Leonard Goldberg

"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."

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 Another of those few times, Dan Curtis, a leading ABC daytime producer, sent me a manuscript of an as-yet-unpublished novel called *The Kolchak Papers.* I read it in two or three hours—it was the contemporary tale of a vampire in Las Vegas—and I told Dan, “This is as good a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

"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?”"

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

"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."