Ted Turner seems to have this uncanny knack for coming into my life just when I tend to have a real need for entertainment–or sometimes something far more substantial. So you shouldn’t be surprised when you read I am downright evangelical about CALL ME TED, the six-hour documentary retrospective on his life which dropped earlier this week on MAX. Which, ironically, would sort of lend some hindsight credence to perhaps one of the few times I ever experienced him in person being dead wrong about something.
Without going into details that frankly I’m legally bound not to disclose, I’ve had more than a typically trying week. So it was truly fortuitous that when I blindly opened up my MAX app Wednesday night in search of a hockey game the homepage splash boldly advertised this, with his Rhett Butler-esque smirk and brimming confidence taking up the majority of my roommate’s 75 inches of HD. As a one-time employee who got to interact with him on several occasions, it was the epitome of clickbait. And you’d best believe I binge-watched the whole thing as best as I can anything these days, with only sleep and my legal troubles intervening.
If you’re a little younger than moi, you might not know exactly how significant a role he played in driving the evolution of the entertainment you likely take for granted. Ted was a uniquely driven insomniac who identified a need for something to be on the air 24 hours a day, a policy he first adopted when he took his modest Atlanta independent TV station WTCG-TV national when he realized that outside of a handful of major markets no such alternative on television existed. Like many who owned UHF television stations in the 70s, he found both content and relevance by obtaining the rights to broadcast local sports, in this case the MLB Braves who had just lost 94 games and had traded the face of their franchise, the recently crowned home run king Hank Aaron, back to the city of Milwaukee where a younger incarnation of him helped them win a world’s championship. But via that satellite and the burdgeoning reach of cable systems, the Braves developed a following that was not possible to be measured by Nielsen but, as he explained in the documentary, from the “trays of letters we received from Alaska to Maine praising the fact that we were offering up a ballgame when nothing else was on”.
Ted then took that spirit to an even bolder move by starting up CNN, the first-ever 24-hour news channel, which he insisted on having the word “cable” in its name in order to allow its marketers the reinforcement that they were bringing to people something that didn’t exist anywhere else. As INDIEWIRE’s Tony Maglio reminded:
Turner has famously vowed that the channel will continue running until the end of the world. How serious was he? Serious enough to commission the infamous Turner Doomsday video to be played during Earth’s final minute.
And that unwavering support, in spite of his losing tens of millions of dollars per years during its emerging days when it was known as “Chicken Noodle News”, ultimately paid off for the operators and the industry when it became the most pernicious outlet to provide real-time coverage of the Gulf War. Ratings reached record levels for cable networks of ANY genre. So it’s no surprise that, as the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Alex Weprin detailed, those who benefitted from CNN’s growing relevance and respect were among those who fronted this project both through financing and enthusiasm:
Eagle-eyed viewers of the docuseries may notice that three of the executive producers are John Malone, the founder of Liberty Media with the nickname “The Cable Cowboy”; Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast; and Charles Dolan, who founded Cablevision and HBO. Malone is also interviewed in the series.
And they were joined by a host of other familiar faces as Weprin further chronicled:
The series, which is produced and directed by the husband and wife team of Joni Levin and Keith Clarke, explores Turner’s personal and professional lives in a way that hasn’t been done before, including interviews with some of the people that have known him best, including his children, his ex-wife Jane Fonda… CNN veteran Christiane Amanpour, former Warners executive Alan Horn, and many others.
I became part of the Turner-verse shortly after that momentous Gulf War coverage, shortly after I had been unceremoniously booted out of an executive position less than nine months after being hired to start up a programming initiative that ultimately received a zero dollar budget, and also not long after I had buried my mother a week short of her 58th birthday. After a successful consulting gig, I was given a permanent position to work in detail on special projects of corporate importance. Few were as special to Turner and his family than the animated series CAPTAIN PLANET AND THE PLANETEERS. It was a weekly cartoon that featured a lot of the same structural elements that had been seen in the likes of TRANSFORMERS and SUPERFRIENDS–five diverse teens who individually were typically ineffective, but when their “powers” were combined became de facto superheroes. In this case, the “villians” represented environmental hazards, with each episode carrying a call to arms for kids to take action to save the world from potential disaster. TBS gave the show a prominent time slot and full national exposure via cable, but it was extremely important to Ted that this reach every single market and non-cable home in addition. In most cities, the show was scheduled as an adjunct to other less aspirational throwaway weekend animation from toy manufacturers and broadcast networks, typically airing just before or after sunrise. But in a handful of those situations the show was given a more prominent time slot and actual promotion from stations who shared Turner’s commitment to environmental issues. And yes, the show delivered more than decent ratings in the process.
I got to rub shoulders with Ted and his new wife Jane Fonda at his insistence during a memorable convention of news directors in San Antonio, Texas. We were instructed to introduce our clients to the two of them, mostly so he could show his appreciation to them for providing reciprocal coverage from their local stations that served as a de facto affiliate support system for the network and allowed it to report breaking news from almost anywhere in the country. I brokered a couple such meetings with some smaller market stations, Ted working the room with swashbuckling command. He backslapped and embraced every single person, Jane warmly offering her own thanks. Whenever they’d mention the market they were from, Ted would tell a story about some sort of wild night he had once had there. The eyerolling from Ms. Fonda was unforgettable. It’s again no surprise that her prominence in this project is significant, her honesty about the depth and challenges of their love compelling and while, even as they are now long separated by time and age, it’s pretty clear that their mutual love and respect is eternal.
And a couple of years after the company parted ways with me I had an even more memorable moment with the man. During the dying days of the Family Channel, the industry was embroiled in a series of government-mandated meetings to put ratings akin to those in the movies on television programs. As I was one of the few senior executives who was assured of a role with the impending FOX Family management, I was assigned to represent the channel in these high-level meetings, which also featured representatives from studios and broadcast networks. Among those in the room were the top two executives from UPN, one of which was once my boss; both of whom knew me quite well. Ted just happened to be in Los Angeles for one of these meetings and as he was often want to do he dropped in to see what was going on–a habit I saw up close during my visits to Atlanta. Of course Ted didn’t know me from Adam, and given the slight slur we heard in his voice during this Saturday morning session at that moment I’m not confident he would have been able to tell me apart from Eve.
He locked in on my nametag identifying my employer and quipped “The Fah-muh-lee Channel, huh? You one of them Jesus freaks?!”. The UPN executives who knew me exploded in laughter, which naturally got the whole room to join them. Even Ted was taken aback. I saw one of them mouth something in his direction akin to “He’s Jewish, Ted”. He turned even redder than his complexion was and immediately joined in the laughter and backslapped and hugged me. I said “And after I worked for you, Mr. Turner!!”. He then gave me his signature response which was, of course, the title of this documentary.
I needed some Turner in my life then and I sure needed it this week as well. I even learned a few other things about the man I never knew, including the omnipresence of a man named Jimmy Brown who essentially helped raise his five children during his busiest times and was as trusted a compatriot to him as were any of his employees or business partners. The respect and love from his seldom-seen children that are interviewed for this that were extolled on Brown were second only to the love and appreciation they gave to their father from sparing them the pain of the suicide he was seriously contemplating after his bitter ouster from Time Warner in 2001 by the Judas in his life, his one time “best friend” Gerald Levin. Seeing the story of Levin’s betrayal and his own subsequent downfall makes the likes of the current executives in charge in what has evolved into Warner Brothers Discovery pale by comparison.
Ted is still with us, though in a far less robust and strapping form than he once was, and that’s a point that the filmmakers drove home with Weprin to explain the timing of this project’s release:
Turner is 85, and is suffering from Lewy Body Dementia, and it is with that in mind that Levin and Clarke worked to get the project done.
“I knew I had a time frame. I didn’t know how long he’s going to be with us, and I wanted to make sure that he was able to see this, and appreciate who he is,” Levin says. He had no editorial say in this … He also knew that he had to be separate from it, because it could become a puff piece,” Clarke says. “He’s seen the whole six episodes, and he’s made it clear that he really loves it, but it’s painful to watch at times, because he says, the truth can be hard to watch. He said he felt it was honest and authentic and truthful,” Levin adds. “Hats off for that, for him to be willing. He believed and trusted his story to me.”
Much like he trusted and was honest with so many others. Including, I’m proud to say, moi.
So thank you again, Mr. Turner. Er–Ted.
Until next time…