his young study play around with cameras and editing equipment.
Naughton didn't go farther than the next-door office suite to find a documentary subject. An obsessed young man in that office was trying to breed the world's first ultra-pink guppy. Naughton spent months crafting a sympathetic film about the man, then submitted it to the WNET-TV independent documentary fund. To his surprise, the New York public-TV station notified him he was one of 25 finalists for a filmmaking grant.
He didn't win the grant, but the film did get him accepted into the prestigious graduate film school at New York University.
By this time, Naughton was married. His wife, Vicki, a physical therapist, was happy to work in New York to help put her aspiring husband through school.
But the young couple's plans didn't exactly win rave reviews from her parents, aunts, uncles and siblings. ``All of my Virginia in-laws were like, `Excuse me, you're leaving to go to NEW YORK? To go to FILM SCHOOL? Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?' ''
In hindsight, Naughton said: ``I can understand . . . how weird that was.''
His first weeks at NYU back in the early '80s were like a filmmaking boot camp. During classroom screenings of his films, his classmates were wowed by his lighting and editing skills. But in obscenity-laced outbursts, his teacher ripped his work to shreds.
``I thought that my life was over,'' Naughton said.
Then out of the blue, NYU offered him a graduate assistantship with full tuition. Naughton said he still doesn't know why. But he made the most of it. His master's thesis, a documentary about gun-runners for the Irish Republican Army, won an American Film Institute award. That got him a job in 1986 at WNYC, one of New York's lesser-known public-TV stations.
Naughton's job was to develop new programs. ``It was heaven,'' he said.
He pursued several programming ideas. But ``The Kwitny Report'' was the only one that made it onto TV. When Naughton was made producer of the program, that was more than enough to keep him busy.
Right from the start, a program about proposals to legalize drugs, ``The Kwitny Report'' took a take-no-prisoners attitude. Critics loved it.
Naughton vividly recalls the night The New York Times reviewed the show. He and his researcher and associate producer walked at 10 p.m. to The Times building on West 43rd Street and bought copies of the first edition right off the press. They were rewarded with a glowing review.
``The Kwitny Report'' ran locally its first year, stretched across the Northeast and Midwest its second and went national its third. Even then, Naughton and his gang were working with an annual budget of only about $1.5 million. And two-thirds of that was in-kind services like free studio time. After travel and other expenses, Naughton and Jonathan Kwitny had enough money for only two other full-time employees.
``Everybody in the business was amazed to see how little money we had and how few people we had and what we were doing,'' Kwitny said. ``It was Tom. It was like the loaves and fishes what he would do with a budget.''
Not even union work rules stood in Naughton's way. Kwitny said dazzled film editors, who were indoctrinated never to give up their controls, stood back to let Naughton whirl knobs and push levers when deadlines neared.
``He was just an artist at those machines.''
For a two-part show shot in Poland in 1988, Naughton was a one-person producer, director, camera operator and sound man. He and Kwitny worked stretches of 40 hours straight, then crashed into sleep on the floors of their Polish acquaintances.
That show was the series' highlight. ``We were the first news crew to go behind the Iron Curtain and say unequivocally, `It's over. Communism is dead,' '' Naughton boasted.
Unfortunately, ``The Kwitny Report'' soon died too.
``Politics,'' Naughton said flatly. The show's controversial, confrontational approach made public-TV programmers and corporate sponsors squirm.
So there Naughton was in late 1989, out of work and looking for a project.
He knew a writer with a film script. Naughton read it, liked it and decided to try to make it into a movie, to be called ``Stray Kids.'' He lined up Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson as stars and tentatively pulled together more than half of the $2 million budget.
To save money, Naughton planned to produce it at the then-Atlantic Film Studios in Suffolk. He'd heard about the studios, built by a father-and-son duo of New York entertainment lawyers, through his Virginia relatives. Naughton and his wife, who by that time had two young children, decided to move permanently to Hampton Roads.
But soon after coming back in early 1990, Naughton found out that the Suffolk studios were in trouble. The proprietors were too distracted fending off foreclosure to give Naughton's project the attention it deserved.
He thought about moving the project elsewhere. But it might have taken years of full-time effort to get the movie made. And he and his wife weren't keen on uprooting their kids again.
Naughton decided to plow his energy into a field he knew better: documentaries.
Through contacts from ``The Kwitny Report,'' he met Archaeology magazine Editor-in-Chief Peter A. Young. Young wanted his magazine and its publisher, the Archaeological Institute of America, to get a foothold in TV. He gave Naughton the go-ahead to take the idea for a TV series to the broadcast and cable networks.
PBS, Arts & Entertainment, The Discovery Channel and National Geographic all turned down the idea. Naughton's agent suggested he reapproach them all after making a pilot show.
Naughton spent months scouring the United States for financing for the pilot. Then he remembered reading that the Canadian government helped fund film production. Going through someone who knew someone who knew someone in Quebec, he eventually was lined up with Montreal producer Nicolas Valcour.
Their first phone conversation, in December 1990, went something like this:
Naughton: Hello.
Valcour: Uh. Me. Talk to you? Uh.
``I'm thinking, `This is my worst nightmare,' '' Naughton remembered. ``The guy doesn't speak a freaking word of English. How are we going to do this?''
They managed to bridge the language gap, however, and Valcour came through on the financing end. He lined up $150,000 (Canadian) to produce a half-hour pilot.
More rejections followed. But executives of The Discovery Channel's parent company saw something they liked: not for them, but for a fledging new network they'd acquired called The Learning Channel.
In fall 1992, ``Archaeology'' premiered to enthusiastic reviews.
Now, with its third season not yet over, Naughton, Valcour and their combined work forces of about 25 in Virginia Beach are already developing ideas for next year's episodes.
Both ``Archaeology'' and ``PaleoWorld,'' which is also coming back for another season, are now 100 percent financed by The Learning Channel.
These days, Valcour is in charge of scheduling, budgeting and other administrative details - through a smaller sister company of New Dominion's called QUAI 32 Inc., which Valcour owns.
With his elephant's memory for details, his ease with numbers and his smiling, unflappable demeanor, Valcour keeps his and Naughton's operations going day to day.
Naughton calls his French-Canadian partner, who now lives in Virginia Beach, ``the best thing that ever happened to me.'' He said Valcour's organizational skills were proven one day last summer when eight film crews were shooting on the same day in different corners of the world.
``Not one problem,'' Naughton said. ``Not a single one.''
Valcour's active role has freed Naughton to chase ideas - and to develop the contacts needed in TV land to turn ideas into film.
Naughton has a favorite saying to sum up his role: ``The producer's job is to make something happen.''
``This company here,'' he said, smiling, ``is a result of that. Making . . ILLUSTRATION: Color cover photo by Drew C. Wilson
Tom Naughton
Color Staff photos by Bill Tiernan
"The producer's job is to make something happen," says New Dominion
Pictures' Tom Naughton. "You don't make something happen, you're not
a producer."
Jennifer Rivers edits film for an "Archaeology' documentary about
Roanoke Island, N.C., with producer Greg Francis. Computers have
helped speed the editing process at New Dominion. Film images are
converted into bits of data, making it easy to trim or reorder
scenes.
Tom Naughton's French-Canadian partner, Nicholas Valcour, oversees
scheduling and budgeting for their far flung venture. Valcour says
New Dominion's Oceanfront headquarters is a spirit-refreshing key to
its success. "Just to go out and walk on the beach ... this ambience
is very important."
B\W photo by Bill Tiernan
An editor works on the episode of " Archaeology" about the Lost
Colony, filmed on Roanoke Island, N.C.
Color photos
"Archaeology"
"PaleoWorld"
KEYWORDS: FILM COMPANY by CNB