ABC

"Next Steve added to the Disney column: PIXAR ONLY ONE HIT “We’ve had only one hit,” Steve said. “Before we prove we can repeat it, Disney might be reluctant to change our deal.” This was the one-hit-wonder problem. One hit did not make for a track record. “Anything else in Disney’s favor?” Steve asked. “We’ve talked about this,” I said, “but maybe Eisner’s interest in animation is waning. He just bet big by buying ABC, which includes ESPN. Animation could be on its way to becoming a sideshow for him.”"

"One day I ran into Michael Eisner on the set of one of our game show pilots. He headed up daytime at ABC. I asked him how he liked the show, and he noncommittally said, “Well, my wife liked it.” So I sent roses to Jane Eisner, with a card. Michael called me and said, “Do not agent my wife!” He was kind of angry about it—but that sort of stunt got my name out there, and Eisner and I soon became friends."

"In buying ABC, Smith acquired a legitimate platform company—one that other companies could be added to easily and efficiently."

"With Occasional Bold Action Interestingly, as we’ve seen, this penchant for empiricism and analysis did not result in timidity. Just the opposite, actually: on the rare occasions when they found projects with compelling returns, they could act with boldness and blinding speed. Each made at least one acquisition or investment that equaled 25 percent or more of their firm’s enterprise value. Tom Murphy made one (ABC) that was greater than his entire company’s value. In 1999 (at a time when oil prices were at historic lows), Exxon bought rival Mobil Corporation in a blockbuster transaction that totaled more than 50 percent of its enterprise value."

"He worked hard to become a preferred buyer by treating employees fairly and running properties that were consistent leaders in their markets. This reputation helped him enormously when he approached Goldenson about buying ABC in 1984 (in his typical self-deprecating style, Murphy began his pitch with “Leonard, please don’t throw me out the window, but I’d like to buy your company.”)"

"When the company’s multiple was low relative to private market comparables, Murphy bought back stock. Over the years, Murphy devoted over $1.8 billion to buybacks, mostly at single-digit multiples of cash flow. Collectively, these repurchases represented a very large bet for the company, second in size only to the ABC transaction, and they generated excellent returns for shareholders, with a cumulative compound return of 22.4 percent over nineteen years. As Murphy says today, “I only wished I’d bought more.”"

"By one tally, we had spent $3 billion by 1987 for more than 150 cable companies, giving TCI reach into nearly 20 percent of U.S. homes. We had a sufficient lead—nearly twice as large as the number two player, Time Inc.’s ATC. A year later, we had no earnings but posted cash flow of $850 million—more than the cash flow of ABC, CBS, and NBC combined."

"Federal law forbids any noncitizen from owning TV stations, so Rupert Murdoch became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985 and quickly set about assembling a formidable media empire. He brazenly bought up some of the crown jewels of American media, such as the 20th Century-Fox movie studio. And amid the sneers of skeptics, Rupert launched a fourth U.S. broadcast network, the Fox Broadcasting Company, challenging the dominance of ABC, CBS, and NBC. After buying Metromedia’s TV stations, securing a foothold in key markets, he enlisted as CEO Hollywood heavyweight Barry Diller, who crafted a strategy around younger audiences and unconventional shows like *The Simpsons* and *Married… with Children.* Fox defied the odds and reshaped the American television market in the process. I learned from Rupert’s approach—aggressive and direct, the kind of competitor who was deadly because he was so quick to draw and fire. He tackled challenges head-on—whether from regulators, competitors, or his own team—and always found ways to navigate around obstacles. And he’s never, ever been afraid to buck the system. I respected that."

"As word got out I was looking, I got a call from Steve Ross at Warner. He was an impeccably dressed and roguishly charming media visionary charging against the Big Three television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) that dominated broadcasting with unprecedented news and entertainment choices. Ross had parleyed his early start in the funeral parlor business into what would one day become one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, Time Warner."

"JC and I had an early meeting at the convention center, and we walked the show floor before. What we saw opened our sleepy eyes—workers setting up booth after booth for new channels, including HBO, Showtime, ESPN, Nickelodeon, and MTV—more than we had ever seen before and nothing like we had expected. No longer would cable TV be a community antenna service merely bringing in the Big Three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). These companies were coalescing into a completely different business, an unprecedented platform for networks of all kinds: movies, music, news, history, education, food, and so much more. Millions of TV homes in America would want more choice in the channels they watched."

"At ABC, Paramount, and Fox, I had known what could be done with video screens: we told stories on them. But when I went to QVC in that eventful year of 1992, I watched a screen do something I’d never realized it could do. It wasn’t just a passive one-way delivery system of content. At QVC I witnessed the primitive convergence of telephones and televisions and computers all working together. They were interactive. There was a little video monitor on the set that showed the number of calls coming in when a product was offered for sale. The vertical lines representing the calls rose during the period of the sales pitch, and then, when it ended, they subsided. I was thunderstruck. To me, those calls were like watching waves coming to shore. I thought, *Screens don’t have to be just for narrative, for telling stories. Screens can interact with consumers—*that was the epiphany. It was clunky and rudimentary and I had no clear idea how to turn that revelation into action, but it sat there for a while warming up on the back plate of my brain."

"You rarely get the perfect project or the perfect script. In all my experience I probably haven’t read ten scripts out of a thousand that are so fully realized, so utterly and incontrovertibly great that you just scream, “Make it!” One of those, though, was the day in 1970 that Leonard Goldberg, who had recently moved on from ABC to run a large television production company, called up and said, “You must read this script right now.” It was called *Brian’s Song*, the story of the deep bond between a Black and a white pro football player, one who will die of cancer. I wept as I read it. I called him up and said, “We can only screw it up from here—it’s perfect—let’s go.” Often referred to as one of the finest television films ever made—and one of the greatest sports films as well—it was nominated for nine Emmys and won five. Another of those few times, Dan Curtis, a leading ABC daytime producer, sent me a manuscript of an as-yet-unpublished novel called *The Kolchak Papers.* I read it in two or three hours—it was the contemporary tale of a vampire in Las Vegas—and I told Dan, “This is as good a story as I’ve ever read.” And what a great idea: Las Vegas, a city most alive at night—the perfect place for a vampire to live."

"In I walked, not only having never been in Mr. Goldenson’s office, but never having spoken to him again after our meeting in the elevator on my first day at the company. Bluhdorn had the energy of an electric grid and could hardly keep his seat as Goldenson told me they’d agreed ABC would buy a group of Paramount movies. Goldenson handed me the list and instructed me simply, “Follow up.”"

"Because I also still had responsibility for buying the big feature movies at ABC, my area of programming was now the most successful on the network. As my reward, and when the title “vice president” still had currency, I was appointed one—the youngest VP in network-television history. As Leonard Goldberg had once said about me when he saw me holding my own with that industrial magnate Charlie Bluhdorn, “Who knew?”"

"But my man Goldenson was clearly intrigued, and he patiently waited for all the noise to quiet down. After a moment of slow contemplation, he said softly, “Yes, I can see the risks, but it’s at least a fresh idea. Maybe we should explore this and I could help by going out to California and see if we can get some of the major studios to finance and produce them and thereby lay off some of the risk.” That was a shock to the prosaic system: the chairman was going to engage directly in programming—something he hadn’t done since Walt Disney came to visit him in 1954 to discuss his idea for Disneyland (ABC took an early stake in the park and put Disney’s first series on the air)."

"Pinned down by his small, bright, piggish eyes and looking for a politic way to get out of the commitment he seemed to think he’d made with Goldenson, I said, “Well, a deal this large has to go to the board of ABC for approval”—where that surety of statement came from I’ll never know—“and I, speaking for the program department that has to schedule these films, I will say: we can’t air them.”"

"After our tumultuous first meeting at ABC, when Charlie tried to sell me all those bogus Paramount movies, we continued for years to haggle over those rights. He liked me because I was probably the only person in the entertainment business, probably in any business at this time in his ginormous career, who didn’t tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. Charlie started to call me frequently, usually just to rant about some transgression by his executives, sometimes simply to ask my opinion about this or that nefarious project he was being pitched. Charlie loved confrontation and argument, and from some devilish osmosis I learned never to give an inch when arguing with him."

"And on that very special day, literally that very day, Edgar Scherick, the czar of ABC, was fired! Quite incredibly, they reached down in the organization and picked none other than the young and untried Leonard Goldberg to be the new head of programming. What a stupendously inexplicable stroke of luck. Serendipity, my lifelong lodestar, had made its first appearance."

"Just as I had with the *Movie of the Week* at ABC, I was again starting all alone to try to establish a new television network. There I was with my big idea, my theory that there ought to be an alternative to CBS/NBC/ABC. I knew instinctively that there should be more options than three look-alike networks and wasn’t daunted by how many tries before had failed. I just knew it was time to try this. But how to turn that blue-sky idea into an actual plan? We now had this backbone of Metromedia stations, but how would we find enough other stations to be viable, to cover the rest of the country? What kind of programming would work? It wasn’t as if anyone was clamoring for a fourth network. Even though the three networks had basically morphed into one bland blob, there wasn’t any factual evidence to support starting one. But I was sure it could be done."

"It’s a harsh and binary concept, and not subject to equivocation. Either you are the principal or you’re not. The rationalizing powers of a good employee are endless. Good employees make decisions on a company’s behalf as if they own it. I’d been doing that since my earliest days at ABC. I acted like a principal, but I wasn’t one. I was an employee, and whatever position and power I had could be revoked at any time. I had gone about as high as a corporatist could go. I’d run two studios. I was making more money than anyone else in the entertainment business—I was on the cover of *Business Week.* But as rarefied as all that was, it could be taken away in an instant. All that power I flexed so naturally was devolved from real power. I was craving independence and had a need to stand on my own. And the only way to do that was to take action. But, at such risk."

"One of the many wonderful things at ABC was that if you wanted responsibility, you could simply take it. There were few rules, little governance, and almost no bureaucracy. The strictness came via the ethnic hierarchy: although the top bosses were all Jewish, the actual operations and running of the networks had white Anglo-Saxon presidents. Lower down on one side were the sales departments, populated primarily by gentiles, who interacted with the ad agencies and sponsors, where almost no one was Jewish."

"Michael was now a senior executive at ABC, a big part of making it the top network. But he was still a mid-level vice president and didn’t have much of a chance to get promoted. I asked him to become the president of Paramount; that got his attention and he agreed to join me. He was just so smart—ideas simply bounced out of him. He was capable of saying things that were so ridiculous, and then, in the same breath, out would come something absolutely brilliant. Individually, we were complete opposites; together we were an indomitable combination. He was brash and somewhat reckless with his ideas and enthusiasm. I was measured and endlessly logical and always wanted to be sure any risk was covered. And yet, while he would reference relatively obscure literary properties to emphasize the distinction between an educated, cultured person (him) and an uneducated barbarian (me), he actually was much more basely commercial than I was. He was also funny and we could laugh together, which is almost mandatory for me in any working relationship—even in the most dire discussions or ones of the highest frenzy, something much worse is wrong if you can’t find a laugh somewhere."

"I went into more than overdrive. I attacked on three fronts: the costs, the creative, and an argument for our maintaining control instead of giving it up to Universal. I was convinced that $600,000 for each movie was a made-up number, with no basis other than it was what they demanded. Of course, I couldn’t know, since I’d never produced more than a postage stamp in the mail room. I had to learn fast on bottom-up budgeting, figuring out just how many days it might take to shoot a ninety-minute movie. How much ABC sales could get for the commercials. What independent producers might be available, since I doubted we could count on the major studios to produce at our costs. How to come up with a framework for actually making deals with those producers. How much each film would cost. I needed to figure out all these things in areas where I had no experience—I didn’t even know the right doors to knock on to find the answers. And I needed to know all this within a week, and all I had was my untutored brain and the energy of a speed bunny. I made up a production plan on pure instinct and common sense, though I couldn’t figure out how to pay for it."

"I called Milken, who said, “John wants a billion seven fifty. But he thinks he could sell the Boston station to Hearst for six hundred million. So it’s a billion one for the other stations.” I called Murdoch and reported all that. Rupert wasn’t fazed and just asked how much the whole effort would cost. I called my friend Marty Pompadur, a very senior media executive who had been a key ABC executive and knew everything about broadcasting. An hour later Marty was in my office, and we began chewing over how to build a fourth network."

"My first actual task, other than being the best assistant in the world, was to improve ABC’s library of movies. No one else in the company had concentrated on that, and there was an opening, so I claimed it. I hadn’t yet turned twenty-four."

"I pleaded ignorance of the law and kept my job, but my bumptious pursuit of the straightest line from problem to solution kept getting me into trouble: I’d see the older executives at ABC to-ing and fro-ing with caution and delicacy, respecting channels and protocols and worrying that every action had consequence and risk that would upset their careers and financial security. I, on the other hand, saw only linear logic and was able to proceed directly, without the distractions of normal family life (and, to be honest, financial worry) or any of its curbing responsibilities. I was bashing forward all the time because I didn’t see the risks an average person would."

"Garth looked twelve, and Kevin looked even younger. I’m naturally disposed to hiring people who don’t necessarily qualify or have lots of prior experience; it comes from my own history. I like to give people “too much” responsibility because I took on “too much” when I was at ABC in my early twenties. I liked my process of drowning until I could figure out where the current was moving."

"All through that summer of 1974, there was a Shakespearean plot developing around this triangle of outsized personalities. Neither Charlie nor Yablans/Evans ever knew that I was surreptitiously talking to Andy Tobias. When I heard from Andy how vicious Yablans was in characterizing Bluhdorn, my motivation was to do as much as I could to make certain Charlie wouldn’t be unfairly or negatively portrayed. Hard going given the delectable tidbits Yablans was throwing out. Andy told me Charlie wouldn’t agree to be interviewed, so it was up to me to be his defender. It never once occurred to me that I was helping to open a door I would soon be walking through. And, anyway, I was awfully busy just trying to save my ABC schedule from disaster."

"From the beginning of my time at ABC, everything for me had been “What’s it about?” or “What’s the story?” or “What’s the material?” not “Who’s the hot person of the day?” or “What was the last hit?” My focus had always been the idea, the story, the concept. I strongly believed that at Paramount we had to concentrate on developing scripts from the beginning rather than going backward and being dazzled by all the promoters with stars and packages, which was the way movie studios were then run."

"Over time, the distinct images of the three networks had blended together. Initially, CBS had been Tiffany, NBC was live “specials” and color, and ABC was the shoot-from-the-hip network that would try anything. ABC had become number one, and as the other two tried to compete, the programming for all three networks had grown very similar. I’d always been a contrarian counterprogrammer and believed this opened the opportunity to start a brand-new independent network and began to scope out how to get it launched."

"“There’s nobody in this business at ABC, NBC, or CBS who doesn’t know one thing,’’ Tisch said. “The show is the thing. But by the same token, if you carry that to extremes, it’s like the guy who drowned in an average of 12 inches of water. Sure the show is the thing. Everybody knows that; but do you sit around having the money pour out in waste while you go around saying the show is the thing?”"