CBS "The Judy Garland Show" auctioned off: Anyone got $1.5 M?*

My guess is that either the bid prices failed to meet the minimum, or the winner wants to remain confidential for the moment.

I'm still very dubious on whether there's a commercial market for 50-year-old variety shows like this. I remember watching some of these shows and thinking, "that woman is either drunk or out of her mind." Little did I know...

 

For what it's worth, The Judy Garland Show was cancelled on this day, March 28, in 1964.

 

I really don't see how anyone would make back 1 million on that investment

 

I have said before that the Garland series, like other variety series such as The Ed Sullivan Show, do have a future not only through reissues on DVD and CD, but also on Blu-ray and through licensing. The series, as issued on Pioneer many years ago, is now out of print, and goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay.

 

Not for 1.5 million they don't.

Just because a hndful of people will pay for an out print set is no indication anyone will make back a 1.5 milliong investment.

Sorry as much as you love this material it's not worth anywhere near what you think it is.

This would be a very limited shout factory release at best.

I'll be generous and say 10,000 units x $50 a pop, - minus production costs.

No where near 1.5 million.

 

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree.

 

Yes we will.

Sorry sales are just not there for classic TV and never will be.

 

I'll the people who do this for a living seem to agree since the person who owns this is selling it and not cashing in the easy money you claim is just sitting there waiting for them, and second no one seems to have jumped at this marvelous deal.

 

I would remind you that reissues on SACD of such classic artists as Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra seem to be abundant in this spring 2013.

 

I would remind you that Classic World seems to have done quite well over a decade ago when they issued this material on Pioneer, and subsequently by Infinity Entertainment and the Falcon Picture Group. Furthermore, Savoy Jazz has also in the recent past take licenses to issue many CDs from the Garland series.

 

Yess in limited runs.

You keep forgetting to factor in sales figures here. No is selling this stuff in the quantities to justify 1.5 million,

And sorry Garland is no where the draw of the two examples you just trotted out.

There is no way someone is going to move 12o,ooo units of a Garland boxset which is what they would have to do make a realistic profit selling them at $50 a pop. It's just never in a million years going to happen.

Sorry amazing artist but she is never going to move the amount of product you seem to think she will.

 

Again you are totally ignoring how many units they did.

 

Hi Steve,

I have never heard of any Garland Show bootlegs. Can you cite an example?

 

Moving on now since someone clearly has no idea of the entertainment industry that is based in reality.

 

I have no idea of exact numbers, but it is pretty certain that the Pioneer issues, whether individually or sold in the two box-sets, were produced in good numbers.

 

I work in the entertainment industry.

 

As others have noted, I'm guessing clearance for the guest artists would add substantially to the $1.5 million investment... and some artists might not give permission so then you'd be stuck with edited sets (look no further than the Dean Martin Show). On top of that, add video mastering costs, disc manufacturing costs (including artwork, etc.), marketing costs, distribution costs, etc.

 

The clearance rights are all taken care of. You would need to get them ready for blu-ray though. The guy who owns it now was making his money doing single episodes for 14.99. That just will not fly anymore. They have financials listed with the auctions but they don't appear to be vetted and they don't say where these figures came from. There are strange things in them like they list sales for stores that were not in business the year the sales were reported in. They also list the sales figures as exact multiples of $14.99, I find it fishy that this guy has sold every single unit for a decade at exactly $14.99?

The auction site is also very fishy. When I register it's nothing more then a wordpress site, they then sent me my login details in plane clear text, from a personal e-mail account.

This is not the way I would want to make a multi-million dollar deal.

 

They were not bootlegs. My dad was a writer and producer on that show and he got royalties. The original rights lied with Sid Luft and all the releases have stemmed from whatever chain of ownership has succeeded that.

 

Two issues: number one, my understanding of the sync rights business is that every time you release a TV show or movie in a new media (new mastering, new video format, whatever), you have to negotiate a rate with the publisher for every song used. They don't own that as part of the show -- almost nobody gets rights in perpetuity, especially for a 1964 show. My guess on the low side is that if there were 10 songs used in each show, it'd be a minimum of $5000-$10,000 per song for (say) a 3-year period. If each show costs about $75,000 just for music rights, they'd have to sell an awful lot of them just to break even on the rights alone.

And SAG/AFTRA, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the American Federation of Musicians all have to be paid residuals as well. Just getting attorneys to fight through all the red tape to get all this stuff cleared is a nightmare. The moment you run into an issue where the rights are under a cloud -- for example, they do a take-off of a Broadway musical and change the wording a little bit for comedy -- it could theoretically take months to track down somebody just to sign off on the parody. If one of the background actors says, "I want $500,000 every time you see my face," you wind up having to either cut them out of the show or blur their face out so they're unrecognized.

I don't think there's anything more difficult than trying to reissue an American TV variety show on home video, simply because of the union and legal rights problems.

"Getting them ready for Blu-ray" would basically just be a question of taking the 2" master videotapes, unprezzing them for 1080i, and using lots of processing to try to sharpen, noise reduce, eliminate dropouts and glitches, and otherwise clean them up for modern audiences. If the 2" tapes are in good shape (which is possible), then they might need very little processing beyond really good up-conversion. That's the easiest part of the whole thing.

 

Yeah when I typed it I left out the word "supposedly." After digging through everything the whole deal is sketchy.

This stuff is generating 3 mil in sales annually but this guy wants to dump the package?

Like I said nothing is vetted and the numbers don't add up right from an accounting standpoint. It seems to be an estimated retail total, not revenue generated for the rights holder.

 

Particularly when the market is already flooded with cheap DVDs from the last owner.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trk...0&_nkw=judy+garland+show&_sacat=617&_from=R40

 

Cheap? Total them up. Even at 10 bucks a volume you are looking at well over a hundred bucks.

 

Is it just me or does Garland come across as a creepy depressed shaky drunk?

I mean, She's fine in The Wizard of Oz (The only movie of her's i own or have seen) but in interviews I've seen etc.. She comes across as the above. Very unstable looking.

 

That's because she was a creepy depressed shaky drunk.