12.13.07

So, funny story.  Almost two years ago - specifically January of 2006 - I went on an audition as I sometimes do.  It was for the job as a host of one of the myriad of Saturday morning landscaping shows.  It would have been a nice little gig – by nature the shooting of the shows would be through the summer, which is a slow travel time for me, as well as a little quieter time at the shop.  I showed up at the audition and waited my turn, going over the bit.  The production company had sent out a little script of a “show” and we just had to follow the bullet points and be in general charming and entertaining.  Now I have been to hundreds of auditions in my life – for all sorts of media things, and you by nature immune yourself to getting excited about anything, realizing that it's usually just a cattle call at the beginning.  But on my side I had had a few national commercials and done some theater and print stuff, so I was no stranger to this world.  It was, however, a very definite backseat to my real job – the whole importing/selling thing.  There was a time when I had hoped to have the business be successful enough so I could start chasing after acting more aggressively, but that theory went away after I realized what the reality was of owning and running your own business.  So here I am at the audition handing in my head shot and resume.  There is always a distinct wall between the auditioner and audition-ees.  There are usually anywhere from one to five people in the room depending on the client etc, and all parties involved know that the main goal is to rattle through as many people as quickly and efficiently as possible, then do the more in depth stuff at callbacks.  So my point is, no interaction between the seller and buyer as it were.  As I am standing in front of the people from the production company busily going over the bullet points and calibrating just the right balance I should have between wit and empathy in this little audition, the main guy  - for privacy's sake lets call him Mike, looks at my head shot and says “Are you Ian Grant?  Do you have a shop in south Minneapolis?”  I of course say yes.  He then says his wife knows me and has always been telling him that they should do a show about me.  Mike (his name is actually John), then says “So why are we doing this audition, why don’t we talk about doing a show?”  I of course say “Yes, why not.”  There was in the back of my mind a heavy dose of skepticism, but who knows.  

So I go through the audition and at the end I am thinking it will be interesting to see if John will mention this again or was it just one of those auditioning bon hommie things.  Sure enough John hands me his card and says lets get some coffee in the next couple weeks.  Admittedly I am still a little skeptical, and after three weeks go by, even more so.  There is no way I am calling this guy only to have him say “Ian who?”  But then I think hey, what the hell, if you have a chance to have your own show and don’t do everything you can to go after it, you don’t deserve a show.  So I bring his card to work that day with the plan to call him early afternoon.  But late morning John beats me to the punch.  We set up a time to have coffee and have him come into the shop and check things out.  The meeting goes quite well and John sets up a time to have a camera guy come in with him to shoot a little promo of me in my shop walking and talking, not necessarily at the same time . . .thankfully.  The shoot goes well and I actually liked how it turned out.  I know, however, that John does a lot of show concepting like this, but I also know that the production company that he is in has had -and still has- quite a number of really successful shows on HGTV, History Channel and TLC, so I know they are the real deal.  John then sends the little four minute promo out to the head of the Production company and the word comes back that it seems pretty dull. The owner gets show concepts all the time and by nature has to rattle through them quickly, so the promo has to be all it can be for it do get on his horizon – which is understandable. So John and I persist.  We are both convinced that if the owner can see me wandering around in my indigenous habitat (ie a buying trip in India somewhere), that it will make much more sense. I mean, you can almost just step off a plane and turn a camera on in India and you have a show.  Add some guy like me standing there pointing at things, well then, my friend, you have television magic.

So I schedule a buying trip to India two months before I really need to go on one, John finds a camera guy over the internet in Bombay (where we are going to do the promo).  The plan was for me to go to Bombay (where I really don’t buy anything) and have me go around to all the bazaars and haggle and find things and walk around absorbing the ambiance, walking through the streets generally having a good time.  Hanging out with the locals, look at some sites, eat some food . . .anyway.  Then I can get on with my buying trip and head down to Kerala.  It's worth the extra time and money to do it (see the afore-mentioned new mantra of  “what the hell, if you have a chance to have your own show and don’t do everything you can to go after it, you don’t deserve a show” in the earlier paragraph).  So the shooter (the camera guy) and his crew and I run all over Bombay and get some great stuff.  Turns out the shooter did a big stint in Antarctica for a documentary that won some awards in India, so no slouch on that end.  After a day of shooting he and I exchange cards and he asks - just off the cuff  - where I am off to.  I tell him I am going to Kerala where I do some good buying and in general know the place quite well. He then says he has a colleague that lives just a few hours south of where I will be and why not film down there?  I only have three days left on the buying trip, and filming this stuff takes quite a bit of time, but again, I think if it's possible, why not do it.  So he calls his buddy (who was also on the Antarctica thing) and sets it all up as we are sitting there.  

I arrive in Kerala – one of my most favorite places and get to my hotel – again one of my most favorite places, this beautiful little boutique hotel in an old colonial style with collected but minimally placed antiques in each room, a great central courtyard and one of the best restaurants in Fort Cochin – the Malabar House.  Anyway, I meet the shooter there and the rest of his crew, we go over what we are doing and start filming.  Shots of me hanging out in parks with locals, playing cricket in one of the various daily games that go on in the park across from the hotel, me hanging out and fishing with the locals using these great Chinese fishing nets, going through the bazaar, finding stuff, talking about stuff, haggling over stuff, chasing goats out of ware house areas.  Certainly my first shot at directing, but I had a good relationship with the talent (myself), and in looking at some of the tape we were getting, it seemed pretty good.  All in all, great scenes and a lot of fun.  But interspersed throughout these three days there were continual audio problems.  Already midway through the second day of shooting, I think all of us had taken apart and re-assembled my wireless microphone which kept on cutting out.  Not good, as we were getting a lot of great stuff, but the audio would cut in and out.  The second half of the second day and the third day, supposedly the audio was working (excellent use of foreshadowing here).  

We finish the shoot on the second to last day of my buying trip, the last day I finish up all my buying (it was actually a very good buying trip through all of this), and I am on my merry way home all the while handling the 6 hours of tape from the two shoots as if they were the queens jewels.  

I get back and get the tapes to John so his people can do their editing voodoo and shortly there after get a phone call.  The audio sucks.  The Bombay audio they can’t seem to recover, and the Kerala stuff is pretty tough as well.  But in the end, they are able to put together a 4 minute promo and they send it over to me.  Though I say so myself, I really liked it.  Actually, I really liked it.  So did John, and as it turns out, the production company owner loved it.  So it's now into his hands.  

Here is the video:

Fast forward to January of ’07.  Now I am standing around in my booth at the New York Show.  Mid-way through the show and it's going well.   Cell phone rings and it's John calling from DC where their company has an office and is also where the headquarters of Travel is.  I think there are some other networks there as well.  Anyway, back to the phone call:  “John here, Travel is asking for that Ian Grant show.”  

So Travel is looking for some new shows and we are in on it.  Of course quite a few production companies are in on it as well.  And so the elimination process begins.  Starting with hundreds of shows presented to Travel from all of the production companies they use, we make the first cut.  Now we are in June, by the way, all of this is leading towards being awarded a pilot and potential series.  Every day John and I are going back and forth discussing possible show scenarios that then get sent on to Travel so they get an idea of a potential season.  A couple fully written out shows get sent in.  We make the cut of 20.  More and more show scripts get written up.  John and Steve tell me it's time to start looking into a lawyer for my contract if it comes to that.

Early July, we make the cut of 6 shows.

Travel picks three shows to go with.  Ours is one of them.

Now is probably a good time to describe the show.  On every buying trip I go with a couple things in mind.  I go needing to buy the bread and butter things – whether it's old things that I know exist in an area or new things that I am having produced.  The other part is trying to find some “thing”  or “things” that are hard to get, something that is unusual to me.  So as I am wandering through the bazaars, the warehouses, the alleys finding my bread and butter items, I am also on the hunt for the unusual thing.  An example for an episode could be in Thailand. There are some tribal necklaces that make their way down to Chiang Mai from the remote villages on the Lao/China mountain border.  Some of them are quite rare and hard to come by.  We would start out by going through the major bazaars of Chiang Mai finding the things that I find, showing you the viewer where to go, what to look for, what a specific area or village is known for.  All along the way I am in search of this rare curly necklace that comes from a particular tribe on the border of Laos and China.  As we get further and further off the beaten track, we delve deeper and deeper into local cultures, traditions, sights, sounds and smells, get lost, get stuck, watch a local kick boxing match – you know, all the stuff that happens on the way on any trip.  Hopefully the final shot is of me in the remote village hanging out with one of the few guys that makes this curly necklace, maybe having dinner in one of their homes, seeing how they live.  

Ok, so that’s the show – not so much in a nutshell, but as my mom has said in the past about these blogs, I’m a bit wordy.

So Travel sets the pilot to take place in New York City.  Most likely picking there rather than overseas because of time constraints as far as when it needed to air and logistics of travel etc.  So the trick was to find things that I would honestly buy in New York.  New York is the other end of the food chain for me.  I sell to people in New York, not buy from them, so this truly was a bit of a trick.  Fortunately, after John and I put our heads together for a few weeks, we were able to find some genuine places for me to go – some really off the beaten path, and some “hiding in plain site.”  

The most exciting one for me was the one hiding in plain site. In my rug merchant days we always used to get copies of the auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s to see what things were selling for.  I thought it would be cool to try and get in to one of these monthly auctions for the show. Anyone can go to these auctions and bid on things.  Christies in particular has a monthly sale called the House Sale where they put all sorts of things up for auction – ranging in price from a few hundred to around $20,000.  What a cool thing for a tourist to do when they are in New York.  Go to an auction house where everyone normally expects to find only multi-million dollar Rembrants and Caravaggios being bid on by people with private jets and multiple houses.

Of course the problem was the timing of the house sale.  Sothebys was too late in October (the pilot was meant to be done by the fist part of October), and the Christies house sale was starting on the first day of the High Point trade show, which is my biggest day of the show.  Not only that, but it meant that we would be filming the other parts of the show in the preceding days, starting Friday.  I need three days to set up my booth for the High Point show, so typically I would be on my way to High Point that Thursday night.  But it really seemed like the Christies bit was worth it:  it would be the potential payoff at the end of the show, all the while not knowing if I would win the items I was looking at or not.  So do I skip the first day of the High Point show, potentially missing out on not only immediate sales, but also long running clients that would generate sales for years?  My wife Lisa fortunately reminded me that I am always of the opinion that you shouldn’t worry much about things that are out of your control as long as you have done everything that is in your control.  This was exactly one of those situations.  There were so many things that were out of my control in regard to getting to this stage of the show, so if I didn’t do the Christies auction, I would certainly always look back and wonder what the pilot would have been like if I had done it.  There will be more High Point shows.  We scheduled the pilot to fit in the Christies house sale, and built the pilot around it. I’d just have to be a day late and hopefully not a dollar short to the High Point Show.

So Christies became our running thread through the pilot:  our “curly necklace” (if you were paying attention in the show description paragraph).  It was where I was going to find a couple items to bid on, we would hopefully get behind the scenes into the warehouse areas, talk to the auction people all sorts of stuff, do the auction live etc.  I really was genuinely excited about this part of the show.

A couple highlights of the shoot. Starting on Friday in the diamond district – this short little street: 47th street.  It's where 90% of the diamonds that come into the states come through, they have cutters here, gem setters, jewelry designers, little booth retailers to big store retailers, and behind the storefronts and on the floors above is this virtual city that makes up the entire diamond industry – from raw stones all the way to the finished piece.  They do deals in the street worth over a million dollars in diamonds done on a handshake and their word.  Next was DUMBO – Down underneath the Manhattan bridge overpass –  an area that one of my clients (Judy Green) turned me on to.  It’s this great old warehouse district that is now becoming the home of all of these modernist furniture designers and artists.  Again, walking around the neighborhood talking to a couple of these designers about the area, where to go what else to see. Next we met up with Jan Lee who is a Chinese antique dealer from China Town who has a little warehouse in Brooklyn. It was this classic piled up dust covered warehouse filled with Chinese and other types of antiques and a lot of fun – I may as well have been overseas in some Chinese antiques warehouse as far as the camera was concerned.  A great part of the shoot.  Then a really cool side bit literally on the docks across the water from the Statue of Liberty in a place called Red Hook.  Theirs is this little Vespa dealer there, in the middle of nowhere.  He is from Tuscany where Vespas are made and still spends half the year there.  He imports used Vespas and restores them in this little hole in the wall on the docks.  After somewhat assuaging his fears about me driving one of his Vespas, we did this little bit of me driving around the docks and warehouse area following our van with the back doors open and the camera and audio guys hanging out the back as I blathered on about Vespas.  

Of course the big deal of the whole shoot for me was Christies.  We were given great access – supposedly the only film crew allowed into their warehouse areas among other things.  We shot the preview (where all the items are out for viewing) as well as a bunch of behind the scenes, and then on the last day of shooting, we did the auction - which was fantastic. I’m not going to spoil it for you, you have to watch the pilot.  But suffice to say it was very much worth skipping the first day of the High Point show to get this last scene at the auction.  Really fantastic.  

Then right from the Christies auction to a quick hop in a cab outside, an hours drive to Newark airport, the flight to North Carolina, pick up rental car at 9pm, turn the hours drive to High Point into an hour and a half by missing a turn in the countryside, go to the grocery store to pick up supplies, arrive at the rental house, wake up one of my High Point room mates to open the door, settle in and off to bed at midnight.  Up the next morning at 6.30, into the booth by 8am and settle in to a full week of the fabulous High Point show.  

If you read the last entry, the High Point show went really well. The majority of the clients I missed while I was galavanting around at the Christies auction came back and placed orders.  All’s well that ends well.

Since then, lot more of the back and forth to Travel, re-writes, re-voice overs, committees at Travel, back to us, back to them, cutting a bunch of things to fit it all into a half hour show, changing/re-shooting the intro a few times to get the right vibe, different committees at Travel . . . you get the point. Then of course there is John who has been working around the clock on this ever since the shoot.  Between he and Janine – the editor – they have been on a virtual seven days a week schedule for the last month and a half working on all the million different possible arrangements that can go into a 22 minute show. . . 22 minutes and 19 seconds.  It's an amazing amount of work on his part.  I can truly say that, while I mainly selfishly hope it all goes through for my sake, I also really hope it goes through for his sake as well.

We are now officially on Travel’s calendar for December 21st at 8.30 eastern time.

It's kind of strange to be talking about this show thing in public . . .at least as public as a furniture blog goes - with the eleven or twelve people that read it, not counting myself of course – it’s waaaaay too long for me to read.  In the end, we are still only at the pilot stage.  The good people at Travel (just so we’re clear, I’m sucking up), have been very positive about it going to series, but until I am sitting on a beach somewhere sipping a gin and tonic or mojito - depending  on the beach, basking in the glow of a full season of “Deal Hunter” with a renewal signed for a second and third year, I’m doing my best to wait and see.  

Did I mention the pilot airs at 8.30 pm eastern standard time on December 21st? So as I said, the air date has been set for December 21st. . . you know, 8.30pm, eastern standard time. . . .so watch the pilot, set your T-Vo’s, vote on line, vote often, turn the tv sets in Best Buy and other home electronics stores to the show, set up some e-mail chain that directs people to Travel’s web site with a form letter that says something to the effect of “Ian Grant is the greatest thing to happen to television since the invention of the cathode ray tube” but don’t feel like you have to quote me directly on that one. Whatever feels right to you.