TV Talk: Western Pa. native Ed Lammi retires from Sony

Bloomfield native Ed Lammi, a 1966 Peabody High Scholl grad who studied English at Penn State, retires this month after 23 years as Sony Pictures Television’s head of production. During his tenure there, he managed to get several productions to film in his hometown, including the pilot for FX’s “Justified” and series including WGN America’s “Outsiders” and Amazon Prime Video’s “A League of Their Own.”

“Ed always pushed to have Pittsburgh included in every discussion about every show that was being produced that was looking to leave Los Angeles,” said Dawn Keezer, director of the Pittsburgh Film Office. “If there was any hint in the script that they could look at Pittsburgh, he brought it up. Not always successfully, but I know he tried because, over the years when I’ve met other people in the department, they’d go, ‘Oh my God Pittsburgh, all Ed talks about is Pittsburgh.’ I wish I had someone like him at every studio. It would have been an amazing gift.”

As Sony TV head of production, Lammi works with Sony’s development team to work up an estimate of the cost to realize a producer’s vision for a series.

“Once the show is ordered, we get involved with the production people, the line producers, the post-production teams, and that’s our main interface to the show,” he said. “We’ll build a plan, we’ll build a budget, we’ll figure out where we think is the best place to [shoot] it. And there’s a whole lot of negotiating back and forth with showrunners, with buyers as far as all that before it lands. Then the line producer is the person we work with to fashion that final budget, get it in shape.”

While studying at Penn State, Lammi got recruited by a friend to work part-time at a State College public TV station and after graduation got hired full-time there to work in master control. Later, he worked at Pittsburgh’s WQED-TV as a stagehand, including on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Lammi said as a teenager he expected to become an English teacher but after many years of book learning, he appreciated the hands-on work required for TV production.

“A little bit of it was serendipitous,” Lammi said. “I got a job at that TV station right after I graduated [from Penn State] just because I went back to visit my friends, and they offered me the job, and I went, ‘Okay.’ A lot of it works that way.”

Lammi made training films for Xerox in Rochester, N.Y., before he and his wife moved to Los Angeles in 1979.

“We realized that if you’re going to be in this business, you ultimately need to probably come here [to Los Angeles] or go to New York,” Lammi said.

For about a decade, he worked as executive in charge of production on a litany of series, including “My Two Dads,” “The Famous Teddy Z” and “227.” He also returned to Pittsburgh, recruited by his friend John Harrison, to work as associate producer on George A. Romero’s 1985 film “Day of the Dead.”

Lammi, 75, joined Sony in 1987 as vice president of production and in his 36 years there he’s been involved in making “Married … with Children,” “Breaking Bad,” “Outlander” and “For All Mankind.”

Lammi wouldn’t share the titles of any series that Pittsburgh just missed landing, but he acknowledged that a tight budget sometimes requires studios to “look north of the border.”

“There’s been a couple that we would have aimed for Pittsburgh but the numbers were so compellingly large that besides the tax credit because of the rate of exchange [with the Canadian dollar], sometimes that number comparison is just too compelling,” Lammi said.

In addition to tax credits, Lammi said the creative element of the show’s setting is always top of mind.

“You might have the best tax credit in the world in Toronto but if the show is set in the South Pacific, I probably couldn’t do it [in Toronto],” he said. “We always look to tax credits and Pennsylvania has a good tax credit, so that’s always been good. … The Pittsburgh crews are great, the locations are great. It’s just really good to work there.”

In addition to his work at Sony, Lammi team-teaches a production management course with fellow Pittsburgh native and director John Harrison (Syfy’s “Dune”) in Carnegie Mellon University’s Master’s in Entertainment Industry Management program.

Students in the two-year program spend their first year at CMU in Pittsburgh and their second year working and taking classes in Los Angeles.

Harrison teaches the portion on how to get a project written, pitched and sold.

“I deal with the issue of what the business is like, the deficit financing, the cost of production, versions of the way things work,” Lammi said. “I teach the budget class and I basically just go line-by-line through a sample budget and walk them through what it means.”

Much has changed during Lammi’s career, including production costs of TV series. Network dramas that once cost $2.5 million an hour now cost closer to $4 million with some cable/streaming series costing close to $20 million per hour.

“It all depends on the show; it all depends on what the elements are,” Lammi said. “We have big, big visual effects-type shows. They’re very expensive. We have big world-building shows. They’re expensive. As an independent studio, we do all different kinds [of shows] at all different prices.”

Today’s comedies range from $2 million to $5 million per half-hour with single-camera series generally costing more than multicam sitcoms filmed in front of a studio audience. (Shows with big-name talent in starring roles also tend to be on the more expensive side.)

“It’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s exciting,” Lammi said of his career in Hollywood. “People have such a passion — it’s a vocation more than it is a job, and I love that energy and that willingness for people to put in such incredible hours.”

‘Kingstown’ needs babies

In January, Paramount+’s “Mayor of Kingstown” begins filming its third season in Pittsburgh, and the production needs babies. Twins or triplets are preferred, caucasian, any gender and no older than 5 months. They are needed to play the role of a main character’s child.

Pay is $500 per day, per baby. If interested, email contact information and baby’s stats (age, height, weight, photo) to extraspgh@gmail.com.