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DREAMTIME Hits Big Time
By Jean Gruss
Editor/Lee-Collier
Sometimes the small gambles pay off big.
For John Biffar, who operates a video and film production company called Dreamtime Entertainment in Cape Coral, it was borrowing his employer's equipment and striking freelance deals on the side.
Fort Myers television station WINK-TV hired Biffar in 1980 to be a reporter, shooter and editor. Typical of small-market television stations, he did it all for $175 a week.
The low pay didn't sit well, so he bid on a project to produce a 17-minute promotional film for the Lee County Tourism Development Council. Unbeknown to the station's owners, Biffar borrowed WINK-TV's equipment and produced his first commercial success for $17,000, an amount that was nearly double his annual salary.
After he received his compensation, Biffar handed a $5,000 check to the station owner, Ed McBride. "That's your cut of the profits," he told him. But McBride didn't approve of the deal and told Biffar to stop running his side business using the station's equipment.
"They still cashed the check," Biffar chuckles.
In 1983, emboldened by his success outside the station, Biffar quit his job and started his own production company. Using the profits from shooting commercials, Biffar, 47, pursues his passion filming documentaries, including one called "Queen of Swing" he plans to enter in this year's Sundance Film Festival. He recently was hired as the director of photography for National Geographic's upcoming film, "Absolute Bridges" and traveled to China this month to shoot it.
At 6 feet, 7 inches tall and nicknamed "Long John," Biffar is not big on bragging. He shies away from talking about the inner workings of his business. He's rare in the industry. Few documentary film makers are ever profitable, but Biffar's colleagues and clients say his firm grasp of the business is a big reason he has succeeded.
What's collateral?
When Biffar struck out on his own in 1983, he needed money for new equipment. So he went to a bank where he used to cash his WINK-TV paychecks and applied for a loan.
Geoffrey Roepstorff was the lending officer who greeted him. "Do you have any collateral?" Roepstorff asked the young Biffar. "What's collateral?" the budding producer answered.
Despite that first exchange, Roepstorff took a liking to Biffar and found him to be smart about money. "A lot of times you'll find creativity without that financial side, but you've got it in John," says Roepstorff, who is now chief executive officer of Fort Myers-based Edison National Bank.
Biffar says he put up about $15,000, and Roepstorff lent him $30,000 to buy equipment. "It was taking a gamble," Biffar says.
One of his first clients was his former employer, WINK-TV, for which he produced regular medical-news segments. He also shot more promotional videos for his first freelance client, the Tourism Development Council. Together, these two jobs provided steady income to help pay off the loans while he grew the business.
In particular, Biffar says, medical commercials have been an especially lucrative niche. "It's our bread and butter," he says. Dreamtime charges $5,000 to $50,000 to produce a 30-second commercial, depending on the complexity of the shoot and how much editing work needs to be done. Clients include Cedars Medical Center in Miami and Eye Centers of Florida. Biffar says Dreamtime generated $1 million in revenues in 2004.
Biffar's success attracted attention. In 1995, he sold Dreamtime to a San Diego-based company called Jaycor, though he wouldn't say how much Jaycor paid. Biffar continued to run the company as he had before, and Jaycor later sold Dreamtime to Paul Bush, a friend of Biffar's who ran a New York-based furniture company. In 2002, Biffar bought the company back for a quarter of what he had originally been paid for it, happy to run his own business again.
"I'm pretty much unemployable," Biffar concludes.
Now, though, Biffar relies on partner Donnie Vick, 39, to run much of the commercial business. Although they operate the business under the Dreamtime name, Vick set up his own company called Sun Studios and partners with Biffar to shoot commercials. Most people in the business work as freelancers - Dreamtime has only five employees - so rounding up a crew takes time and effort. "John owns the equipment, and I supply all the people," Vick says.
Biffar says Vick is better off having his own company rather than being his employee. And Biffar says he can devote more time to documentaries and films rather than rounding up a crew for each commercial. "He's got more incentive, and I've got less headache," Biffar says.
Passion projects
Biffar's passion is shooting documentaries, but he couldn't break into the business based on his commercial work. Plus, he says being based in Cape Coral didn't give him the cachet that he would have gotten if he were based in Los Angeles or New York. "No one hires you unless you have a track record," Biffar says.
So he started shooting documentaries on his own dime. Biffar spent 10 years traveling to and from Guatemala several times each year to shoot "Children of the Fourth World," a documentary about an American woman who started a school for children of destitute families who lived near the Guatemala City dump.
"I wanted to do something that had meaning and substance," Biffar says. The documentary aired nationally on PBS and won four regional Emmy awards in 1998.
Another documentary Biffar produced was called "Uncommon Friends," which explored the personal friendships between Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and Alexis Carrel. Biffar also shot wildlife documentaries in a series he calls "Assignment Earth," which he is still trying to sell. They're profiles of individuals who made a difference in the environmental movement, such as sea turtle conservationist Peter Pritchard. They were shot in the style of Jacques Cousteau documentaries in which the camera crews are the stars.
Biffar financed these documentaries himself, though he wouldn't say how much he spent. "I'd be depressed if I kept track," he says. "There was no budget for it; it doesn't make sense to accountants."
Dreamtime also produced a full-length movie called "Captiva," starring Ernest Borgnine. The movie, a comedy set on the Lee County island of Captiva, cost $1.7 million to make and was financed by friends that included Paul Bush. "We didn't get our money back, but we came close," Biffar says.
Travel Channel series
But those first documentaries and the movie set the stage for future projects that would prove lucrative. Among the first to pay were documentaries for the Travel Channel. One series called "Freeze Frame" takes viewers on photo safaris to exotic locations such as Fiji and Switzerland.
Another was the "Fireboats of 9/11," a documentary for the History Channel about the role of the marine division of the New York City Fire Department in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"You have to be able to figure out how to make a really good program, but at the same time you have to do it within the constraints of a budget and make a profit," says Carl Lindahl, vice president of historical programming at the History Channel who commissioned Biffar to produce Fireboats. "He's a good businessman."
Biffar says he got the idea for the fireboats documentary from his father, who retired as chief of the marine division. He says it fit perfectly with the male audience History Channel seeks to reach.
"It was a terrific show," Lindahl says. "He had great contacts and resources."
"They pay very well," Biffar says, declining to say more. The key to making a profit on these projects, he says, is to own your equipment. Biffar estimates he has about $500,000 of equipment, including cameras and editing machines.
Biffar soon will be off to shoot the National Geographic documentary, called "Ultimate Bridges." He landed the job of director of photography through a producer named Phil Frank, who had commissioned Biffar's projects at the Travel Channel. He's shooting for two weeks from Beijing to Shanghai. The program will air on the National Geographic channel next year, though it hasn't yet been scheduled.
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