Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
ABC, Part 2: Road to the ’70s
Tonight! In full color! The incredibly true story of America’s boldest TV network, brought to you as only ABC can! (Music theme of Wide World of Sports) In the battle of the balding billionaires, first they endured the Agony of Defeat. Then, in a blaze of shamelessly popular entertainment, they tasted the Thrill of Victory! It’s all here, the dreamers, the hustlers, the lawyers, the regulators, in the boardrooms and bedrooms of Hollywood and of Central Park West! (Wide World of Sports theme rounds the final turn and heads for home with a fanfare of trumpets), This…is part 2 of the story of the American Broadcasting Company! It’s headed your way, and it all begins…right now!
There’s an expression in show business, “Nothing’s as cheap as a hit.” One hit, if it’s big enough, can turn around a viewer’s impression of the channel it’s on. The Untouchables had been such a hit, a lurid, staccato crime thriller at the turn of the darkening Sixties. By the fall of 1965, ABC was poised to launch another influential hit show, Batman. They chose to make it a mid-season replacement, holding it back until early 1966. It was a wise move. The show’s timing was perfect, riding in on a wave of pop culture and comic-book-based pop art.
ABC wanted to sell itself to ITT, one of Wall Street’s most aggressive conglomerates, headed by Harold Geneen, one of the most famous tycoons of his day. It would be a stock swap, with ABC management retaining some seats on the merged board. The company badly wanted this deal to go through. Washington was their obstacle. Because it involved a broadcaster, it required signoffs from the Justice Department and the FCC. Senior staff of both companies devoted months of their time to the agreement. The legal work ran into tens of thousands of billable hours. And…
The government turned ABC down flat. There was a silver lining: Forced to finance its expansion with its own cash flow, the company discovered efficiencies that other broadcasters hadn’t been pushed to find. Dollar for dollar, they became the most profitable of the Big Three.
ABC was the last of them to embrace color television. All three networks’ costs of converting to color included higher payments to the studios who made TV shows, due to their own higher technical expenses for film, costumes, makeup, lighting, and sets. The ratings of ABC’s black-and-white shows weren’t suffering yet: Burke’s Law, Peyton Place, The Addams Family, The Patty Duke Show, 12 O’ Clock High, Combat. But by 1964, color TV sales were finally taking off, and ABC was forced to catch up.
In 1966-’67, Batman helped ABC in two ways: by giving the network the enormous advertising revenues attached to a surprise smash hit; and by giving other show producers (on rival networks) the fatal temptation to imitate Batman’s wacky, cartoonish style, above all its nodding-and-winking lack of belief in the show’s premise. It worked for Batman; it sank The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Batman was such a hit that ABC scheduled it twice a week, as they’d done with Peyton Place.
The network tried for a follow-up hit with The Green Hornet. They failed, but that show’s second lead ended up going somewhere—Bruce Lee. The color era brought ABC action shows—The Rat Patrol, Garrison’s Gorillas—and kept up ABC’s groove with middle-of-the-road family shows like The Big Valley, Marcus Welby M.D., and The FBI.
ABC did inventive things. They did occasional live prime-time dramas. Lacking their own hit spy show, they imported The Avengers from the UK. They wrung profits from daytime with soaps like General Hospital. They had a paranoid UFO show, The Invaders, three decades before The X-Files. They even filmed a TV movie, Shadow on the Land, that was going to lead to a weekly series about present-day America being run by a fascist government. Hard to picture that as competition for Bonanza or The Dean Martin Show.
Every network’s largest profit centers included their advertising-rich “O and Os,” their five owned-and-operated big city TV stations–in those days, the limit of what each network could outright own. The many hundreds of ABC’s other affiliated stations were, like those of the other two networks, bound to them by no ideology or sentiment but by short-term contracts. Affiliate relations were important to maintaining a tenuous and highly breakable loyalty, based on sharing advertising time and revenue. The most effective conservative protests of the classic TV network era weren’t mass movements of millions of viewers, but of hundreds of representatives of restless network affiliates, meeting several times a year, whose regions didn’t always like what was coming down the coaxial cable from New York.
For a few months, I’d get to see ABC up close.
In March 1970, I registered for the draft, on the morning of my 18th birthday. From 1967 on, cities and college campuses all over the country had been wracked with demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The very next morning, a block and a half from my NYU dorm at 55 East 10th Street, a building at 18 West 11th Street was reduced to rubble when three radical bomb-makers accidentally blew themselves up. By May, even schools without riots canceled classes a month early. This national crisis was screwing up my plans of making some money over the summer. Fortunately, a distant relative got me an interview at ABC, and I was hired for a mailroom temp job. It paid $1.50 an hour; not bad.
ABC’s Manhattan headquarters was a new skyscraper that had just recently joined “broadcaster’s row” on 6th Avenue. NBC was (and still is) in its original, Depression-era home in Rockefeller Center near 50th Street. CBS was in an elegant Eero Saarinen-designed headquarters, nicknamed Black Rock, at 6th Avenue and 53rd Street. ABC was at 6th and 54th. In those pre-cable, pre-internet days, that’s a lot of media power concentrated in four city blocks. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Hearst company, the Time-Life magazine empire, the head offices of MGM, United Artists, Columbia, and Paramount studios, and many of the ad agencies of Madison Avenue, were a ten-minute walk from ABC’s front door.
I worked noon till 8. The end of the day was busy for send outs, peaking from 4 to 6. After that, volume usually slowed, slacking off after 7. Almost every night ended with a couple of us preparing a case of memos and documents to go air courier overnight to ABC’s offices in Los Angeles, rushed to La Guardia and JFK by ABC News motorcycle messengers, who otherwise spent their days bringing unprocessed news film from airport tarmacs right to the door of the developing labs.
Getting out of work at 8 pm wasn’t always ideal, but it was summertime. My girlfriend often rode into the city to surprise me, waiting in the lobby when I left work. I instinctively knew I’d never take that for granted. We’d make a plan on the spot and go out, to one of midtown’s countless movies or restaurants. Even on the hottest of days, it was usually cooling off by 8.
I rarely saw famous actors at headquarters. British singer Tom Jones walked in. He had a show on the network. Local ABC 7 worked out of studios on the west side, so we rarely saw the Eyewitness News team. But we did see a lot of athletes when they came through New York. ABC Sports frequently did talent signings and press conferences in front of corporate backdrops and symbols. Sports had done far more than their share in making ABC profitable, so much so that Sports division supremo Roone Arledge would later be given a reward he coveted: a controversial promotion to be head of ABC News.
One time, my girlfriend entered the lobby ahead of a pair of men. One had a distinctive voice so loud it boomed off the marble-clad walls. She turned and saw a tall, vague-looking middle-aged man. “Young lady,” he demanded, “Do you know who I am?” My gal had the courtesy not to say, “Why don’t you ask the receptionist? She’ll know.” Instead, she said, no doubt politely, “No, but your voice sounds familiar.”
“I’m Howard Cosell!” he harrumphed before walking away.
Even as ABC entertainment ratings soared, ABC News stayed mired in third place. News Division had its bright spots, like space and science reporter Jules Bergmann, a favorite of the astronauts. The Nixon White House felt the network was the only one of the three that even tried to be fair, and Nixon granted a rare one-on-one interview to ABC anchor Howard K. Smith.
To a greater degree (at the time) than the other networks, ABC ran their TV programming and production out of semi-autonomous offices on the Coast. Chairman Leonard Goldenson didn’t see himself as ABC’s showman, but as its wise man, the dealmaker. The New York headquarters was mostly unglamorous business: ad sales, billing, banking and payroll, government and legal affairs, public relations, and affiliate relations. HQ was impressive, all shiny and new, but functional, not fancy. The whole building understood The ABC Way: keep an eye on costs. Even network VPs kept long-distance calls short. Mail went first class, but not certified or registered.
One useful life lesson to a teenager: to my surprise, the offices of the top bosses were often the last ones to leave the building each night. What do you know; the big boys didn’t always have it as easy as I thought. An open memo was sent to network vice presidents, including big shots like Fred Pierce, Elton Rule, and Martin Starger, reminding them that Goldenson personally insisted that complaints raised by affiliates get an immediate response. Another open memo to a small group of executives noted that everyone, even the chairman, flew economy class, and expense reports should reflect that.
Sometimes, after much of the staff left for the day, a mail room worker was dispatched to the corner newsstand to buy a copy of the New York Post, an evening tabloid, and bring it to Mr. Goldenson’s secretary, up on the umpteenth floor, so he could read it on his ride home. It seemed like an odd little thing for a teenage kid to be in on, being privileged to see the common man touch in the quietest of TV’s founders. You could never picture, say, CBS’s Bill Paley ending his workday reading anything like the New York Post. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that by 1970 ABC was a respected competitor coast to coast, entering a decade when it would finally reach the top.
The aftermath for me: Working at ABC was a great summer job for an 18-year-old. In the fall, I went back to film school. What about that girl who waited for me so many summers ago, like the one in the lyrics of Five O’ Clock World? She’s sitting across the table smiling while I type this.
The aftermath for ABC: The Seventies would be a golden age for ABC’s golden coffers. Love, American Style begat Happy Days, which led to Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Starsky & Hutch were no ratings slouches either. CBS programming phenom Fred Silverman came to ABC in 1975. By the time Silverman left in 1978, ABC was #1, thanks to shows like Charlie’s Angels. Was there schlock on TV? Of course; there always will be. But there were also moments of pop culture greatness.
ABC’s broadcast of Roots was the surprise hit of 1977, a genuine phenomenon. Its reputation and adherence to history look tarnished today, but give some credit to what Roots was in its time. For people old enough to remember those broadcasts, it may be one of the few, fairly-well agreed-on high notes of the vanished age when three networks ruled the commanding heights of television.
Published in General
My wife worked for the company that distributed Hollywood Shuffle, Samuel Goldwyn. She says Townsend was a nice guy. It was his first big break. There are a lot of funny bits that should be remembered, but one of my favorites was his fantasy about a secret white control center that is telling his fry cook boss not to promote him to waiter, and by satirical implication, runs the world. It was brave to poke fun at that idea.
Another was the audition scene for black actors, all of whom are directed to imitate Eddie Murphy. “We’re looking for a certain…ah, Murphonic quality”.
The General? Sure. Very different from other showbiz titans. He was a radio telegraph operator who persuaded his bosses that a “radio music box” could bring entertainment into homes, not just dots-and-dashes to trained men. RCA was, at first, a cartel formed by the major electrical companies of the day (as well as, oddly, the United Fruit Company, who liked the idea of instant communication with distant plantations). Later, commercial pressure and government edict broke RCA away from its “parents”, like General Electric, which would become a strong competitor until it bought the network towards the end of the century.
Sarnoff was a technical visionary, who in turn made network radio, then television, then color television happen largely by force of will. He didn’t neglect the entertainment side, but his idea of radio was public service. In those days, ad agencies and sponsors owned the programs and dictated content. It was CBS’s Bill Paley who knew a bare minimum of how radio worked, but knew a lot about hiring away top talent.
Sarnoff disdained Paley’s aristocratic airs and rarely failed to call him “that tobacco fellow”. (The source of Paley’s family fortune was cigars). Sarnoff always referred to his opposition very formally as “the Columbia Broadcasting System” and to his own company as “the N.B.C.”
The wadding from the blank in the gun hit him. Wadding out of blanks still have quite a bit of energy when they come out of the muzzle.
Don’t do that.
Younger people–which these days, includes nearly everyone–may not realize what a big deal, and what a delayed deal, color TV was. Color sets, almost three times the cost of black and white ones, were introduced for 1954 but struggled for most of a decade to get much market share. ABC color-casted a few times for shows like The Jetsons, seemingly to reassure their affiliates that at least once in a while, they could actually do it, without yet bearing the expense of the full plunge into color that NBC, the Peacock Network, had, or even the tardy, reluctant half-plunge that haughty CBS, then dubbed the Tiffany Network, finally made.
CBS and ABC would also have a hefty bill buying color cameras and equipment, much of it from arch-enemy NBC’s parent company, RCA. This was a particular pain to CBS, whose color system had lost out to NBC’s. But CBS had a sort of revenge around 1965. Their live concerts from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center got rave reviews from The New York Times, then and now the (godless) Bible of Manhattan, for the exceptional quality of their color pictures. These were made possible by Norelco cameras, from Philips in the Netherlands, with a new pickup tube called the Plumbicon. Very quickly, RCA’s own camera business lost sales and had to adapt the Plumbicon technology.
And in the early years, you practically had to have a standing appointment schedule with the traveling TV repairman. Lots and lots of analog settings that all had to work together to make that color picture.
Even B&W sets were fussy in their vacuum tube form. We had a set that would not stay in horizontal hold very long, so the picture would start rolling up or down every few days. Turning that knob to achieve stability was a test worthy of a safecracker – the sweet spot was microscopically tiny.
It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Broadcasters weren’t going to spend a fortune getting into color if there weren’t many sets that could view the programs in color. And people weren’t going to buy the sets unless there was a lot of color programming to see. Even in New York, where I grew up, headquarters of color-mad NBC, there were only a few hours a week of color shows.
And I hope he still had the footage in 1986 and 2002.
When he played for Wattsammatta-U?
Jack Soo died on set? I thought he died of cancer.
For a long time after Rocky and Bullwinkle had faded from the airwaves, Jay Ward Productions kept its offices on the Sunset Strip, selling merch at the front desk with a statue of Bullwinkle out front. Some of it was great, some doesn’t hold up well. Some of the puns are groan-inducing.
Jay Ward and Bill Scott came along at the right time, when early TV was developing a voracious appetite for cheap cartoons. They glommed onto a fact: verbal jokes were a lot cheaper than good animation. So they farmed out most art production to Mexico and concentrated on writing gags for the soundtracks.
Let the record show that the most prolific producer of documentaries in the early years at ABC was John Secondari. After the success of his 1952 novel “Three Coins in the Fountain”, Secondari turned to television. He has many long conversations learning about the medium with my dad, an ABC executive who lived down the block and was a fellow Fordham class of ’39 grad.
“Sec,” an established print journalist as well as author, became the founding Washington Bureau Chief and White House Correspondent for ABC News. Working in-house as a producer/host he created numerous documentaries, some under the ABC News Close-up banner, and later many others with his second wife and production partner Helen Jean Rogers, including the Emmy-winning “Bell & Howell Close-up: The Vatican” (1963), and the Peabody-winning series “The Saga of Western Man” (1963-69).”
It’s not unfair to say Secondari was ABC’s answer to CBS’ Edward R. Murrow. He was also a heavy smoker — a pipe, as I recall — and died at age 55. Perhaps you would have heard his name if his politics were similar to Mr. Murrow’s, but such was not the case.
An excellent and rare detail, Jim, and thanks! Secondari is obviously a major name the rest of us should have heard of. A side note:
Bell and Howell was a big ABC sponsor. It funded a lot of ABC’s documentaries. It’s been quite a while since it was a nationally advertised maker of popular consumer goods, to say the least.
Wrong network. When NBC launched in 1926 RCA was owned jointly by Westinghouse, General Electric, AT&T and United Fruit (forerunner of Chaquita). In 1932 the DOJ filed an antitrust suit and RCA was spun off as a separate company. As part of the deal Westinghouse was forbidden to manufacture and sell radios for two years.
GE reacquired the company in 1986, they sold off the appliance brand to Thompson Electronics of Indianapolis and RCA records to Bertelsmann (it’s now with Sony.)
To bring this back to ABC, GE Chairman Jack Welch was so incensed that the NBC News division failed to re-sign David Brinkley and let him walk to ABC, he ordered GE to become the primary sponsor of This Week, which they did until Brinkley retired.
I believe it was mainly the gas pressure. I could be wrong.
That makes sense. Particularly if it was pressed to his temple or something.
Westinghouse bought CBS in 1996. Renaming it to CBS Broadcasting inc. There was a lot of turmoil at CBS, Paramount Pictures and Viacom through the 1970’s through 2000…
Even today, CBS is owned by Paramount Global – which is itself on the verge of bankruptcy, more turmoil is in CBS’ near future…
1957, Eisenhower’s second inaugural. A technical experiment: that’s not a big, heavy, costly broadcast TV camera, it’s a small, light, cheap Dage closed circuit vidicon camera.
I had forgotten about Hexum. That happened, if I remember my 80s movie/TV star deaths trivia correctly, in…83? 84? The last thing remember seeing Ritter in was Slingblade. He was Tex Ritter´s son, yes?
Yes.
Yeah, it was cancer, but I thought I remembered some report about him collasping on set. Is that not right? It´s been 40 some odd years and I was a teenager. The memorial episode was a very honorable and touching move by the cast and crew.
That and I’m Gonna Get You, Sucka! had the two best take-downs of Hollywood´s treatment of race and depictions of black Americans. Just let people be people for the love of God! What was it Malcolm X wrote near the end of his life? Something to the effect of “Would some journalist ask me about something other than race? Baseball? The space program? Something?”
Soo, a smoker, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer during Barney Miller‘s fourth season (1977–1978), missing the last five episodes. He returned for the opening of season five, but the cancer spread quickly, and Soo died on January 11, 1979, at age 61, at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center (now the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center).[12] His last appearance on the show was in the episode entitled “The Vandal”, which aired on November 9, 1978
Not sure that Paramount is in that much trouble. Like every other major studio, they’re waking up with a hangover from the streaming revolution. Streaming will stay, but the cloud-nine economics that studios have used up till now will settle into sane and once more, profitable ones. The pressure of the money will force it.
Paramount’s one Achilles Heel is size; it’s big, real big==”A Mountain of Entertainment”–but not as big as MAX/Discovery or Disney. Probably not as big as they’ll need to be, long term, to survive. Ultimately they’ll need a merger partner. Since Netflix and Amazon are committed stand-alones, that leaves Universal and Sony, both of them already big but could be bigger. If any two of the three pair up they would easily be in the Warners/Disney league.
(There are, of course, complications with my spur of the moment, back of the envelope calculations. Sony, being foreign-owned, can’t own a broadcast network, so it would probably have to be an outright sale, even if done through an exchange of stock.)
Thanks.
The guy in the hat standing next to the Dage has what appears to be an Argus C3 hanging around his neck. That was my dad’s first camera, I used it quite a bit when I was in school (I even lugged the thing around while backpacking at Philmont in 1976) and still have it in the closet 6 feet away from where I’m sitting. It took great looking pictures.
Pretty sure it’s in the exact same case too…
Barney Miller?
Sony is for sale… Maybe the new owner rolls it into Paramount and bulks up with non-core assets from Disney and Warner.
The problem Paramount has, is that its the #5 streaming service – and down that far there isnt enough mustard left to feed the beast. They have to maintain the legacy models of theatrical box offices and TV, to make ends meet.
Where did you hear that?
Having been an executive at Sony Pictures up until last July, it was clear that all the entertainment assets of Sony are core to the overall strategy of the company. When I met with the Sony Pictures CFO in January, that was still the case.
This article is from 2021, but I don’t think the Sony’s commitment to filmed entertainment has changed.
Sony Pictures Not for Sale, Says CEO Yoshida Kenichiro
The following is from a news release on the 2023 strategy (emphasis mine):
So I would say that Sony Pictures is not for sale.
Sony for sale?? Don’t think so, not yet. It’s making money and is too well integrated with the tech side of the company to make for an easy split. But sooner or later, the logic to merge is real. I’d guess a Sony deal is possible, but at a breathtakingly high number, not a fire sale. Suppose it were Apple making the buy. If Tim Cook was willing to part with, say, $80 billion, something could happen.
EDIT: Clav’ed! I doff my hat to someone who really knows. Though I still say that for $80 bil, Cupertino could own Dean Martin’s entire Matt Helm catalog for Columbia.
I’d forgotten to mention the profitability. When Daniel Loeb was pressuring Kaz Hirai and Sony to sell Sony Pictures, contribution was around 2-3%. In the fiscal year ending in March 2023, it was over 8% and was over 10% the prior year, buoyed by Spiderman, No Way Home and the licensing of Seinfeld to Netflix.
Not a distressed asset. And not for sale.