Swimming Against The Tide

Keep the Creatives Away From the Suits

Designing an atmosphere in which creatives can do their best work is all about space and buffers. In Jim Samples, the network's 41-year-old executive VP and general manager, Lazzo has a buffer between the suits at Time Warner and his team. Lazzo needs Samples because of how things operated when AOL acquired Time Warner in 2000. The online service ushered in a system of budget cuts, micromanagement, and meetings. Money for marketing was cut; new series were reduced. "There was a period, from 2000 to 2002, when you didn't know who to turn to to get an answer," says Lazzo. "There were more checkpoints to go through."

Samples saw how all the prying eyes in the AOL days paralyzed his creative team. So he acts as a barrier between corporate scrutiny and the producers, animators, and writers in Atlanta. "My job is to screen, to keep that away from the creative folks here." He can give Lazzo so much leeway because Adult Swim keeps bringing in viewers and new advertisers, many of whom later buy spots on the kid's side as well.

Lazzo, however, is taking that buffering one step further: He's keeping Samples away from his own creative folks, the two dozen or so people who pump out all of that twisted programming. A few years ago, Lazzo set up shop for the Adult Swim team in an old carpet warehouse that CNN used to store field equipment. It's just across the street from Cartoon Network's downtown Atlanta offices, but with one wrinkle: You have to cross a major highway to get there.

The warehouse (called Williams Street) was nothing much to look at before Adult Swim got there, and now, some three years later, it has a style that can best be described as early postapocalyptic: ratty couches, exposed ceilings, dim lighting, a beat-up foosball table. And then there's that highway, which makes trips between Adult Swim and Cartoon Network HQ just inconvenient enough. "Mike's take is, 'Leave us alone, we'll make you money,' " says Matt Thompson, cocreator of Sealab 2021. "Hiding your people is the only way you can have autonomy. It's one of the main reasons I think he chose to go to that crappy building."

What's important, too, is that Williams Street isn't just a clubhouse; it's a clubhouse in Atlanta. True, if the heat and humidity don't get you, the seafood will -- or so Lazzo will rant while driving you around town in his Range Rover. But that's a small price to pay to steer clear of what Lazzo calls "the machine": Hollywood and all its assorted players. "We're outside of New York and Los Angeles," Lazzo says. "The type of people who come here, they keep us interesting." Lazzo is no fan of the machine. Before he hired his production chief, Keith Crofford, to produce Space Ghost, Lazzo had gone to a Hollywood production company to do the pilot. "It was awful, so we figured, 'Even we could do that piece of crap.' "

The Williams Street outpost also lets everyone associated with Adult Swim mingle, an essential element, Lazzo says, to Adult Swim's success. To that end, Lazzo has also brought his own art director and on-air-promotions department over to Williams Street. "You want people bumping into people all day long," he says. "You want your writers, promo guys, and editors all saying, 'Hey, did you think of this?' " Even Lazzo shares his office with Crofford, so he's not sheltered in a big office and away from the action.

Stay Off the Accountants' Radar

Lazzo and his team know that one reason they can get away with what they're doing is that Adult Swim isn't a glaring line item on the budget. Its shows tend to be "cheap ass" productions, as Sealab's Matt Thompson puts it. Shows such as Sealab can cost as little as $50,000 an episode -- enough to make about 1 minute of The Simpsons -- and can be churned out in four to six weeks, as opposed to some four to six months.

The cheaper the shows, the more risks Adult Swim can take, the more time it can give shows to grab an audience, even if it takes an entire season, typically 13 episodes. "A network animated show can cost $1 million an episode," says Lazzo. "Who wants to make a $13 million decision that blows up in their face? They'll make safe bets instead. Our system is the opposite of that. You make a risky decision and if it doesn't pan out, you're not out that much. That's the key." For all the fun and games, Lazzo's focus on costs is serious. "They gave us a budget and said, 'This is how much you have,' " says Jackson Publick III, creator of The Venture Bros., which premiered in August. "When we went over, we ate it."

Man Versus Machine