MOST studio executives live and die by the cardinal rule of TV programming: Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.
Not Barry Diller.
The pugnacious head of Studio USA – which syndicates the(MD+BO) ‘Jerry Springer Show”(MD-BO) (11 a.m. on WPIX/Ch. 11) – again demonstrated his defiant streak by attempting to tame the top-rated ringmaster of TV’s favorite circus during the critical month of May sweeps.
The 57-year-old media baron banned the show’s trademark brawls and bawdy behavior, issuing a mandate for a kinder, gentler ‘Springer.” Last week’s racy slate of topics – including porn and bisexuality – were promptly yanked and replaced with far less salacious reruns from six years ago.
Diller has never liked tabloids and the more sensational media.
When he was the head of Fox TV in the mid-1980s, he fought to declaw ‘A Current Affair,” the grandaddy of tabloid TV shows, and was urged News Corp. (which owned the network and owns The Post) to sell Star magazine, its weekly supermarket tab.
Diller complained it was impossible to get big stars to come work at Fox at the same time Star reporters were stalking them.
His distaste for low-brow high-jinx is still strong.
‘I guarantee you that Barry has only the greatest of contempt for Jerry Springer,” said Michael Wolff, a media columnist at New York Magazine who has known and covered Diller for more than 20 years. ‘But Barry has much broader ambitions than a single TV show. If it comes to sacrificing profits for his larger media interests, Barry would do it in an instant.”
Larger media interests – the larger the better – could be the defining motto for the many convolutions in this tycoon’s career.
Now the head of HSN, Inc., a cable empire tied to Universal, Diller currently controls assets worth well over $2 billion. With ‘Springer,” that perennial button-pusher of bad taste, under fire from the Chicago City Council, insiders said that Diller would rather suffer a drop in the ratings, than risk the big picture.
‘He recognizes what everybody recognizes, that it’s a trashy show,” said Wolff. ‘And it’s not going to get in the way of his broader goals, regardless of its artistic or financial merits. He has the big picture in mind.”
One look at Diller’s career, and it is apparent that the California native – who has been at top of the Hollywood food chain since the ’70s – has always had the big picture in mind. And he has never had a problem drawing a line in the sand.
He has long had a reputation in Hollywood for being a bulldog who relied on equal measures of shrewd deal-making and a reluctance to compromise.
‘Any time Barry Diller has had a plan, the resources and a vision, he has broken the meter in terms of expectations,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-owner of Dreamworks SKG recently said of his former colleague. ‘I, for one, wouldn’t bet against him.”
Springer is the highest-rated syndicated talk show on TV – an achievement that brings in as much as $100 million a year to Diller’s Studio USA.
But Springer is also a target everytime something goes wrong. Kids and guns? Jerry’s fault. Teen-age pregnancy? Poor reading scores. Attention Deficit Disorder. All Jerry.
Some suggested this week that Diller believes that Springer was a ticking public relations timebomb that jeopardized his still-young media empire. And to build an empire of his own is what he has lived for.
The son of a Beverly Hills real estate developer, Driller dropped out of college and started his career in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency. He got the job through Danny Thomas, father of his childhood friend, Marlo.
At 26, he masterminded the movie-of-the-week concept at ABC Studios.
By his mid-30s, he was the head of Paramount Picture, greenlighting a string of hits that included ‘Saturday Night Fever,” ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and ‘Beverly Hills Cop.”
His successful track record continued during the ’80s. He helped turn Fox TV from a fledging enterprise into the fourth network. He bought a controlling interest in the home shopping network, QVC (short for Quality, Value and Convenience), and today his properties include the Home Shopping Network, the USA Network cable channel, Universal Television Group and several other companies.
Never short on ambition, he’s also made headlines in his bids to be top dog at various media conglomorates, with a string of high-profile, but ultimately unsuccessful takeover and merger attempts at Fox, Paramount and CBS.
Over the years, however, his reputation as a hard-driving task master has turned into the stuff of Hollywood legend. His management style has been described as impatient and bullying, reportedly calling executives ‘f**kheads” at meetings. One oft-repeated story goes that Diller hurled a videocassette at an executive with so much force that it left a hole in the wall. The executive later framed the hole.
‘Barry is a very scary guy, and a very enigmatic guy,” said Wolff. ‘There’s something very compelling about him. He’s got that basic Hollywood thing of being able to seduce you and abuse you at the same time.”
Perhaps that unique Tinseltown talent was acquired from his glittery pals, a crowd of West Coast power-brokers nicknamed the Hollywood Mafia. Diller’s jet set group includes designers Diane Von Furstenberg and Calvin Klein, Dreamworks czar David Geffen and Michael Jackson’s personal manager, Sandy Gallin. The glitzy group reportedly spends a great deal of time together, including ski vacations to Aspen or Deer Valley during Christmas.
And he’s an avid cardsharp. He regularly indulges in a poker game with a group that has included Steve Martin, Carl Reiner, Johnny Carson and Neil Simon, and according to those who’ve played poker with him, has an unabashed will to win.
Despite the high-profile social life, Diller’s personal life remains something of an enigma. Rumors have circulated around Hollywood and in the press for years that Diller, a bachelor, is gay. The rumors have persisted for decades, despite the fact that he frequently escorts Von Furstenberg.
‘I have never given a personal interview in my life,” Diller once told the Advocate, ‘because I decided long ago that that was a necessary policy if I was going to claim some right to privacy and defend it as strongly as I do.”
He’s known around Tinseltown as an aggressive strategist and a risk taker.
Friends have described him as a thrill-seeker with a taste for risky pastimes, with hobbies like backwoods skiing and collecting Harley Davidsons. He bought a private Gulfstream jet to shuttle him between homes in Manhattan’s Waldorf Towrs, a Spanish-style estate in Coldwater Canyon, a beach-house in Malibu and offices in Florida.
‘Everything Diller does seems emphatic, from driving fast to skiing even faster to running a company,” his old friend Jack Nicholson once told reporters. ‘He’s extremely bright. He goes after it for all the right reasons. He’s got very strong individual tastes. And he enjoys it.”