Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman & June Cohen & Deron Triff

Author:Reid Hoffman & June Cohen & Deron Triff [Hoffman, Reid & Cohen, June & Triff, Deron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Venture into unfamiliar territory

It’s an old Hollywood story: Ambitious kid gets a job in the mailroom, works hard, schmoozes his way up and down the halls, catches the eye of a bigwig, and begins his ascent….

But that’s not exactly how it played out for Barry Diller. He did start in the mailroom—at the William Morris Agency. But while everyone else in the mailroom was, in Barry’s words, “sucking up to the agents,” Barry snuck off to the file room to study. Within those file cabinets was the entire history of the entertainment business. “And so,” Barry says, “I spent three years reading about the business, from A to Z…. It was my school.”

When Barry emerged, he was ready to apply what he had learned—and to move on from the agency. A friend introduced him to a rising TV executive at ABC, who asked Barry to be his assistant. Barry wasn’t particularly interested in making photocopies and answering phones, but he took the job, because, as he puts it, “I’ve always believed whatever you’re interested in, get on the widest road. And television was a pretty wide road.”

The network was struggling, and that was actually good news for Barry. “ABC was the third network, the hip-shooting network. It would try almost anything,” Barry recalls. “It was also like a candy store. If you wanted responsibility, you just took it.”

Barry seized the opportunity to pitch a big idea.

“All television at that time was series, either comedies or dramas,” Barry says. “And in both forms, everything was present-day. Those series would go on for seven years, Lucy still lived in her same apartment. She never moved. There was all middle—no beginning, no end. And I thought, Why don’t we tell stories on TV that have a beginning, middle, and end, like they do in movies?”

So Barry pitched the then-radical idea of a “Movie of the Week”—a movie made specifically for TV. His colleagues balked. It just wasn’t television, the naysayers said. That’s not what we do. But having studied seventy-five years of entertainment history back in the William Morris file room, Barry knew there was a precedent for movie-like storytelling, with decades-ago series like Playhouse 90 and Studio One.

Barry fought and prevailed—or, to put it another way, the ABC execs gave him just enough rope to hang himself. “If anybody thought it would work, why would they give responsibility to a twenty-three-year-old?” he says. “Everyone thought it would fail, and they’d get rid of this aggressive kid in the process.”

And so the TV movie was born, and became such a permanent fixture in the television landscape that it even earned an Emmy category of its own. Among ABC’s more memorable productions: Duel, directed by a young Steven Spielberg, and the classic tearjerker Brian’s Song.

But Barry soon ran up against the limitations of his own format. When he tried to adapt novels for the small screen, he wasn’t able to do the storylines justice. “You can’t do it in two hours, much less ninety minutes.

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