Reality Road

One Cinematic Arts Alumnus’ Successful Survival In Television

For students at the School of Cinematic Arts, the informal school motto “Reality Ends Here,” is often tinged with the fact that what may seem to stop actually begins when they cross the stage at graduation. And though the future before these talented women and men can pose some daunting questions, for Executive Producer of Survivor Tom Shelly ’87, it was a genre of television ironically dubbed reality that was the perfect choice.

“USC prepares you for storytelling, no matter what the medium,” said Shelly who earned his M.F.A. from the cinema program and says his role in reality television fits well with his fascination of the cinéma vérité style of the ’60s and ’70s. Since sharing the Emmy for Outstanding Non-Fiction Program in 2001, Shelly’s work on Survivor has been consistently nominated by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

For a brief time following graduation, Shelly was a cinematographer as well as a writer/director before starting his reality path on the true crime recreation show America’s Most Wanted. After describing his work in television as similar to film school with “a bunch of us sitting around trying to tell stories,” Shelly recalls how one particular moment in his education prepared him for the pressures of the medium.

Tom Shelly (right) along with Mark Burnett, Casting Director Lynn Spillman and Producer Teri Kennedy on the set of Survivor: Cook Islands.

“Everyone called one project’s strict 20-minute time length, ‘unrealistic,’” he said. “But that was an important lesson because in TV you are 43 minutes and 15 seconds to the frame. It’s great to be artistic, but that’s the real world.”

Shelly’s award-winning relationship with Mark Burnett began when he was introduced by one of his America’s Most Wanted colleagues to the producer who then hired the filmmaker to work on his race adventure show, Eco-Challenge.

“It’s about knowing if you can count on the person you’re hiring,” Shelly said when asked what the key factor is to making relationships that lead to success. “You have to be persistent, but you’ve got to be able to deliver,” he added.

While his time on the islands could be described as adventurous, the experience can often times pale in comparison to delivering a show to the network every week.  With Survivor’s Thursday night airing, the week’s episode has to be delivered by Wednesday morning and “at first, that really freaked me out,” Shelly recalled. “It was the most stressful work I’ve ever done. With movies, you can go into a theatre and get the vibe of the audience. In TV, you live by the numbers published the following day, and you hope that hope that every Friday morning you find out a lot of people tuned in to watch.”

And just how does a USC graduate outwit, outplay and outlast in an industry that is being changed by DVRs, cable stations and a host of new outlets?

“It’s hard work and tiring, and in television you are delivering the product all the time. Just remember that it’s all storytelling,” he added.