When she was an accountant, Katherine Petrie used to brown-bag it. In her new job, she says, "it's amazing how much more happens over lunch than in the hours before and after." Yes, she's in Hollywood, land of the fabled power lunch. "Everyone always says that the real currency here is relationships," says Petrie, whose celebrity acquaintances include Tom Selleck and Bill Cosby. "Lunch is an important time to go see, be seen and get things done."
For Petrie, getting things done is critical. As director of made-for-TV movies and miniseries at CBS Productions, she's responsible for launching and coaxing along 12 to 15 original productions a year, which air on Sunday and Wednesday nights. Petrie moved into the job just over a year ago after holding several other posts at CBS, including accountant and executive assistant to CEO Leslie Moonves. Now overseeing a budget of half a billion dollars, she describes her work as part business undertaking and part creative endeavor -- a fitting combination for a film buff who double-majored in economics and drama.
Most of her movies and miniseries begin as ideas pitched to Petrie and her colleagues by producers or writers. Fewer than one in 50 proposals move into the preproduction phase, which is when writers and cast are hired, followed by crew and staff. Of those projects, only about half make it into actual production. It's typically one to two years from the first pitch until the movie airs before some 24 million viewers in the nation's living rooms.
"Making television movies is much different from making cable movies or features [shown in theaters]," Petrie says. For example, "most television viewers will watch movies based on who is in them rather than who directed them." The writing differs, too, because TV movies must be structured around a series of seven commercial breaks. "If you ever suspected there was a formula to writing television movies, there kind of is," Petrie says. With so many distracting breaks, "retaining an audience for two hours is no easy task."
Living in Beverly Hills with her 4-pound Pomeranian, she typically puts in 70- or 80-hour workweeks. "It's definitely a job to do while you're young," Petrie says.
Aside from power-lunching with interesting people, her favorite part of the job is falling in love with a story and being able to make it into a movie to share with the world. "There's a certain magic to seeing an idea go from that first pitch meeting to sitting and watching it on national television," she says.
"But meeting Tom Selleck ain't bad either."
-- Ravi Chandrasekaran, '02
