I like this. Perhaps a post Cold War fundraising idea? Sell it to the world....
Realistically, even with some positive ATL developments that would make the Slovak film and TV industry weather the 1990s better, and offer more stuff for export than just the occassional film, there are natural limits within the distribution market and the country's soft power with helping push through and promote domestic programming abroad.
If the Slovak Sherlock Holmes series was made at the tail end of the Czechoslovak era, I feel many would also unfairly confuse it for a Czech series, even if it was a 100 % Slovak production (a more common thing in the era than it seems to foreigners - there were loads of Czech-only produced films and series, as well as Slovak-only).
I could definitely see a Slovak Sherlock Holmes series, if done well and already popular at home, being sold abroad, at least as a bit of an experiment. Just to test the waters, whether a foreign adaptation of such an iconic anglophone property could garner attention. I know die-hard Holmes fans were appreciative of the Soviet series with Livanov already back in the day, and he still seems quite popular abroad to this day, along with the Brett Holmes and Cushing Holmes, and so on. Maybe my hypothetical Sherlock Holmes played by Martin Huba could find his own niche of appreciation in the international fandom.
The working title for my ATL concept is the simple
Dobrodružstvá Sherlocka Holmesa a Dr. Watsona ("The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson"). Abroad, in English, the series would often be nicknamed "Slovak Sherlock Holmes".
Anyone else remember The Secret of Steel City and Danger on the Danube Delta?
Not sure I know of the latter, but I certainly remember that late 1970s Verne adaptation, one of several 1960s to early 1980s Verne adaptations done in Czechoslovakia. I haven't seen all of them, and I've only seen bits and pieces of that
Steel City adaptation. As much as I know the source material, I don't think I've read that particular novel in detail, but I quite liked how they visualised its setting, given that they had to rely entirely on 70s film tech and special effects. I wasn't even sure whether that film and other Czechoslovak Verne adaptations (especially the non-Zeman ones) are known all that much in the anglosphere and elsewhere abroad.
Is there nowhere local suitable for period filming
Au contraire, why wouldn't there be ?
I think there are plenty of places in Slovakia that could be a pretty good stand-in for Victorian Britain, though it would be a fair bit tricky.
It also has to happen in the early 1990s, or some political developments and film industry developments will have to be butterflied away. Slovakia had plenty of film and TV production in the 1990s, but there was a general decline of professionally, studio-produced stuff, and this also heralded the trend towards co-producing a lot of our stuff. It's only been in the last two decades that we've slowly rebuilt a more diversified domestic film and TV industry, and even that's on a different basis. It took until 2017 until one of our private networks dared to film a historical detective series, after who knows how many years since the last one was made. I feel the early 90s timeframe is good if you want to do an old-school but modern enough detective series that could be well-remembered years down the line, especially if you don't want too many deeper divergences in the 90s.
Maigret and Cadfael both used Hungary.
Seems you're right. I really didn't know that about Cadfael, but perhaps I'd notice it again if I rewatched some of its episodes. There is some good medieval architecture and there are some nice landscapes in Hungary, so it's certainly not impossible. Never would have thought that series' cast was ferried to 90s Hungary to do the shooting.
You know, an idea has struck me; maybe co-pro withe RTE? It'd take an unusually visionary DirGen but in the post-Cold War world anything was (briefly) possible. Dublin is a commonly used substitute for Victorian/Edwardian London...
That's a really intriguing concept, but given the state of Slovak public television in the 1990s, it would simply be far too expensive for the era. They did eventually do more expensive co-productions with others, and the pace has picked up again this century for higher production values programming, but in the 1990s, a Slovak-Irish co-pro would be overly difficult. Especially if Slovakia was ultimately the junior partner in the whole thing.
