Shawn Ryan Quotes

It's easier to cancel a show if it's expensive.

Basically, movies come down to economics, and they're always too expensive. From a producer's point of view, an actor is either going to make him money or save him money.

It's fine to do movies and say, 'We made big grosses,' but you've got to go back and ask, 'How much did it cost?' and 'Where do you make your profit?'

Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.

In the U.K., there's absolutely no money for television. So you can do pretty much whatever you want. They're not losing money on any of the shows, so they'll give you a lot of creative freedom. In the United States, there are millions and millions of dollars at stake, so they need a sure formula.

I run advertisements and sell T-shirts to cover overhead costs and pay the few people who help me out behind the scenes. Anything left over is spent on production costs, animation costs, etc.

On a TV show, for instance, dancers have to be paid for a week and a half rehearsal time. So unless they're vital to a production, they're just not used.

Almost all decisions based on cost accounting are utterly wrong.

You only have so much money to shoot a movie with.

The first prize for any production is, if you can find a location that means you don't have to build sets, that will serve, and is not excessively expensive to hire, then it can save you a lot of money.

How that works is our first season was the year we had a threatened writers' strike, so what we did was that instead of doing 22 episodes, we did 30. We put 10 in the bank.

Normally, if you do a television show, it's 25 episodes. Your year is kind of shot, you know what I mean?

Now a movie with 30 million returns would be something very incredible and the producer can only get 10 to 15 million. This is only 100 thousands US dollars. This is not enough!

Why should I build an asset when I can buy it more cheaply than you can build it?

I'm being told it saves money to shoot in Toronto, because of tax benefits, the crews are cheaper, but what I save in the bottom line, I lose in a million other ways.

I am the lead on NBC's 'Siberia,' and I loved that experience.

I've never had a series that's gone past 12 episodes.

Use the same measure for selling that you use for purchasing.

Normally, a TV show shoots episodically.

At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.

A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

I really wasn't on the Dallas set much. I did three or four episodes so I didn't see too much.

A concern that produces its own raw materials, and works them up through the various processes until it delivers the manufactured product in the domestic or foreign market, can work on a narrower margin all around, and yet do full justice to its stockholders and employees.

The fact 'Twin Peaks' had a life at all took most of us in the cast by surprise. We thought it would be too unusual for network television. The original intention was that it would be a two-hour movie. If the network didn't want to pick it up as a series, it could just show that. But ABC took a chance.