A hands-on family partnership - small business success - company profile

A Hands-On Family Partnership Every successful entrepreneur knows that the trick is to find a need--a hole--and fill it. For a special father-daughter team, the hole was wasted television air time hissing away between scheduled programs. Many foreign, government-financed stations need no commercials to support themselves. When they broadcast U.S. shows, filmed to make time for commercials, there are many empty minutes between a program's end and when the next show begins.

In the world of international entertainment finance, where you get paid for each minute of air time you fill, Robert and Rachel Dunlap earn the same television per-minute rate in New Zealand as do the producers of "Dynasty? when it is shown there. Their product: short, general-audience animations that can air in those few minutes of empty broadcast space.

Robert Dunlap, and actor, and his daughter Rachel, now 13, started a Los Angeles film production company R.E.D. Productions, in 1980 with $25,000 and a garage as their studio. Rachel, an eighth-grader, is an active partner in R.E.D. She and her dad, who is 43, are reluctant to talk about the income of their privately owned company. But they are well on their way to at least $3 million by 1989. This year they completed three film shorts, making a total of 20 films since they started.

Their first, a four-minute cartoon called "The Story Of Bing And The Magic Ring," grew out of one of Rachel's spelling exercises and the Screen Actors Guild strike of 1980. As 8-year-old Rachel was beginning to show a flair for writing through her schoolwork, Robert suddenly found himself out of acting jobs.

"I decided I didn't want to be at this town's mercy any longer," he says. "When I decided to start this business, I chose my daughter as a partner. Even at such a young age, she was a talented writer. She doesn't have to handle any of the financial burdens of the business, She concentrates on the artistic side."

Robert, a veteran of such movies as "Peyton Place" and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (he was also the Orkin Man for nine years), says: "Our main problem has been getting people to take us seriously."

Potential investors could hardly be blamed for questioning the wisdom of putting money in a project begun by an actor and a sober-faced 8-year-old. They had no way of knowing that this level-headed pair could turn whimsy into solid profits.

So the Dunlaps wrote and produced their animated shorts without studio backing. "I used the money I had made in acting jobs and loaned the business money to start up," says Robert. The father and daughter set up their shop so that most of the work--drawings, music, processing, camera work--can be handled between the two of them with six part-time nonunion assistants.

In addition to being used as fillers in 78 countries, the cartoons have found a domestic market on American children's shows. Depending on the complexity of the animation (there are an average of 1,440 hand-produced drawings per minute), the staff required and the number of colors used, an animated film costs $2,000 to $3,000 per minute. This figure, says Robert, does not include labor and incidental costs such as publicity. The Dunlaps' distributor, which acts as a licensing agent, pays them quarterly for all revenue that it took in during the previous three months--provided it took in any.

While it is possible to pay for a film's production costs in a single screening, depending on the size of the audience, it rarely happens. Says Rachel: "The quickest return we have had on a film is six months, but the longest took about three years before we broke even."

And like all filmmakers, the Dunlaps have to worry about piracy and stolen tapes. "When we send a tape to Singapore, we expect the TV station that is our customer to sent it on to its next booking--New Zealand, for example," Robert says. "We have to depend on customers to do that, and we're always worrying about someone 'disappearing' a tape."

The Dunlaps recently completed "Impact Earth," a hour-long show for Public Broadcasting Service. "We had no idea we'd be getting into the education market," says Robert. "It's all a matter of taking advantage of the opportunity." Producing for children also ensures a continuous market for the Dunlaps' work.

Says Robert, "As Walt Disney said, there's always a new crop every seven years of people who have never seen what you've done."

COPYRIGHT 1986 U.S. Chamber of Commerce
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group