Barry Diller

"As part of his continuing education on the business, Larry Tisch traveled to Hollywood to meet the industry’s most successful enter' tainment executives—Michael Eisner of Walt Disney Co., Barry Diller, then CEO and chairman of Fox Inc., and Robert Daly, then chairman and chief executive of Warner Brothers Inc. These were the people who packaged and produced the programs that formed a network’s lifeblood. CBS, he recognized, needed the equivalent of a Grant Tinker and a Brandon Tartikoff. Tartikoff had developed the idea of “The Cosby Show,” which at that point was a major reason for NBC’s passing CBS in the ratings. Tisch wanted to know how they did it. He asked everyone who ought to know, unconcerned about the possibility of sounding ignorant."

"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."

"News Corp. Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, who at various times has been my competitor—or my consigliere, gave me a master class in business strategy. I am still learning the black magic of programming from Barry Diller, who is a bona fide genius and a maestro of television and internet content. And I am reminded of my own ambition when I counsel Mike Fries, who is one of the hardest-working, team-building, risk-taking entrepreneurs I ever have seen, helping to build one of the biggest broadband companies in the world with Liberty Global."

"In response, Barry Diller put out one of the shortest press releases in the ⁠history of business mergers: “They won. We lost. Next.”⁠"

"But, deluded by his own self-image of grandeur, Yablans simply couldn’t take this hit to his reputation… and he quit. Cold. Just like that. I didn’t hear it from him. His lawyer called. Sidney Korshak. In his deep, intimidating voice, Korshak said, “This isn’t working. He’s out, and we have to settle it.” I replied, “There isn’t anything to settle. I’m perfectly happy for him to stay if he wants. If he quits, which is what you’re telling me, then there’s no settlement, he just goes home.” Korshak said, in that low and menacing voice, “You seem like a nice kid, but you’re a little naive. I’ll deal with your boss,” and he hung up. Sidney went to Charlie, and fearless though Charlie usually was, he was a little scared of Korshak. Charlie then called to tell me, “Sidney thinks you’re being a hard-ass and we have to pay him something or things will deteriorate. *Unpredictably.*” Charlie hadn’t liked hearing that word, “unpredictably.” He’d told Sidney that I would be reasonable and to go back and work it out. But he said to me, “Don’t be *too* reasonable.”"

"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."

"I then called Larry Tisch. “Congratulations, Barry—you just made a lot of money,” he bellowed at me with his booming voice (the QVC stock I had bought for $25 million was now worth $125 million). He must have gotten their proposal over the wire a few minutes before. Now I was doubly stunned. I quickly said we could easily compete with the Comcast offer and I was sure John Malone and Liberty would back our deal instead of just selling out. Tisch interrupted me, saying, “If you think I’m going to overbid them, you’re smoking something. I’m going to the board dinner right now and I’m going to tell them we should authorize a one-point-five-billion-dollar dividend instead of doing this deal because we’re not going to get caught up in some bidding contest for a home-shopping company.”"

"We started and it was a glorious sight as Diana sang the first numbers with a long red scarf blowing ten feet in back of her as the wind picked up. Then came the deluge—thankfully no lightning, but a downpour for the ages. Soaking in my light-beige suit, I clambered up onstage and whispered in Diana’s ear that we had to stop. She resisted and went on as the wind and rain pelted down and the mikes for the orchestra went dead, though hers was somehow still working. After I went up a few more times, she agreed, telling me, “Just let me get these people out of the park safely.” With the most magnificent artist’s instincts, she slow-talked almost a million people out of that park without a single injury. But my god, what a disaster."

"Most people leaving high positions in media companies either hang a shingle outside their door waiting for their previous reputation to produce corporate opportunities or get a production deal to keep them minimally relevant. Usually they never again attain the power or influence they had in their corporate life and just slowly fade away. I understood there was no way to replicate my previous center-stage life unless I was prepared to go back to being an employee. While everyone else was misunderstanding what I was doing in the wilds of Pennsylvania, I knew just how much a real advantage it was to go from having a big position and big profile to one that, while so much smaller and less jazzy, had the most solid of profit foundations and a public currency. That’s so much better than starting out from scratch with just a shingle out front. And here, for the first time, I could legitimately claim I was a principal."

"As I was racing around in those early days trying to build up our assets I was also planning to turn the television stations we’d bought with Silver King into a national network. It was unbridled, brainless ambition. Hauling endless bricks of programming up such a steep hill just wasn’t worth the toil. Thankfully, a better brick, a gold one, got thrown over our transom. Jerry Perenchio, a truly great entrepreneur and generous gentleman, had just bought Univision, the Spanish-language network, and he thought our stations would further his distribution. He offered us a whopping $950 million. I cashed the check as soon as it arrived. This ended our very short-lived experiment in programming local television stations, and I was relieved to be out of it. I was just learning the difference between extremely difficult business models and internet-enabled virtual ones that flowed fast from idea to adoption. I was also learning to take advantage of luck and circumstance, which made a lot more entrepreneurial sense than trying to pull off an old media idea born only out of my native optimism."

"Somewhere in the middle of that animated discussion, Leonard Goldberg returned and peered into my office. He later told people proudly, “There was this big mogul and my little assistant yelling at each other while devouring pastrami sandwiches—who knew?” Somehow, defending what I thought was right and fair for my company, I became fearless, while at the same time I was able to calibrate just how far I could go. I never came off as arrogant or disrespectful to Bluhdorn, but I was able to hold firm against his tidal wave of aggression. In that negotiation, I found out something about myself that has surprised me ever since. I actually love confrontation. Arguing principles forcefully, loudly, and passionately was becoming the definition of me. As long as I wasn’t arguing “self,” I was fearless."

"The Universal executives were justifying making a terrible and very expensive movie called *Van Helsing,* about the vampire hunter from *Dracula*, saying that they’d come in short of the $700 million if they didn’t make it. I said, “That’d be fine with me,” and they said if they came in under this year’s budget, the next year’s would be cut back. I said, “Who cares? The only ‘care’ is that the script for *Van Helsing* is unreadable,” and they said I didn’t understand the modern movie business. Also that they had “green light” authority for making films and I shouldn’t stand in their way. I hate this term, “green light”; I believe that the final call on filmmaking decisions should always be made by the chief executive."

"A week later I called a board meeting and began to read a very long statement about their dastardly acts, with a call to return to the clear spirit of the transaction. Ten minutes in, Ari Emanuel interrupted and said, “Why do we have to listen to this? It’s just boring.” That was followed by various cries of “Hear! Hear!” from the other Live Nation directors. What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity. Because I thought good faith would govern, we’d never put in any protections beyond having an equal number of directors. That afternoon, after returning home in a complete funk, I resigned as chairman. The next day I sold all my stock."

"We now have five, all from the same mother, Shannon, who I found twenty-five years ago abandoned on a country road while I was biking in Ireland. She was just nine months old and followed me around for a day until I picked up and took her back to the U.S., where she lived until she was sixteen on our farm in Connecticut. When she started to decline, I couldn’t imagine not having her in our lives. I’d heard about the successful cloning of dogs in South Korea and decided to try. The results have been extraordinary. The pups, born from Shannon’s DNA, do not have her exact coloring or sequence of spots, but I see in each of them the essence of Shannon’s spirit and soul. And yes, I know it is controversial and an indication of how outrageously advantaged our lives are. I hold no illusions about that."

"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.”"

"During a lull I once asked, “Why do you pay attention to these research people? Why do you accept their prognostications as if they’re science? It would be better if they came in wearing headdresses and bones around their necks because they’re just witch doctors who give you false security over a process that is definitionally insecure.” They kicked me out of the room. Now, having accepted the job, I was overwhelmed from the start by the relentless manufacturing regime, and I had no time, no ability, and no idea how to reform it. My heretofore solid instincts were doing me no good inside the tangled web of prime-time programming. I was lost and miserable knowing that under my watch sooner or later the whole schedule would collapse—and so would my big-time career."

"We live life as fully as possible in every arena we’re able to. I don’t feel guilty about it and guilt isn’t the reason for our philanthropy. I’ve worked hard, helped make some beautiful things, tell some great stories, built companies, and created jobs. I believe Diane and I have earned our keep, but we surely know our keep is vastly different from most others. There is such disparity in this that *fairly earned* doesn’t seem enough. Nothing really does. The wealth gap is far too great and unless better guardrails are put around our capitalistic system I doubt it will, or even should, survive."

"Instinct is what I prize. Not research or data. Those who try to apply metrics to these basic decisions waste a huge amount of time and money. And experience doesn’t necessarily give you an advantage. It may even be a hindrance, since experience can easily inculcate a cynical outlook. In the TV and film business, you have no choice but to fly by your instincts alone, and that’s why it was mandatory for me to keep myself as naive and, yes, as undereducated as I could, so I could trust my instinctive ability to recognize a good idea. I force myself to remain naive in this way so many decades later."

"We came up with the name for the park because I kept reading comments that said it would or should be called Diller Island, and that made me shudder. One day toward the end of construction, a group of us were sitting around talking about all the wondrous experiences people would soon be having on the island, and someone remarked, “Let’s don’t get carried away with ourselves, after all—it’s just a little island.” *That’s it,* I thought—*Little Island! We have our name!*"

"The original estimate to rebuild the pier was $70 million. The new current eyeball estimate was at least $150 million with no one confident it would hold. Everyone said, please just stop this nonsense and get a more sober-minded architect to come up with something doable. Nevertheless I plowed on, though I did blanch some when the estimate climbed to $250 million. Part of that escalation was our decision to add an amphitheater and other performance spaces. I don’t remember one irrevocable moment when I was presented with the final budget and said “Yes.” We just slid our way forward, and I never held up my hand to say “Stop.” But I thought if I was right and this lived up to its potential, who would care twenty or fifty or five hundred years from now what it cost. But money was just the start of the troubles to come."

"Over the years, Charlie had attained an earned reputation for megalomania; along with that came a need to have a direct effect on any life he touched. The forces of his energy and power were almost impossible to resist. On meeting an actor for the first time, he was likely to say, out of the blue, “Why don’t I make you a director?” He was constantly trying to rearrange everyone’s life into something he could manipulate and control."

"I have had quite a long run, and I am still running. If I had to ask myself why, I’d say with certainty it’s because I’m still curious. I never see a plane taking off that I don’t want to be on. I still want and need to be engaged and part of things. I was there in the great days of television in the late 1960s, when there were still new formats to invent. I was in the movie business in the 1970s, when movies were in one of their greatest creative periods, and I got to make some that have stood the test of time. I was back in television to invent the fourth network in the 1980s, and in the 1990s left corporate life to become something of an entrepreneur. Early in the twenty-first century I got to play at the beginning of the internet. And yeah, I got rich and accomplished. But that truly was the least of it. The most of it was building, always building. And even better than that was being lucky enough to let a family build me into something resembling a person."

"Why Katharine Hepburn thought Michael Bennett and I should meet—and what Michael thought of her suggesting it—will never be known, but I do know that putting people together without a personal motive wasn’t Hepburn. She simply said to both of us, “I think you’ll like him.”"

"We went on our first trip to Santo Domingo, where Gulf + Western owned a huge sugar plantation and had developed a luxe golf resort on the southeast coast called Casa de Campo. We had our first fight there. Whatever hurt it was that stung me I no longer remember, but I had to get away. I fled on my motorbike up into the rocky hills of the Dominican mountains and slowly unfroze as I dodged potholes along the unpaved road. Why was I so emotionally unprepared for intimacy? When I was eight years old, I had given up believing my mother could protect me from my brother or from my emerging sexual confusion. I became a “walker in the city,” all on my own, not dependent upon anyone. Now my emotions were all over the place because an actual person was becoming important to me. I didn’t just *want* her, I *needed* her, and that banged hard into my built-up self-protections. But all that receded as I drove back to the house, and found Diane standing in the driveway, instantly stitching me back together with her huge earth-mother heart."

"On the opposite side of the ledger was *Friday the 13th.* As soon as I heard the title and concept, I said, “I don’t need to know any more, just make it!” It was a huge hit, but I’ve always had an aversion to horror movies, so never actually saw it. I once got scared out of my suit seeing *The Exorcist* at the home of Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy. He had about twenty people over, and while everyone else loved it, there was such shrieking and screaming that I ran into the other room. Richard Pryor followed me in and said, “Hey, pussy, can’t you take it?” I couldn’t."

"I also believed that all this was the doing of a mad, willful, contrarian Austrian who was furious at the president of his company and wanted to use me to humiliate him. I was just an accessory to Charlie’s vengeful whim. Nevertheless, of course I couldn’t do anything but say yes, but with very little joy and not much enthusiasm. Here I was, thirty-two years old, being offered this opportunity, and yet all I saw was trouble and strife ahead."

"Our successes were becoming ridiculously expected. There was a sense we could do no wrong. But when we first thought of making a movie out of the *Star Trek* series, which had ended ten years previously and had a relatively small audience, no one in Hollywood could believe that such great geniuses would try to take a middling, long-ago-canceled TV series and turn it into an actual movie."

"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?”"

"Then John came to my house one afternoon. I began by saying, “Right now, you are the biggest star in the world, and you worry you’re going to screw it up. You’re listening to this twerpy, inexperienced manager of yours, and it’s leading you to the wrong decisions. This is a critical time for you, and when you’ve got a great script and a great part, you don’t let anything put you off it.” I went on with various examples of how his management had been mishandling things since his spurt to superstardom."

"When I first moved to New York, I thought that city was going to be my permanent home, but soon found I was never going to have geographical permanence. For the next thirty years I would be a nomad, my only constant the planes that connected New York and Los Angeles. While historically the command-and-control systems for networks were in New York, filmed and taped series were mostly produced in L.A. Equally important, Leonard was now seriously dating Marlo Thomas, and he wanted to be with her as much as possible."

"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."

"Paramount’s New York home office was in the mighty Gulf + Western Building, which had a perfect position at the southwest corner of Central Park. Years later, when Charlie was suffering from one of the many vicious attacks on his character in *The New York Times,* I wrote him a note saying, “The sun will never set on you or the Gulf + Western Building.” Charlie burst into tears reading it. Years after, that building was reclad and gussied up into the Trump International Hotel—and I can’t help but wish the sun had never risen on that."

"From Steve Ross, the dealmaker who built Time Warner, I learned how posturing for no reason other than his worry about maintaining his supreme self-image could hold up a deal: he once kept me in my office in the deep of winter, after they had turned off the heat, until I agreed to something he hadn’t even yet offered—because it would only be offered officially if he could count on my saying yes to it. His ego couldn’t stand the possible rejection."

"She simply said, “Yes, I did.” The next day was a Saturday, and we were at the pool with some friends. What happened then between us was an explosion of pent-up demand, and we ran to the guesthouse. David Geffen, who had been one of those at the pool, walked in on us. I caught a glimpse of David’s more-than-astonished face as he quickly closed the door."

"As we walked, we made little asides to each other, and then, like the gym scene from *West Side Story* when everyone else fades away and Tony and Maria are left alone, Diane and I found our way to a sofa, far away from the rest, and we stayed there for a long time. There was a glow around us that was setting off sparks, accurately described best by the French as a *coup de foudre*. Flushed and completely discombobulated, I said, “I’ve got to go,” and she walked me to the door. I was functioning without a brain, not a thought in my head, being willed on by pure primitive urges. We stood at the door, and I said, “I want to call you,” and she said, “I want you to.” As I walked to the elevator, I knew something heretofore unimaginable was about to happen. All my life I’d been mostly un-seducible—by a man or woman—held back by shyness and, to a degree, fear, yet here I was with no restraint at all, knowing I was going to see her again and that nothing was gonna stop that."

"“This is a sympathetic film about a communist, and while you may think it’s amusing for a capitalist company to do this, I work for a protocapitalist, Charles Bluhdorn. I don’t talk to Charlie about decisions to make a movie or not make a movie, but for this one I have to. I can’t put Gulf + Western in a position of being taken by surprise by the controversy this film will cause.” We were still very much in the Cold War with the Soviet Union (it would be ten more years before it would collapse). When the idea was put to Bluhdorn, he surprised us by saying that of course Gulf + Western would support the movie. He said the greatest thing about America is its tolerance, even encouragement, of open discussion on any subject."

"Nothing much had changed in the fifty years of movie distribution: there were still thirty film-exchange centers that each studio maintained across the United States, and the distribution of film prints was a complicated jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to change this Pony Express method of distribution. I whittled our exchanges down to fewer than ten. FedEx had just been founded, and while the technology was still primitive, I knew lots of these analog processes were going to change. But innovation in Hollywood was mostly an accidental afterthought."

"A few months before he died, we were together in San Francisco. Charlie was in the Presidential Suite at the Fairmont hotel, and I was in the suite directly underneath him. We started having what was to be a long and sensitive phone conversation. At several points I said, “Why don’t I just come up and see you instead of talking like this?” Very firmly, he said, “No, let’s just keep talking,” which I thought was weird. It didn’t occur to me that he didn’t want me to see him wigless or in whatever poor shape he was in."

"Since I left corporate life some thirty years ago, there’s hardly an area of the internet that IAC hasn’t touched. The number and pace of transactions and attempts at transactions are dizzying. Some weren’t successful, but enough were to produce a combined value of more than $100 billion. Not bad for a company that started out on fumes with $40 million in revenue. That wasn’t my goal, because the money has always been a by-product, but as a report card I am proud of it. Far better this late in life to have some pride compared with the shame I’d felt for most of my early years."

"So I had the wonderful job of explaining to the nurse, who was truly in love with my father, that it was over and she had to leave immediately. I made it comfortable for her financially, but it was still brutal. A month or two later my father and Janice got so very sweetly married. She told me she had always been in love with my father, but had to wait almost fifty years for that love to be consummated. They were together for nearly two years lolling happily on the world’s most luxurious cruise ships, getting off one and boarding another with maybe a week’s pause between."

"The result was *The Tracey Ullman Show,* a sketch and music variety series that turned out to be far too highbrow for Fox. But inside it were these little animated one- or two-minute interstitials about a family called the Simpsons. Short though they were, Brooks and his co-creator, Matt Groening, thought they could make a half-hour series. It was expensive—a huge gamble. But more than any other show, it built Fox. *The Simpsons* is probably the longest-running, most successful show in the history of television. Ironically, we scheduled it directly opposite that number one series, *The Cosby Show,* and we beat it that first night out. That cemented Fox Broadcasting firmly as the fourth network."

"It was one of those conversations that wasn’t designed to resolve anything, but it rattled around afterward in my head. I began to understand that this was Davis’s method: over the past months, he had ruthlessly weeded out Charlie’s loyalists in the company. And the way he asserted his authority was by forcing the number one person in each division to fire the number two person. Once he had done that, he had the balls of the number one guy in his pocket."

"The natural choice would have been to promote Jim Judelson as CEO. Though diminished by the overpowering Charlie, he was officially the number two person. He had a good record administering all the businesses, and while not personally impressive, he at least had the requisite qualifications. He certainly wanted the job, but his problem was that Charlie had been so dismissive of him for so long, frequently cutting him down and belittling him before the directors, that he had no standing of his own and little credibility."

"Barry Diller, Barry Diller… this name I kept hearing among people… You were a mystery to me, you are a mystery and you probably will keep being a mystery… I probably need you more than you need me and you probably are more of a man than I am a woman… I like your image, your mystique, you are someone people talk about, I like that… and then I like the rest: the real stuff… your heart! I love your heart, I know your heart… I know you have so much to give and I want to get it… D"

"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."

"My father felt an existential unrest and tension most of his life, but he had been truly happy and content the last twenty years, first with my mother and then, after she died, with her best friend. He was a good, decent, and honest man, and I wish we could have really known each other. The formality of my relationship to both my parents still astounds me. Was it me or was it them? That they never, all my life, ever, asked me a personal question seems unbelievable, but is true. It’s equally true that I never asked for advice or ever shared anything about my inner life with them. They set the initial rules, but I never pierced through them, and to this day, it’s still so difficult for me to be open and emotionally available. It’s both a continuing mystery and a sad testament that I’m still mostly incapable of easily sharing my inner life."

"By this point both sides were stretched to the max. Sumner was quoted as saying that I was his great friend who’d betrayed him and that little “crummy” QVC was no match for the great Viacom. I responded, “This is about the future of Paramount—which I led for seven straight years when it was number one in the industry. So do you want this fifty-year-old person or this seventy-year-old? I’m young, I’m vigorous, and he’s old.” Oh, do I now rue trashing a seventy-year-old for his age."

"Sometimes the staff would ask, “Is it commercial?” and I would brutalize them, because rather than using their instincts, they were trying to predict the public’s appetite, which I said then and say now, over and over again, simply isn’t possible. Neither is using research to help make decisions. No amount of research on ideas is worth the paper (or computer screen) it’s printed on. Data can tell you what *has happened,* not what *can or will happen*. Data is often harmful to instinct, and I believe this to be true for making not only creative decisions but many business decisions. PowerPoint can be the enemy; structured information often narrows the sieve just when you need to broaden it out in the spaces between information and real understanding. Overtraining our brains on data alone doesn’t confer an advantage, and it can be a deterrent if it’s the only decision-making component. That’s often the problem with MBA students, who come armed with all the business tools and case studies but little simple human instinct. I do not believe that using instinct rather than deep, hard numerical or fact-based data to help with decision-making is the lazier process. Too much information can overload, overcomplicate, and obscure what is at the essence of any proposal: Is it a good idea, and does it make any common sense?"

"That wasn’t the only thing Google manhandled us out of. We bought Ask.com for $1.8 billion because we thought its search interface far superior to theirs. It was the first to get away from showing ten blue links and was innovating with what it called “smart answers” to search queries. What we didn’t factor in was that Google could simply copy all our innovations and push us into irrelevance. We still own Ask.com. It’s a bit of a lemon, but for almost twenty years we’ve been able to squeeze enough profits out of it to get us way past breakeven on the original purchase price. As usual for me, we made our mistakes early and course-corrected from there."

"The match had been struck! Serendipity über alles! I instantly perked up and stopped him short. “QVC, really?” I said, leaning forward, suddenly completely engaged. “I was just there last month and was amazed and excited by the interactivity of selling on television.” Ralph looked astonished. While he was proud of it, it was a small-time operation and way outside mainstream media. They both were looking at me weirdly, and then at each other. *Why would Barry Diller be interested in a home-shopping company?* Until then I had been utterly passive and now, suddenly, my eyes were lit. “Tell me more about QVC. I want to know everything.” All I’ve ever needed was pure curiosity, and here it was, raging. I was rapt—my divining fork was twitching furiously. QVC was a successful concern, making around $60 million a year. But it was not something the Robertses thought would be their ticket into big-time media. Ralph then mentioned, mostly as an aside, that Joe Segel was soon going to retire, and he planned to sell the 15 percent of the company he owned."

"I went off to a Christmas cruise in the Caribbean with about ten pounds of Paramount internal data to study. The bidding process had given each side the ability to top the other with a three-week pause between bids, and I was prepared for Viacom to raise the stakes. Which they did. Over the next months the bids went from $62 a share to $95, and the transaction now approached $9 billion. We both had to raise more equity. Redstone got Blockbuster to inject $500 million into Viacom, and we got Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast, as well as BellSouth, to come in with us. It was a grueling process, and the media followed each bid as if it were the longest horse race in history. At one stage, when Viacom had the leading bid, *New York* magazine put me on the cover with the headline MOGUL IN A MESS."

"Our first board meeting soon followed. All was pleasant until I asked, as the new chairman, “What’s happening with the search for a new CFO?” Michael Rapino, who was chosen to lead the company, having previously been the Live Nation CEO, said, “Well, I’m not sure we should really do this. We have a perfectly competent CFO, and it’s really not needed.” I said, “That’s not the deal we made.” To which Ari Emanuel, a board member on their side, said, “Who cares what deal we made?” I said, “What the hell do you mean? We had a firm written agreement on this point. Balance and good faith are the cornerstones of being together, and in our first meeting you gleefully renege on a key contractual point?” His disdainful reply was “Who cares? We have the votes.” I said, “Votes? What are you talking about?”"

"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."

"It was early evening after the court victory when I got a call from our lawyers; they were finalizing the agreement and wanted me to come down to their offices to sign it. I walked down Second Avenue, shaking my head in amazement that it was almost ten years earlier when I’d left Paramount for Fox, then left Fox to go off on my little own. Now here I was returning to the movies, but this time as a principal, actually *owning* Paramount. When I arrived, all the lawyers were scrambling about, papers flying between different floors of the building. I was put in an office to wait for Martin Davis to arrive, because we had to cosign the agreement."

"Out of my blunt nature came my most defining aspect of management: I encouraged and insisted upon extreme argument in every creative area. It was loud and it was something of a free-for-all, and every voice got attention if that voice had passion. I was like a bandleader conducting lots of dissonant instruments clanging together. But if you listened, really listened to this cacophony, out would come, after exhaustion and sometimes late into the night, the refinement of an idea into something actionable. I called it “creative conflict,” and since then I’ve prized it as the best process for decision-making. It was sometimes tedious and often more than boisterous, and it was certainly not for everybody, nowhere near politically correct by today’s often oversensitized standards. But I learned to use it to tease out the base truth of whatever was up for discussion, because at some mostly tortured point the truth rang out in my head and I knew what to do. Eventually, I adapted it to fit into almost all my business decisions, and it’s this process that has since guided me more than anything else. I’ve never thought decision-making should be peaceful. Despite today’s standards of enforced and usually dull civility, I still believe passionate, argumentative debate is the best way."

"In an attempt to stave us off, Gordon Weaver, the person whom I’d faithfully supported over the years, told our CFO that if we informed the DA, he “wanted it clearly understood” that his eleven-year-old son was going to say that Barry Diller had molested him in an elevator. I was beyond shocked by this betrayal and unhesitatingly instructed our lawyers to give all our evidence to the authorities. In April 1990, Weaver was indicted for conspiracy and filing false tax returns. He ultimately pleaded guilty. A further irony is that Weaver, who was married, soon came out as gay himself. It was hard to believe that this person I was so fond of and thought so highly of could commit such thievery. It was morally reprehensible and personally unforgivable to me that someone who was gay and knew its particular vulnerabilities would himself threaten to make such an ugly accusation."

"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."

"It was a dramatic story: me and my Paramount history and upstart QVC buying that fabled old studio. I was twenty-four years old when Charlie Bluhdorn barged into my office to save his recent acquisition of Paramount from going bust, and here I was twenty-five years later bidding to buy the whole company. The afternoon we made the offer, I called Martin Davis to tell him an official letter would soon arrive on his desk."

"Before we let anyone in, I walked it alone, stopping at every viewpoint and marveling at what we had wrought. Whenever I’m out and about watching people crossing that bridge, a bridge that connects a little island to a big one, seeing them so happy-faced both coming and going, I know for certain it was worth all the storm and strife we went through to create this oasis from city life. Two million people came that first year, and many more millions since. Someday, a hundred or more years from now, if there still is a New York, if there’s still a United States that hasn’t been blown to bits by internal or external conflicts, people might wonder how this ever got built, and I hope they’ll marvel at it in the same way I do whenever I see something unique that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for one person’s imagination and will (and yes, wealth). And, also… a little craziness."

"This was percolating in the background as I was busy getting to know the CBS executives, and while Larry Tisch, in his fashion, began nibbling away at the edges of our deal. First he said it would be better for him to stay as chairman for the first year or so since he’d still own 20 percent of the company. I’d be president and CEO. Then he told Marty Lipton that his translation of my stock award at QVC into CBS stock would mean I’d get vastly fewer shares in the combined company, cutting me from 5 million to 800,000."

"Two years later, they were ready to make the sequel. And, despite all my contractual reassurances and guarantees, I was told that George wanted to change the terms. He wanted more. I was enraged. We had made such a big deal out of *never* having to be put in this position, and yet that was exactly what was happening. I couldn’t believe it, and thought, *Well, maybe this is just the lawyers out on their own for more money.* I called George and said, “Can this be happening?” He responded with cold clarity: “It just isn’t really worth it for me to spend time on this for the current deal.” “This deal, the most generous in history, isn’t worth it?” I asked. He repeated, “No, not really.” I said, “But you made a legal and moral commitment to honor these sequel terms. Here you are, someone who doesn’t live in Hollywood because you loudly decry the amoral atmosphere of the company town, and then you blithely renege on an agreement made in good faith.” He replied, “Yeah, well, it’s just not worth it for me unless I get more money.” I wrote him a very long letter laying out all the arguments and ending with a plea for him to honor his agreement, but I never received a reply. And of course we renegotiated and made the sequel. The only scene in *Raiders* I never watched—I closed my eyes tight—was the snake scene. I have a deep aversion to snakes and cannot watch one, much less hundreds. But that experience with George tested my aversion to cynicism. I hadn’t expected to find that the Hollywood-bashing, take-the-high-ground George Lucas was actually a sanctimonious, though supremely talented… hypocrite."

"I read it in an hour, and of course I loved it beyond love. I said, “We’ll do it!” He and I made the deal on the phone in five minutes, but I thought, *It’s never going to happen; he’ll go back to Warners because it isn’t officially in “turnaround,”* meaning the studio hadn’t legally let it go. I was fairly certain Warren would never accept a formal, signed piece of paper that said he and his film were being rejected."

"Over the next twenty years we feasted on 155 separate internet business transactions. A more apt description of me might be “internet opportunist.” I didn’t have any great foresight. I wasn’t a “visionary”—another overused term. I had no overarching plan. Everything emerged organically from my first visit to QVC, when I realized screens could *and would* be used for something other than telling stories. And then out of thin air—or more precisely, thin wire—came the internet to supercharge it all."

"So I flew to gray and dreary Belgrade and sat in a cement-block screening room, where they said, “We very much want to show you the film, but we haven’t been able to marry the film and audio track together, so we’ll show you some footage without sound and then go into another room to hear some of the soundtrack.” I thought this was insane, but there I was. I had no choice but to spend the next three hours first watching and then hearing this mess of a movie. I was fuming, but I had John Heyman’s everlasting gratitude. He told me he thought my visit kept him from being assassinated by the government for wasting a fortune on this fiasco."

"Then, one Christmas holiday, into the mail room walked David Geffen, a scrawny nineteen-year-old who looked more like a malnourished twelve. He introduced himself, saying he worked in the New York office, but wanted to use the holiday to find out what the L.A. office was like. I thought, *Whoa, now that’s ambition.* I could actually feel the hunger for success vibrating out of him. I’d never met, then or since, someone with more focus, more pure drive and ferocious intelligence than David. Unlike me, who loves process, David is the most efficient problem solver ever born. No artificial intelligence will ever exceed his ability to go faster from problem to solution, or from poverty to so many billions. Despite all the biological aggression and occasional occupational conflict that has bubbled between us at various times over sixty years of knowing each other, I treasure him now as my best friend."

"Turning down *Moment by Moment* was an obvious example; we were dubbed insane for not making it. But our narrow approach—that the material was all—gave us a blueprint for how Paramount should function."

"Then, two months later, we opened *Saturday Night Fever.* All of us inside the company loved the little movie we’d made, and with hubris we decided to preview it for the industry at the grand Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard thinking that if we were standing this tall behind it everyone would take notice. At five of eight, the place was practically empty. Our old-time head of publicity came over to where I was sitting and whispered in my ear, “Travolta’s the problem; he’s a television person. You don’t put a television person in a movie. The kid just doesn’t put asses in seats.” Well, not old Hollywood asses. But two weeks later we opened the movie, and there were vast lines around the block at every theater across America. Television execs and a television star had broken into the movies. We were on our way. The next year, 1978, we went from last place to first among all the major studios. And we would stay number one for the next seven years. Miracle of miracles."

"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’ve lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being referred to as best friends rather than lovers. We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends. Plain and simple, it was an explosion of passion that kept up for years. And, yes, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane. I can’t explain it to myself or to the world. It simply happened to both of us without motive or manipulation. In some cosmic way we were destined for each other. At that time the Europeans had a wiser attitude about this than us provincials. And today, sexual identities are much more fluid and natural, without all those rigidly defined lanes of the last century. I’ve always thought that you never really know about anyone else’s relationships. But I do know about ours. It is the bedrock of my life. What others think sometimes irritates but mostly amuses us. We know, our family knows, and our friends know. The rest is blather."

"For those who can now never think of me as anything other than a boss, I have to say I was a better-than-good assistant. I was always a presentable young man in the strict suits and ties we all wore. My hair had begun to go in my earliest twenties and so I looked older than I was. There was no task I wouldn’t do, tiny or large, no length to which I wouldn’t go in order to make Mr. Weltman’s life better. I’ve always longed to have me as my own assistant, because no one had a keener eye for every detail than I did. I anticipated perfectly. I discovered that I had this aptitude to sublimate everything into being supportive. Because I had so little self, I knew I couldn’t be a principal, but I also knew I sure could suss out how to make the principal’s life better, just as I’d made my mother’s life better when I was a child. Where other people might assert themselves, I served."

"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."

"If I had succeeded in buying Paramount or CBS, I know two things for certain. One is that I would never have been able to control either—I’d have still been an employee and most likely been thrown out at some point. And I’d never have become an internet entrepreneur. Big word, “entrepreneur.” I wasn’t a natural one. I was a tried-and-true corporatist with more than a master’s degree in managing large enterprises. It had been decades since I’d started anything from scratch and my first moves were pretty mundane. We had these two dreary assets, HSN and Silver King, and while turning around HSN wasn’t going to excite anyone, it did give us cash and some credibility to think about expansion. I wish I could say I saw the possibilities of the internet in some full-blown prophetic way. I didn’t. But inside the humdrum reason I wanted to buy Ticketmaster was the seed of what would consume me for the next twenty years."

"What took my father from his San Francisco–based construction-supply business to Los Angeles was the postwar housing boom in Southern California, where servicemen coming back from World War II were starting families and looking to use their government loans to buy homes in that sunny land of plenty. Back then, the great valley basin was mostly endless citrus orchards and thousands of acres of undeveloped land. My father, his brother, and three entrepreneurial colleagues essentially bought and built entire sections of Southern California—the San Fernando Valley, Palos Verdes, West Covina—replacing vast orange orchards with hundreds of thousands of tract homes, sometimes in ten-thousand-unit parcels divided into four basic models, mostly indistinguishable from each other. Men like my father made fortunes delivering the American dream to young couples in cookie-cutter houses in made-from-scratch communities. My father was far from the dominating force, that was his brilliant elder brother, and he always felt in his shadow."

"Now I understood the reason he never wavered from that huge deal he’d offered me at our first meeting: he really didn’t care. He had a far simpler motive for hiring me: *Get Diller in place and my debt will be his problem to solve.*"

"Stung, I nevertheless wouldn’t let it go: “And, as is usual for them, the price is way inflated. I know I could do it for far less. I could keep us independent of the MCA Octopus that’s been able to take over most television production and keep the networks basically out of producing shows.” That was a reference to Wasserman’s political strength in having gotten the FCC to bar the networks from owning most of their own production."

"He said, “Give me some time to think about it.” A few days later, he came back to me and said, “There’s really only one principal in this company. I mean, you make decisions, and that’s been fine for me and for you. But this is a family company and you’re not a member.” With that, whatever delusions I was still holding on to crumbled."

"I did have a higher tolerance for “temporary failure” than Rupert did. (Although my revulsion at the prospect of *ultimate* failure may be even greater than his.)"

"During the 1990s and early 2000s, I hopscotched my way across every internet opportunity, not that we didn’t plow money into some glorious dead ends. We put hundreds of millions of dollars into Citysearch, believing it was a great organizing principle for local businesses to have a web page that connected them to internet users. It was, but it was also an impossibly hard slog at a time when not enough people were online to support it. We struggled for years until Google’s monopoly tossed Citysearch into the dustheap of online history."

"Companies were “budgeting” total costs for making movies; Universal’s that year was $700 million. I thought there should be no budget, just start at zero and build up from there only when a movie and its individual cost made sense. Macro numbers and forward projections are fine for accounting, but anathema as a decision tool in making movies, which are and always will be onetime, one-off projects."

"I wasn’t jealous, but I knew that whatever had rotted my brother’s brain wasn’t going to be fixed with bribes. I hated how he dominated and subverted their lives, and I sensed all the attempts to help him would fail. My brother was their life burden, and the source of their guilt, but no matter what he did, they couldn’t or wouldn’t let go; they always held on to hope."

"He mercilessly laid me out from one end of the room to the other, ridiculing me in excruciating detail and telling me exactly how dumb I was about scripts. He said, predictably, that I was just another network “suit” and added I was far too young to even fit properly in it and wasn’t entitled to have opinions on anything other than skateboarding. I walked out reaffirming my clerkdom and swore I’d never get near anything creative again. I would be the best assistant the world ever saw and never step out from under Leonard Goldberg’s protective cloak. But now, with the *Movie of the Week* beginning production, I had to overcome my antipathy to creative affairs and dive right into making editorial decisions. It’s always been true that my career was one long case of “fake it until you make it,” and here was my earliest need for the biggest fake imaginable."

"My most potent argument for doing this in-house was that we should never give financial and creative control to anyone, much less give one producer exclusivity over an entire programming area. This just made practical sense to me, but this need for control was also very much primal. As time went on (and as will be underscored endlessly throughout this story), my desire to be, my need to be, in control has never wavered. I raged at not being in control of my very self, so being able to be in control of everything else was beyond mandatory."

"It was just about our lowest point. The finance people at Gulf + Western had even made a presentation saying that we should get out of the movie business entirely. The return on capital was just too low for their liking and the risks were too high. They thought we’d never master a consistently profitable slate of movies."

"There was no such thing as process at Paramount or anywhere else I could see in movieland. For the life of me I couldn’t figure what rigor was employed to choose making this or that picture. It was all about what worked before, who was hot, and what the package was (meaning agents would put together all the elements and then put that “package” up for auction). It didn’t make any sense to me. Everyone was hustling to get their picture made with whatever movie studio would say yes. It all seemed catch-as-catch-can: agents pitching, producers pitching, all of them selling against whatever you were doing in order to replace it with their own project."

"Looking back on those golden years at Paramount, when practically everything we touched succeeded, I wasn’t able to enjoy it as a whole, to live in it rather than just plow through it. Living in the moment, whether high or low, has always been hard for me. I didn’t comprehend how we’d changed the entire movie business, or our effect on the culture of the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. In each of those seven years where we were number one in both movies and television, I was constantly worrying, never fully appreciating just how remarkable an organization we’d become. Robert Woodruff, who controlled Coca-Cola during its great post–World War II growth, said “the world belongs to the discontented.” To me that’s the greatest single explanation for those who succeed greatly, but it isn’t exactly the definition of a happily contented human."

"Jeffrey Katzenberg, a very junior member of the production staff, was chosen for the task: he was wildly energetic, and I knew he would go through walls to get the movie finished. Jeff had no other job for about a year and had to endure our constant hectoring about the poor footage we were seeing—the visual effects that were in no way visually effective—and about the budget, which kept growing like a stinking weed. I told Jeff, “I don’t care what you have to do; I don’t care what it looks like; just deliver it.”"

"At the time, there was no such thing as “media.” Movie studios dominated entertainment, and the five majors (Paramount/Warners/Columbia/Fox/Universal) had worldwide importance. If you ran one of these film companies, you were a prominent figure wherever you went. In those early years, though, I wasn’t swanning anywhere; I was just trying to figure out this weird and dysfunctional studio I was now in charge of. Because I’d offed Yablans in such a public and brutal way, everyone was now afraid of me. And I was petrified that they would find out just how unqualified I actually was. Only if I slowed everything down could I begin to understand all the parts and then try to rearrange them into something coherent. I tend to make things worse in the beginning as I fumble around trying to get to base truths. Instinct, which I prize almost above all else, doesn’t work very well for me in abstruse matters. I have to get to the core DNA on any matter, its logical essence, before I can add anything of value. For me this takes a lot of time, often to the irritation of faster thinkers. But when it does crystallize, I can’t be deterred."

"Around the same time I agreed to start an “innovation lab” inside IAC to develop ideas from scratch. I never thought much would come out of these internal groups, since stand-alone innovation rarely innovates inside a large enterprise (mostly it just copies what happens next door), but we birthed a giant exception to that rule. Tinder was the name assigned to a screen-swiping technology the innovation lab came up with, and within a year—with zero advertising—it became the biggest hit in dating. Our total investment was about $750,000, and it went on to be worth $15 billion."

"He called Murdoch and agreed to sell him his 50 percent for $350 million. I was thrilled to finally be done with him. But my thrill was stayed by one last gauntlet. After all the details had been ironed out, weeks went by, and Davis began braying around town that he wasn’t sure he was going to be out of Fox, because Murdoch probably didn’t have the money to close. I had no idea why he would trash Murdoch, other than he didn’t want people to believe he’d been forced out. It was just nasty. He held on to the final signing papers for days without returning them, crowing publicly th"

"Meanwhile, the news had indeed upended the town. Not since the 1930s had anyone skipped so seamlessly from heading one studio to heading another, and no one had ever been given $3 million in salary (that figure also leaked out). The entire creative core of Paramount was now at risk of leaving, and while the studio had a decent backlog of movies, there was real concern that this mighty hitmaking machine would cease to function. It had been taken for granted that Paramount was the most stable and best-run studio; no one outside a very few knew how unstable the relationship had been between me and the head of Gulf + Western after Charles Bluhdorn died."

"Out of total frustration, I got a copy of the Yablans contract and read it word for word. Several times. Usually in employment contracts at senior levels, there’s a detailed description of the duties. I discovered that there was no description of actual duties for the president: no definition of his authority, and no defined responsibilities. *I had found my way to kick Yablans out of his cool.* I composed a simple one-sentence memo to *all* the staff of Paramount worldwide. It said FROM THIS DAY FORWARD, ALL EXECUTIVES WHO PREVIOUSLY REPORTED TO MR. YABLANS NOW REPORT DIRECTLY TO ME. And I signed my name. Literally ten minutes after I’d had it hand-delivered to Yablans, my office door swung open so hard on the hinges that it actually cracked, and a fuming Yablans came roaring in. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing with that idiot memo?” I responded calmly and quietly. “Frank, I have every legal right to do exactly that, and it’s done. You have an employment agreement that I’m fully respecting. So go back to your office and figure out what you’re going to do for the rest of the day, since I don’t need anything from you right now,” and swiveled my chair to the window."

"I was now a mogul manqué. I’d made two attempts at the big time and failed at both. And lost QVC in the bargain. *Congratulations, Barry, you are now really and truly independent and under no one’s thumb other than your own. Yes, you presciently forged your way into the beginnings of e-commerce, but now you’ve got no job and no prospects*. I was back where I started after leaving Fox, except now I was nationally known damaged goods. With a stone-cold blood oath I resolved I’d never do anything again where I didn’t have hard and absolute control, even if it was owning a corner delicatessen. And that wasn’t too far from what was in my future."

"It reminded me of Sumner Redstone’s fierce dictum: never cede or sell control. When you sell you give up being on center stage. Edgar’s uncle Charles, after they sold out to Vivendi, said, “All my life wherever we would go, when the plane landed there’d be a Seagram representative at attention on the tarmac to greet us, and we’d roll into the city royally. Now all I am is just another rich guy.” I was very grateful to Edgar for having given me the chance to build up his television assets and was really sorry we’d become estranged. Thankfully, over time we repaired our relationship and will always be good friends."

"Once it was gone, I couldn’t retrieve it. Something had cracked open, and the true condition of my situation at age forty-nine was seeping out, and I couldn’t rationalize things back to where they’d been. I realized that if I went on this way for long enough, bitterness would follow, and at some point Rupert would, whether cruelly or politely, get rid of me, because that’s what employers do when employees become either obstreperous or obsolete."

"A few years ago I decided I didn’t want to be on the ground, in the grind as much, so I ceded being the chief executive officer of our companies. I still remain chairman of our two principal publicly traded entities. This leaves me time to get in trouble elsewhere."

"We were both wetter than wet and chilled to the bone and went to my apartment to take hot showers to try to warm up. We then got dressed and went up to the party, where all the invited guests had fled from the concert. The place erupted in cheers as Diana and I announced we’d put the concert on the next night, assuming the torrent wouldn’t return. All the equipment had shorted out and the massive crew spent the next day drying it out with industrial fans and handheld blow-dryers. That steamy evening, she gave one of the most triumphant performances ever seen and recorded; it’s still shown on television. And I still have the photograph that appeared on the front page of the next day’s *Post,* showing me trying to get her offstage with a caption that read “Diana Ross’s assistant tries to stop the show.”"

"On that call, Charlie spoke for the first time about the Gulf + Western corporation and his lack of anyone to rely on there. He said he needed someone to trust now more than ever and that he wanted to put me on the board. I was speechless. Nobody from any of the individual companies Gulf + Western owned was on the board, nor were any of the most senior corporate people. The board was entirely composed of outside directors. It was probably better that the hotel ceiling separated us. I didn’t want him to see that I had tears in my eyes. I didn’t know what it stemmed from, but I could hear the vulnerability in his voice when he quietly pleaded with me to keep our conversation secret until after the New Year, when he’d want me beside him at board meetings. It more than touched me that this business-busting titan wanted me to help him, to protect him as he felt more isolated and alone. We never spoke about it again."

"I returned his call within minutes. He said, “I’d like to get together with you.” I told him, “Sure, when I next get to L.A.” He said, “No, I’d like it soon and privately if possible.” We arranged to have lunch the next week at my L.A. house. I asked my cook to prepare a big lunch for the big man. Nevertheless, I had never seen anyone eat like that. I later found out that Marvin Davis kept an immense number of ties in reserve, because food would be all over him within two minutes of beginning a meal. He ate a huge amount of roast beef at this lunch, and between mouthfuls he announced, “Twentieth Century Fox is a disaster. I’ve owned it for two years, and they make terrible movie after terrible movie.”"

"He wanted to banter, but I got right into it, telling him the bankers wanted at least $150 million in new equity to be put in or they’d not renew the loans. I told him I resented having to come to him for this and was gobsmacked that he hadn’t disclosed that the loans were in trouble. Although I was angry about having to sit there and ask for money, I had no reason to assume he wouldn’t quickly affirm the contract between us that said he would fully fund Fox personally. Instead, he put down the caviar, looked up at me for the first time, and slowly said, “I’m not putting any more cash into the company.” Astonished, all I said was “What?” Another mouthful and he repeated, “I’m not putting up any more cash.” I sputtered god-knows-what until I was able to croak out, “But you have to, you signed a personal guarantee to fund the company.”"

"Milken was raving about the historic fundraising for Kluge he’d just completed to take his company private. He announced that now Kluge ought to consider selling the stations that made up the bulk of their company’s assets. He couldn’t have known Murdoch would be there, or that I’d be in my office at the moment they wandered by. Some celestial force seemed to be driving things as Kluge rhapsodized about how reluctant he’d be to ever sell the stations he’d been building up for twenty years—mesmerizing us except for that seller’s gleam in his little Germanic nugget eyes."

"after we’d become a big success and were overdelivering everywhere, I called Keough to say that another company had made a commitment for the next season and would replace Coca-Cola as our biggest advertiser, and I just thought he should know. In an instant he responded, “Let’s be clear: We *are* your biggest advertiser and will remain so. Just tell us the number that gets us there and that’ll be that.” This became a rule of the house between Coca-Cola and Fox, lasting for the next six years. Some ten years later, I joined the board of directors of Coca-Cola, and I’ve been serving now for twenty-three years"

"There was only one area that authentically excited me, and that was the world of entertainment. Simply, it resonated, not just as nothing else did, but as something I was instinctively drawn to. At least half of my friends’ parents were involved in front of or behind cameras, and to me they were a lot more interesting than the other half, who were involved in making light fixtures, egg farming, and other industrial pursuits. From the time I started to ride my bicycle from one famous Beverly Hills house to another, my eyes were starlit with every aspect of the entertainment industry."

"With nothing more than scrap sheets, I called Murdoch and told him we would have to spend about $200 million before breaking even. I added, though, that there really wasn’t any way to actually know the costs, because no one had tried to build a new network for thirty years, and that attempt failed miserably. Despite having been presented with that flimsiest of a business plan, Rupert was ecstatically on board. He didn’t flinch about the costs; he saw only the opportunity."

"I fought back and said, “We *are* making progress. It’s a process and I can’t do it faster.” He said, “You’re costing me a fortune.” I was by then confident we’d pull it off and the value of his stock would increase enormously. I snapped that instead of grandstanding about what it was costing him, he might consider that it really was me making a financial sacrifice for his eventual gain, since every dollar we lost at Fox was deducted from my 5 percent of annual gross profits. This went back and forth as we descended into the Valley, and I was so angry I almost told him that I had real work to do and he ought to just *go in there and buy his own fucking movies*!"

"happened to his children. Quickly I said, “Yes, we’re all fine here, but… will you do me a favor?” He said, in his Talmudic, solemn way, “Of course, my son, of course I will.” “I want to work in the mail room at William Morris.” Thomas, at that time the agency’s biggest client, said, “That’s easy. Can I go back to my massage now?” The next day, I was called by the head of personnel at William Morris. He ever so politely asked me to come in whenever convenient. I said, “How about now?” Thirty minutes and a few desultory questions later I was hired. And just like that my life began."

"I came to understand that denial—refusing to accept an ad that didn’t jump off the page and resonate—was the only thing that mattered. I’ve always believed that if you push people past their endurance, good things come. Rarely does a great ad or a great TV spot appear on the first try, and when it does it’s clear instantly and you don’t have to talk around it. What I call “torturing the process” works. Saying “It’s okay” or “It’ll do” is repellent. Never compromise. There wasn’t an idea for a movie or an ad or television spot I didn’t torture: we had the noisiest, rowdiest sessions that lasted into the night, trying to come up with ideas for movies, with the best advertisements, and it was usually after some exhaustion that original ideas emerged."

"My total ambition at that point was to be the person who takes care of the “Person,” meaning the principal. In that role I was fearless, intuitively knowing how to move all the levers of people and power in my sole pursuit of satisfying the Person’s needs and goals."

"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."

"With prints still wet from the lab, *Star Trek* opened on Christmas Day. By noon there were lines around the block at every theater it was playing in across the country. Jeff had recently bought a small house on Carmelita Avenue in Beverly Hills. The next day I had a truck pull up to the driveway and dump $25,000 in pennies on his front lawn as our thanks for saving us. He called me up and said, “You destroyed my lawn!” But he was very proud of those pennies."

"When the final script came in, the unbelievably controlling Brooks made me come to his office to read it while he sat staring at me from six feet away. He then refused to deal with anyone at the company other than me. As a result I learned so much from him about the craft of big-time moviemaking. He was also the cheapest producer/director I’ve ever known, tough as the old shoe leather his face resembled."

"creative tension is productive; Kate Hepburn said, “Show me a quiet, happy set and I’ll show you a boring movie.” Yes, there are a few, very few, artists who can unilaterally keep the whole equation in their head and need no external vetting. And yes, there are a lot of dopes in the executive ranks. But good and talented executives should not abrogate their responsibilities because artists denigrate them as obstreperous and talentless “suits.” Movies have become a directors’ medium, while television has always been a producers’ and writers’ medium. Because of that, I really do think the quality of television is on average far better than the quality of movies."

"When I knew I was going to leave I did eventually tell him. But I’d held the information too close for too long and he’d grown to distrust me. His reaction was to tell me he thought I’d been keeping him and Davis apart for competitive reasons. Although he slowly came to understand why I was standing between them, he never fully accepted what was the purest of motivations in protecting him, apart from my just not wanting Davis anywhere in my pants."

"I don’t think he cared whether I was Barry or Harry or Billy or Dopey. Davis hated putting up his own money for anything (it later turned out that he’d even borrowed the money to pay for the paintings on the walls of his house). As for me, I simply needed someplace to go. It wasn’t as if I craved running Fox, though I did smile at the thought that not so long ago I’d been a romping teenager jumping over the fence at Beverly High to roam its back lot."

"The soap opera saga began: It turned out that the husband of Janice, my mother’s best friend for fifty years, had also recently died. They were the model family I wished I’d belonged to when my parents’ marriage was on the rocks. Janice still lived in San Francisco, and after my mother died, my father secretly began seeing her. He was flying up and down the coast, back and forth to San Francisco, to be with her. Every once in a while I’d hear from the nurse about how my father was coping, but one day she called saying, “Your father’s acting very strangely, disappearing for days with no explanation.”"

"If there had been a whiff of an opening, Rupert would have bet the company again to pull that deal off. Rupert was always a better and bigger risk-taker than I was. I may have taken a lot of career risks as well as product risks, but the big, betting-the-store risk is not something I was constitutionally able to do. Rupert was, always. It excited him, while it hobbled me."

"I walked dazedly downstairs to my office, closed the door, and sat at my desk, my head in my hands. It hit me with such force what a monumental fool I had been not to have fully understood Fox’s underlying financial structure and debt. I’d been the most successful executive in the film and television business over most of the last ten years, and yet I’d just been duped into joining a soon-to-be-bankrupt company."

"We had already spent $45 million, and my family pleaded with me to just get out of this. Their attitude was *Let’s not go where we’re not wanted.*"

"I learned later the real reason he needed me: the banks he’d borrowed all that money from either wanted it back or wanted him to put more equity into the company to protect their loans. I was considered, at that moment, the most successful movie company executive, so he could use my hiring to keep from having to put actual money into the business. Remember, the only cash he put into Fox was that original $25 million."

"He shot back, “I’ll set up a competitor in every city and put you out of business unless you stand down and give us the right to display your content.” He was playing for the biggest stakes and I knew we couldn’t stop the tsunami of internet adoption. It was going to roll right over us, and while Rosen’s was a principled stand I told Gates we’d withdraw the lawsuit. It was my excitement about the internet and desire to get it going that governed my expedient decision to waive our copyrights—the same issue that today has publishers suing AI on the same basis, with probably the same result."

"After some few months, the legal entanglements came unstuck, and I also became chairman of the Home Shopping Network. I was definitely humbled, but I was back in business and I liked being back on the attack. I also more than liked being discounted again. I was in firm control of two public companies, and while of no size or circumstance, I had enough clay to get going. First up, though, was fixing the forlorn and broken-down Home Shopping Network."

"My need for independence and for not re-stomping old ground had forced me out of the entertainment business, but far sooner than anyone thought conceivable the value of our soaring stock gave us an invasion currency that would lead me right back to the old media world I’d just left."

"My original five-year contract with Fox had ended, and when it expired I told Rupert I didn’t want to enter into a new contractual relationship. I thought it better for us both to just have a six-month mutual termination clause: either of us could end things with half a year’s notice. We had stability and confidence in each other, and my compensation was fair. We both thought that if either of us wanted to stop working together, all we had to do was push a cease button. As my frustrations and aspirations rose in the summer of 1991, I went to Rupert and told him I wanted to be a principal. I remember saying to him, “We both know I *act* like it, but I want to actually *be* it. I want to be some kind of a partner in this enterprise.”"

"My taking over QVC was announced in December 1992. I agreed to purchase $25 million in common stock, or 3 percent of the company (with options to buy another 15 percent), and to form a partnership with Liberty Media, which would hold 21 percent of the stock, and Comcast, which would control 14 percent. *The New York Times* said, “People who know Mr. Diller and are familiar with the deal said that… he plans to turn the shopping channel into an on-line entertainment and merchandising service in which the subscriber and the cable company can freely interact.”"

"Between our lunch and the time Murdoch finalized buying into Fox, he’d gone to Australia, and then on his way back to New York stopped for two days in L.A. He called and I invited him to come over to the studio for a chat. And, here’s where my North Star of serendipity once again showed up: three seemingly disparate events threaded themselves into the opportunity of a lifetime—at least my lifetime. First, that particular day was Michael Milken’s annual investors’ conference, called by some the Predators’ Ball. Milken was at that time the biggest financier of companies in the United States. He had previously called to say he had just financed John Kluge’s buyout of public shareholders at Metromedia, which owned six blockbuster television stations. They wanted to have a reception away from the place where the conference was being held, and Milken asked, as a favor, if I would give them a soundstage to have it on. The afternoon of that day, Murdoch arrived in my office. And finally, as soon as Rupert sat down in my conference room to talk, my assistant buzzed me to say that Mike Milken and John Kluge were in my reception room to say hello before their party."

"My friendship with Katharine Hepburn lasted for twenty captivating—and often irascible—years. It faded because of nothing more than benign mutual neglect."

"Over the years my risk appetite has grown a lot, but I’ll never be in his league. He’s a gambler at heart, always calculating just how far he can push to get the opportunities he hungers for. Sometimes he overreaches, and usually overpays, but he’s always been saved by his ability to pull out of his hat whatever profits are needed to pay off the debts. Over and over, he’s been the great media disrupter. He changed British television by launching Sky satellite service, committing billions of dollars he didn’t actually have for a market that didn’t exist. I’ll be forever grateful that he backed me with Fox Broadcasting against such huge odds."

"You do get lucky when you buy a company that has been mismanaged and yet is still running. Running on fumes is still running, and if you’re compelled to be willful and tough minded it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the few simple things needed to turn one around. Within a year of me taking over, HSN went from losing $70 million to making $60 million."

"The producers, Joel Silver and Larry Gordon, came to see me and said they wanted to use it for this blowout scene. Silver, one of the great bullshit artists of all time, said, “We just need it for a night.” He had been told that I cared about the building, so he added, “We won’t hurt anything. We won’t damage anything. We’ll have all this prep. It’ll only be one night.” He went on and on: it’ll be this, it’ll be that, until finally I said, “Yeah, okay, fine. Go do it.” And the afternoon of the shoot someone from our real estate division called and said, “They’re destroying our building.” “What do you mean, they’re destroying our building?” They told me to go over there and see. It was winter, and at five p.m. it was dark already. The whole street and surrounding area looked like a disaster zone. The first five stories of the building’s windows had been boarded up. I saw Joel, and said, “What the fuck are you doing to this building?!” He admitted, “It’s a little more complicated than I said.” “A *little* more complicated? You’ve destroyed our thirty-story building! And you said you’d be out of here in one night!” He said, “Actually, I think it’s going to be about two weeks.” I was insane with anger, but there was nothing I could do. They’d already wrecked it. The penultimate shots of the first few floors of the building were an explosion that blew out all the windows. I had thought they were going to fake it with a miniature, but no, they did it for real! It took us a year—and cost us a lot of money—to fix the damage. All our tenants also demanded reductions on their rent."

"As for much of the rest, I’ve been able to play a part in the cultural landscape of the last fifty years as well as the beginnings of the internet revolution. I’m a little more wobbly, but I’m still plying the waters for new opportunities just as artificial intelligence is forging the next revolution. I’ll only stop revolving and evolving when my heart stops and I stop moving altogether. I’ve been so lucky in this life. Serendipity has delivered me opportunities that were inexplicable otherwise, and while I certainly can’t see around any new corners, I want to walk adventurous streets for as long as I can."

"Finding our own vein took some false and painful poking about. Finally, in the nick of time came a script that lit my contrarian spark and came to define what Fox was. The title on the first page woke me up: *NOT THE COSBYS.* At the time, *The Cosby Show* was the most successful program on television, a gentle sitcom about an idealized, decent, and loving family (just how idealized we now know, given the revelations about Mr. Cosby). *Not the Cosbys* was about a dysfunctional family saying and doing every impolitic, incorrect thing possible. And it was hysterically funny. We’d found our edge. We were going to be an *alternative network*! We had to change the title, of course—it became *Married… with Children.*"

"Some of our ventures led, some fizzled. But the ones that led were blockbusters. One that still leads is Expedia. I thought travel was the perfect business to be colonized by the internet. We found and bought a fast-growing but still small company called Hotel Reservations Network based in Dallas. It owned the name Hotels.com, and it was our first foray into online travel. Microsoft had also started an online travel service called Expedia, which by 2001 was getting some traction. After the dot-com bubble burst, I went to see Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, on a mission to persuade him to sell it to us. It was still losing money and Steve felt Microsoft shouldn’t be in these internet verticals anyway and quickly agreed to let us have it in exchange for $1 billion of our stock. We were set to close the deal in October 2001 when you-know-what happened on September 11 and travel ceased to exist. We had an out clause in our deal for a “material adverse change,” and 9/11 was certainly that. We thrashed around for weeks asking ourselves how we could pay $1 billion for a travel service when there was no traveling. One day, as we were stewing around, someone in the room said, “If there’s life, there’s travel.” That rang loud enough for me to say, “That’s it—we’re betting on *life,*” and we closed the deal."

"On a strict economic basis I shouldn’t have listened to that voice because on a purely economic basis we *absolutely* should have bought Paramount. The assets would have far exceeded the cost. But… I choked. I stopped bidding. In retrospect, thank god I did as I’m sure our group would have eventually fallen apart because there was no real alignment of interests. Most important, it would have put me squarely back in “old media,” when I was the only one in media aggressively pushing interactivity and technology as the path forward. Despite the starry allure of going back to Paramount in such a dramatic way, it would have been a distraction from the gutsy course I’d been on in e-commerce. Nevertheless, this had become a game, and the momentum of the chase was pushing me forward, maybe brainlessly."

"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."

"I spluttered, “I don’t know, but QVC is this primitive clay I want to get hold of and use it to pursue *interactivity.*” That was mostly babble, because all I really knew was that this was the first time in months I’d been intrigued by anything. Ralph and Brian knew they’d just hooked the big fish, but were bewildered by the small stream it wanted to inhabit."

"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."

"I had one philosophy about new ventures: If you like the idea, get on with it. Don’t overanalyze it, don’t waste time making decks and projections where it’s absolutely certain, *absolutely*, that they will be wrong, high or low. Don’t do anything other than shake the idea back and forth until you resolve that the only known is… it’s a *good idea*. And then, just *get on with it*! Make mistakes and correct them as fast as you can, and eventually there will be fewer mistakes. This is the way non-geniuses succeed, and I’m very squarely in that camp. I don’t see things clearly in the beginning; I can’t see around corners. It’s process I prize—the rocky road from idea to implementation. The consternation and the thrill of pulling it through to success is the most gratifying work. Once that’s done, I lose interest and want to find my way to the next gnarly process."

"I knew almost nothing of the life she had before I was born. She said her mother was Jewish, but I hardly ever saw her, and my mother rarely spoke of her father. He had been run over by a trolley car in San Francisco when she was three years old. If he was ever mentioned at all, she simply called him by his surname, “Mr. Addison.” My grandmother quickly remarried a well-off walnut merchant and with monstrous selfishness put her only daughter in an orphanage. She was five years old. My mother remained locked away there until she was sixteen. She never forgave her mother and never discussed with me her time in the orphanage. I often wondered if she’d been molested there; the surface gaiety, niceness, and kindness she displayed toward others seemed to hide a basic lack of emotional plumbing, as if it had been soldered shut."

"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."

"There was no straight line to my late-stage career. It made no linear sense. Opportunity came from the unintended consequences of disconnected situations that reconnected in serendipitous ways, as if some cosmic hand had been at work. That’s about the only explanation for how events that began to grind way back in 1977 would become one of my greatest, zigzagging-est adventures. It took almost two decades for all the disparate pieces to come together into opportunities I never could have imagined. It’s also a grand illustration of how the meandering paths of media have crissed and crossed in bewildering ways throughout my life."

"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."

"I got the idea I could take these spindly local stations, get them off Home Shopping, and begin networking them with original programming. They covered about 25 percent of the United States and I had dreams—as usual, without much deep thinking or awareness of how difficult it would be—that all these low-power channels could morph into a national broadcasting cooperative."

"I first approached him in business when I was twenty-five and buying a package of films from his Universal studio. I went to his office and said, ever so tentatively, that given we were buying sixty-four units at $600,000 each, couldn’t you just cut one unit from that sixty-four? Two beats. He stared. He said, “No.” Nothing more. Just no. Silence. The stare. And I folded like the cheapest tent. But as I got up to go, dejectedly knowing the fool that I was, he walked me out and, in that very quiet voice of his, said, “Next time you try this, be fully prepared to call the whole deal off if you don’t get what you asked for. Because, otherwise, you never will.” Out I went as the door closed silently behind me. It was the best lesson in negotiating and has stayed with me ever after."

"Bluhdorn insisted: “You’ve got to take all of them.” The kernel of an idea forming, I asked if he planned to make new movies at Paramount or if he was just going to strip-mine the assets. That got him all frothy again and he bellowed, “Do you think I’m some small-time player? I’m going to revive Paramount and make it the biggest studio in town!” (And, he did.) I pounced on this and said, “Great. We’ll agree to contract all those films if we have the right to swap the new movies for the old turkeys. In other words, I’ll guarantee the dollars, betting you’ll make better movies we can successfully run, which will partially offset the costs of making them, since these old movies are basically worthless.” While I didn’t fully understand it at the time, this was exactly the concept Bluhdorn had used to build up Gulf + Western: trading the made-up paper value of his stock and using it to buy better assets than the crummy ones he’d been able to buy at the beginning."

"It’s a lot harder to come in on top of an organization than at the bottom if you want to know how a company actually works. And I’m no good unless I understand everything down to the smallest molecule. No one really wants to tell the chairman anything other than good news and no one at Paramount was volunteering anything given how I was dropped onto the top of the Paramount mountain."

"“Everyone at this pathetic company I just bought is an idiot, so just call me,” Bluhdorn said. I couldn’t believe this giant industrialist wanted to handle this by himself. What I didn’t know was that Paramount was a vanity buy for him, opposed by his board. Until now all the other bread-and-nickel businesses he’d acquired had always been bought below book value. The only way he could justify buying the studio was to sell the television rights to its library of movies at a price close to what he’d paid for the whole company, a conniver’s connivance."

"I thought there were synergies with HSN’s call centers. It had 2,500 people taking phone orders for merchandise, and Ticketmaster had 1,000 taking ticket orders; we thought combining the back office of the two businesses would save money and be much more efficient. It was a basely pragmatic move, hardly inspired or aspirational."

"Broadcasters had, at that time, a sense of responsibility for what they did, and were, to a degree, programming in the public interest. Guardrails of any kind didn’t seem to exist in the movie business. For all Yablans’s bluster he was a master at distribution and marketing. And Evans was far from a slouch at running the production side. He had great theatrical instincts, and he made pictures better because of his intense involvement. The problem was, their enormous successes were done and gone."

"For the umpteenth time I was so in over my head—I had zero experience in big-game dealmaking and was only months into running a publicly held company. I was also embarrassingly naive about what drove investors. I had lunch with a group of twenty or so institutional shareholders of Paramount. I was doing my passionate sell about why we were the better buyer—why I’d do a better job running the company than old Sumner. I was going on and on and could tell I was losing my audience as they dolefully picked at their food. Leon Cooperman, a legendary stock picker who had a big position in Paramount, interrupted my monologue. “I don’t care about how you’re going to run this better than him—just pay me a dollar more so I can go home.”"

"It was around then I bought a sailing ketch called *Mikado*, the first boat of mine that needed a crew and that started our now decades-long cruising and adventuring around the world. Diane and I often try and calculate, in the thousands, how many miles we’ve swum, how many hikes we’ve taken, how many places we’ve traveled, both inhabited and not, with friends and family and not. Boats for us aren’t for keeping in marinas or sitting in one placid place to entertain guests and have parties. If we have guests, that’s nice, too, but we’re in the most contented rhythm when we’re on our own. We often look at each other across our twin chaises on the bridge deck after a day of swimming and hiking and count our endless blessings."

"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."

"I couldn’t understand why opening a picture nationally, using television, wasn’t a better idea than what they’d been doing. I had learned long ago that ad making was mostly about saying no to the ad makers. As in, “No, it’s just not good enough,” and “No, you can’t go home until you make it better.” The standard process at Paramount was to review three or four concepts that the ad department corralled from outside vendors, toss them around for a few minutes, and pick one."

"I had come to know that when Charlie was dead serious about something, his whole demeanor would change from unimaginable boisterousness to being still and pensive, speaking slowly and softly. Finally he quietly said, “I’m not replacing you, so stop this nonsense and go back downstairs and get back to work.” Charlie wasn’t ready to give up on me. He couldn’t accept his instincts about me were wrong. While he bellowed constantly, he’d never lost faith in me."