When Jill Luedtke and Tracey Hornbuckle took their young children to visit a farm in
Utah, they met a calf named Wilbur. They wanted to bring that farm and Wilbur to other
preschoolers.A decade later, Wilbur is the star of his own television series on Discovery
Kids.
What a trip!
The whole thing goes back to 1995. Jill and Tracey came home to
San Diego from that vacation to Jill's friend's farm outside Park City, wanting to extend the
experience for their kids.
"All that was out there was 'Barney' and 'Sesame Street,'" Tracey
recalls.
They talked to a few people about their idea to create a home video featuring
Wilbur the calf and focusing on early literacy. Someone sent them to Greg Anton, who had
been doing video production in San Diego for years.
He gave Jill and Tracey a list of
20 things to do to get their idea closer to reality.
"He didn't expect them to come
back for two weeks," says Kim Anton, Greg's wife. "They were back in two days."
One
thing led to another, and the team expanded to include Kim. The three women formed a
production company - EKA Productions - and created three children's videos starring
Wilbur the calf, shot on location on the Utah farm. They kept their Southern California
homes running, met the demands of their six children and marketed and took orders and
packaged and shipped videos out of their garages.
"That wasn't fun," Tracey says as
those scenes from the video history of the company play on the TV in Kim's family room.
The women groan and laugh. But the videos won lots of awards, including a Parents' Choice
Award, an Oppenheim Award, Child Magazine's Top 10 Videos of the year, and Parenting
Magazine's Video Magic Award.
So, they thought, why stop there, why not try a TV
series?
Little did they know ...
Jill and Kim flew to Dallas to meet the creator of
"Barney." And because Wilbur is a puppet, the women also approached the masters - the Henson
Group.
"Henson wasn't taking on any new properties," Kim says.
"We would freeze the TV
screen (at the end of children's shows) and see the producers' names and call them," Tracey
remembers.
They weren't cutting any deals, but everyone they talked to gave them a little
information, a little advice and, if they were lucky, another contact.
They called on
their professional skills: Tracey, 43, has an advertising and sales background at The New
Yorker magazine; Kim, 49, worked in sales and marketing in the financial industry; and
Jill, 51, is an attorney who specialized in business law. They needed every bit of their
knowledge for business development, contracts and negotiations, and the tenacity and
dedication the venture would require.
"One of Henson's producers told us we needed to
contact Cathy Chilco," Jill says.
Chilco, a Canadian producer/director, was vice
president and executive producer of International Production at Sesame Workshop. She told
them that another Canadian company, Mercury Filmworks, was doing new work with puppets
using a technology called Shadowmation (a high-tech combination of animatronics, live
action and computer animation).
Things slowly fell into place. Chilco Productions and
Mercury Filmworks, along with Discovery Kids and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.,
partnered with the San Diego women's EKA Productions to make Wilbur's TV series a
reality.
Then there was the matter of finding approximately $6 million to produce the
first 26 episodes of the show.
"That covers all aspects of a television production
budget: writers, voice talent, puppeteers, puppet designers, composers, animation costs,
editors, set designers, producers' and directors' fees, studio costs, equipment, among a
myriad of other costs involved in producing a series," Jill wrote in an e-mail.
And
that was on top of other substantial expenses just to ready an episode to show to
potential "buyers" at the networks and studios. This was going to be a whole lot more
expensive than the videos, which the women financed themselves. And they are very
thankful for what they call an angel investor, a couple the women don't name, who have
followed Wilbur's success from the beginning.
The last 10 years have been quite an
odyssey. And for the women and their families, this has become more than a job.
"Our
three families are very intertwined," Jill says. "The guys are golfing and surfing
buddies, our kids are all best friends, and we constantly have pool parties, barbecues,
and we take at least one if not more trips together as couples and as families a year.
Tracey and I and our husbands just got back from Cabo for the weekend, and Kim stayed
home and held down the fort!"
Ironically, the drive to fill a void in their own
children's media is moot. Their preschoolers are now all grown up. Kurt Luedtke is 15,
and brother Erik is 18; Ashley Anton is 19, and her sisters Alyssa and Avery are 16 and
12; Allie Hornbuckle is 12, and her sister Lauren, not even born when Wilbur was
conceived, is 9.
Oh, and Wilbur is now a 2,000-pound steer.
Jill, Tracey and Kim
recall years of putting the kids to bed and working till 1 in the morning or later at one of
their homes. They still often work odd hours, taking conference calls from New York or Canada,
looking at unfinished episodes the producers send for comment, but they have moved from their
garages to real home offices. Kim's is just off her family room.
They remember all the people
who turned them down, who thought they were just three naive moms with a wild idea. They
acknowledge there were times when they thought it might never happen.
And they won't
ever forget the entertainment lawyer they met with along the way.
"He said, 'You guys
will never make it. You're just doing this as a hobby.' You don't tell us that," Jill
says.
"It's the 4 G's that got us through," she adds "A great idea, girlfriends, guts
and God."
