Ted Turner R.I.P.
A true genius.
Ted Turner was one of a kind, a “swashbuckling pirate” his ex-wife, Jane Fonda put it the other day. But, he was much more than that.
The day in June 1992 I went to work for Ted, thanks to my friend, my boss, and Ted’s entertainment president, Scott Sassa, I got a stern warning.
“Oh, you’ve never been yelled at like Ted can yell at you!” one of his executives told me. Her shudder was real.
“I’ve been shouted at by idiots for my entire working life. Getting yelled at by a genius? I’ll take that as a badge of honor.”
Boy, was he a genius. And it was truly an honor to work for a man like Ted. He wouldn’t have ever gotten away with his often outrageous antics without that imagination, intuition and brilliance. Everyone who’s been in his orbit has an unlimited trove of stories, incredible and many times unrepeatable in public.
Ted never screamed at me the entire five years I ran Hanna-Barbera for him. Sure, I saw a few rants and raves, but never in my direction. But, I definitely saw a mind like no others I’ve ever encountered. Whenever it showed itself, I was happy I made the decision to work for him.
Probably if you’re under 40, you have no sense of the man. Take a quick look at his Wikipedia entry, you’ll see the how the world you live in changed. (And, not for nothing, was a world champion sailor along the way.) He was the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Able to make leaps of magic into uncharted territory, always with a mad logic, logic rooted in the real. And, the heretofore unreal.
For most of my readers, he invented Cartoon Network, using a business inference that eluded virtually all the brilliant business people around him. Hell! It hadn’t occurred to the most aggressive and competitive minds in global media and entertainment. He put a broken down, local TV station in Atlanta on the satellite –the first, along with HBO, in the world– which paved the way for the cable TV programming business for the next 50 years. And CNN! Geez, no matter what you think of the politics of the moment… CNN! The world’s first news source. The WORLD’S first news source.
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One day when I walked in his office his venom was aimed at my former employer and client, MTV Networks. He thought that “Beavis & Butthead” and “The Red & Stimpy Show,” not to mention MTV itself, were almost the work of the devil.
This man was the Ted I’d been warned about. Trepidatiously, softly, I broke in. “Uh Ted, we just made a deal with the Red and Stimpy guy…”
He stopped and quickly looked at me.
“Wow! You really got him?! That’s great!”
Ted understood that talent ruled.
We had a few, reasonable disagreements along the way. But, he had a much more open mind about things than what I’d read about his reputation. Sure, he felt strongly and passionately about… everything? He was also beyond smart and could see what no one else could see.
My job, along with my partner Jed Simmons, was to make Hanna-Barbera profitable again. The studio –not the library, the actual studio– had been floundering for years, their last big hit was 10 years before, The Smurfs. The company gave us a budget of $10,000,000 to turn things around.
Seemed like a lot of money to me. But, you know, I’d never made a cartoon in my life. I’d never really had much to do with scripted filmmaking of any kind. (Thank you, Scott Sassa!* Somehow, you had faith.) I quickly greenlit two series, came up with a back-to-the-future syndication distribution plan (Cartoon Network wasn’t really a thing yet, and they didn’t have a budget for originals), and got the whole of Turner Broadcasting behind us. Hanna-Barbera was the company’s newest division, everyone was fond of the cartoons, they were all excited.
Donovan Cook’s “Two Stupid Dogs” and the Tremblay Brothers’ “SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron” were pretty good. My distribution strategy, not so much. The shows didn’t really catch on, we dumped $10mm, and had two shows for the library, but nothing much more to show for it. Certainly, not a profit.
I went to see Ted with a new plan, asking for yet another $10mm. He listened patiently to my scheme to revive the shorts strategy that had virtually invented the cartoon industry (well, it invented it 75 years before!).
“You’ve already failed.”
“Well, that was with two swings. This plan gives us 48 at bats. Don’t you think I’ll get it right at least once?”
He smiled.
Only an entrepreneur would say yes, no business person in their right mind.
48 “What A Cartoon!” short cartoon films later Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network debuted “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “Johnny Bravo,” “Cow & Chicken,” “I.M.Weasel,” “Courage the Cowardly Dog.” Not one. Six. Oh, and a plan that put Cartoon Network on the map.
Ted was a gambler who liked to win. And he won big.
I’ll end with one of my favorite stories, or this could go on for days.
Several days after his multi-billion dollar merger with Time Warner, there was a celebration dinner at a Warner Bros. soundstage in Burbank. The collected executives from both companies (me included) and cable operators across the world were there. When he took the stage, Ted was in a not unusually boisterous, happy frame of mind.
“I gotta thank you all. Because of you, I’m f-ing rich! Rich! It is great to be rich, isn’t it? ISN’T IT! I’m not the only rich one here, you’re all rich, thanks to me! We. All. Got. Rich!”
He was looking out across the room to the cable operators, the mostly men who’d toiled for years, stringing wire across the country’s telephone poles (my former bosses used to derisively sneer while calling them “pole climbers”) to wire America, often putting themselves in deep debt to build their businesses. But without the kind of programming guts that Ted and his competitors brought to the party, cable television wouldn’t have had the meteoric growth that turned it into one of the most profitable businesses the world had seen up to that point.
“Is there anyone in this room that isn’t rich?” My fellow execs and I looked at each other. We were paid well, to be sure, but rich? Like Ted? But he was right, the room was packed with folks that dwarfed the rest of us.
“Come on, raise your hand, come on up to this stage! If you’re not rich, we’ll make you rich right here! Come on.” Ted was generous to a fault. He eventually gave $1 billion to UNICEF to help the world’s poor, among his many other incredible charitable efforts.
One, shy hand went up. Rita Rudner, the comedian.
“Get up here young lady. We’re going to make you rich!”
Sure enough, Ted started collecting money for Rita.
RIP Ted Turner. Thank you.