Donald Fritz was a primary producer of made for TV movies. His primary fare was real stories or ones at least partially based on real stories. In early January he looked at the movies they were scheduling to make during the year. He called it his pipeline. There were plenty of stories in the pipeline for the first half of the year but the people looking for stories were falling behind for stories to produce for the last half. Without some intervention they would not have the raw material to keep the production crews busy.

Fritz’s operation was a production line, just like a Ford or Chevy assembly plant. The reason Donald made money was efficiency of those crews from the screenwriters to the actors to the set crews to the editors to the distributors. He could pay them less money for each film because he guaranteed them a basic salary plus “overtime” but like at Ford if they didn’t have work, he still had to pay the salary. To make money the pipeline had to stay full. People had to be working. The business model was nearly the same as the crews who made the Hoppalong Cassidy and Gene Autrey movies in the 40’s. They made a movie every couple weeks.

They had pretty well exhausted stories about people with spousal abuse, breast cancer, MS, and AIDS. New ones in each category were cropping up but they were not frequent enough to maintain the pipeline. As he ate he saw a woman come in the door on crutches. She was pretty, very pretty. But she was missing her right leg. She sat at a table behind him and was joined by a young man a few minutes later. From the conversation he was able to overhear she had lost her leg to bone cancer two months ago. She was a teacher and was trying to get back to work. The pieces he could hear made a great story, the cancer, the concern about her future, her work to get back to her life. When he was ready to leave he got up, went to her table and introduced himself. He was surprised when she recognized his name but she was skeptical till he pulled out one of his business cards. He asked her to give his office a call. They would talk to her and see if her story would be of interest. She smiled, somewhat embarrassed. She wasn’t sure she wanted that kind of publicity. He told her the name could be changed if she liked. The story could either be hers with her name or it could be a “based on a real story” with a different name and the writers would change enough details to not point to her. She agreed to consider it and he left.