American television was born in Chicago. The Big Boys hustled the new profit-baby away in the `50s to New York and Los Angeles, but anyone who knows the early days knows that TV got its start–creatively, historically, hysterically–right in the heartland of America: Chicago.
You can take TV out of Chicago, but you can`t take Chicago out of TV. The Chicago Connection has never been stronger, tighter, more productive. In news, in entertainment, in meetings taken on both coasts involving all the sexes, there are more former Chicagoans working in high-powered TV jobs–at ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, for independent producers, in cable, at the studios–than ever before.
”It`s phenomenal,” says Rick Kaplan, executive producer of ABC`s
”Nightline,” who started in TV as a copy kid at Chicago`s WBBM right out of the University of Illinois (”Steve Friedman, executive producer of `The Today Show,` was my fraternity brother”).
The more he looks around, the more Chicagoans he sees in news, at the networks, in big decision-making positions. ”John Lane, the No. 2 man to
(president) Larry Goodman at NBC News now, and Jack Smith, who runs the Washington bureau for CBS, and Bill Plante, who covers the White House for CBS, and me–we were all at WBBM (in the late `60s and early `70s). And we all grew up within a mile of each other in Rogers Park,” he says. (So did Robert Walsh, executive vice president of NBC, Inc. He and Lane used to caddy at the Edgewater golf course together.)
Another major mover and image-shaper in network TV, Roger Goodman, one of South Shore High School`s more famous alums, grew up in Chicago, too. Goodman began thinking TV in the mail room at WBKB (now WLS) in 1964, rose to be Roone Arledge`s director in charge of ABC`s coverage of the 1984 conventions and the Olympics. Now he`s responsible for the look, the rich, glitzy, graphic feel of all ABC news and sports. ”More people passed through Chicago on the way to important network positions than any other city you can name,” says Kaplan.
”It`s truly amazing.”
There does tend to be a pattern. Take WBBM, for instance, one of five TV stations owned and operated by CBS. ABC and NBC each own five TV stations, too (WLS and WMAQ, respectively, in Chicago), and while all three networks like to use their O&O`s the way ball clubs use their farm teams to feed the majors, no station has funneled more key players into a network news operation than WBBM has given CBS.
At the top of the CBS News operation is Van Gordon Sauter, executive vice-president of the CBS Broadcast Group, who hadn`t worked in TV a day before he came to work in the newsroom of WBBM in 1972. (He bombed on-air but took to news directing like a duck to water.) Second to Sauter at CBS is Ed Joyce, president of news, who was general manager at WBBM from 1978 to 1980. The GM who took over from Joyce, 1980 to 1983, Peter Lund, is now president of CBS Sports, and the next GM, Eric Ober, 1983 to 1984, works with Joyce in New York as vice-president of public affairs broadcasts. Another former WBBM general manager, Neil Derrough, 1974 to 1977, is now president of all five CBS-owned stations.
”When Derrough left Chicago, he took assignment editor Gary Cummings to New York with him, and now Gary is back as GM,” says Jay Feldman, who worked with all the men named above when he was at WBBM in the `70s. ”It was more than just the farm-team concept at work. It was Chicago. It is a very competitive town.”
”There`s something about having worked and spent time in Chicago that creates an unspoken bond,” says Ray Solley, who used to produce ”Sneak Previews” for WTTW in Chicago and recently went to work with Neil Derrough in L.A. as CBS` director of program development and creative affairs. ”There`s a commonality . . . a shared sense of purpose . . . an instant feeling of trust.”
That certainly describes the male hierarchy at ABC, where the Good Ol`
Chicago Boys network is stronger than ever: Mark Mandala, president of ABC;
Jim Duffy, president of communications/ABC Broadcast Group; Dennis Swanson, president of the five ABC-owned stations; Lew Erlicht, president of ABC Entertainment; and John Severino, now senior executive vice-president of the network-owned stations, all held big jobs at WLS on their way up the ABC ladder. (”I think they all knew each other from another life,” says ex-WLSer Bev Kennedy, director of Chicago`s Museum of Broadcast Communications.) Now these guys are the ladder.
Scattered on rungs just below are other former Chicagoans including Squire Rushnell, now vice-president of children`s programming at ABC, who worked at WLS as program director; Phyllis McGrady, executive producer of
”Good Morning America,” who used to be a producer at WGN-TV; Steve Bell,
”Good Morning America” anchor who used to write sports at WGN for Jack Brickhouse; and Stu Schwartz, senior broadcast producer of ”World News Tonight,” who started out at WLS radio. The list goes on and on.
But why does it go on? Why have Chicagoans gone so far and done so well in TV-land? Why do they tend to cluster at parties, root for the Cubs, pass work to each other, trust each other?
”The Chicago connection,” says Ken Ehrlich, former WTTW producer, now supervising producer of the popular syndicated series ”Fame.” ”How can I explain it? It`s a little like being Jewish. You walk into a room, and if someone is from Chicago, right away, there`s something special.
”I was at a party the other night,” Ehrlich continues. ”I`d never met Garry (”Happy Days”) Marshall before, but he went to school at Northwestern, and as soon as we met, there was instant camaraderie.” Steve Edwards, former host of ”A.M. Chicago,” current host of ”Hollywood Closeup” and a Los Angeles TV personality, was at the same party and jumped right in. They talked baseball, City Hall, deep-dish pizza, the usual things. ”We all wound up gloating about the terrible Chicago weather and how we don`t have to endure it anymore,” says Ehrlich, ”but a small part of us misses it, too. At least Chicago has weather.”
Indeed, the weather may be one clue to why Chicagoans do so well in a rough-and-tumble trade like TV. ”Chicago is a city with a lot of obstacles to overcome, and weather is one of them,” says TV writer-producer Allan Katz, who wrote ad copy in Chicago before he went to Hollywood to work on ”The Cher Show,” ”Rhoda,” ”M+A+S+H” and others. ”There`s a good solid pace to the city, too, so maybe by the time people get to Los Angeles, they really know how to get things done.”
That`s certainly true for the legions of TV newsmen and occasional newswomen who moved into the national ranks after getting their start at local stations here.
”Chicago is a terrific news town,” says John Lane, executive vice-president of daily news at NBC News, who started in TV at WBBM. ”If you make it here, you`ll be okay anywhere. I hired a lot of people from Chicago when I was at CBS News. . . . I myself began at City News Bureau. You can`t get a better education than that.”
The view from atop Black Rock, the CBS headquarters in New York, is remarkably similar. ”Chicago is the quintessential American urban city,”
says CBS News president Ed Joyce, who left Chicago five years ago and still misses Carson`s Ribs. More Chicagoans hold more top jobs in TV news, he thinks, because living and working in Chicago taught them about meeting challenges, being competitive.
Indeed, the three stories that shaped his career all happened in Chicago: the great blizzard of `79, the Jane Byrne victory over Michael Bilandic and the visit of Pope John Paul II in October, 1979. ”Chicago`s a great testing ground for people with talent to get in, mix it up and show what what they really can do.”
”Nightline`s” Rick Kaplan, who worked with Lane, Bill Kurtis, Walter Jacobson, Brent Musburger, Bob Jamieson and others at WBBM, agrees. ”Chicago is the springboard to a million great stories,” he says. ”We all cut our teeth on (Mayor) Daley. . . . We shared huge events: the (Chicago 7)
conspiracy trial, the `68 Democratic Convention, the King riots (in April, 1968, after Martin Luther King`s assassination). Chicago really gave TV news so much of its history.”
Chicago`s WBBM also gave TV news a no-nonsense alternative to the Happy Talk trend that was blazering its way across the nation. The year was 1973. The battleground was the nightly 10 o`clock news. WLS was creaming the competition with a lightweight newscast heavy on glitz, frills and chit-chat, and WBBM`s best and brightest declared war.
”We were dead last in `73, when we started,” says Jay Feldman, who worked the newsroom during the time when heavy-hitters like Sauter, Joyce, Derrough and others were involved in turning WBBM around. ”We all took risks,” says Feldman. ”We were young and determined and convinced that we really could change the face of TV news to something in-depth, serious, straightforward.”
And they did. It took about six years for WBBM to beat WLS Happy Talk and become No. 1, and in Ed Joyce`s fertile mind, it was WBBM`s live and lengthy coverage of the Pope`s visit that made all the difference.
”That was the crucial turning point for us,” he says. ”We made a big investment, in money, in people, and even pre-empted prime time. The other two stations didn`t,” and WLS wound up suffering the most. ”We took away their hard-core viewers,” says Joyce, ”and once they got to know Bill and Walter, they never went back to WLS.” Now, more than five years later, WBBM is still the station to beat.
”It was like going through a war together,” says Feldman, who left TV news in 1983 and took a job as vice-president of programming development for Telepictures Corporation in New York. ”We all still keep in touch
. . . emotionally, we`re all still very plugged into Chicago.”
Former Chicagoans on the entertainment side of the TV business see the advantages of the Chicago experience a little differently. ”Chicago is unique,” says Bruce Vilanch, who was a Chicago Today / Tribune feature writer and is now a Los Angeles-based writer-performer in TV comedy, variety specials and features. ”It`s a big, sophisticated city with a lot of elbow room. Successful people could fail in Chicago, and no one would know. There`s not the pressure to become the biggest star in the world because you couldn`t become the biggest star in the world living in Chicago. You had to leave to do that.”
A bunch of folks left Chicago to make ”Saturday Night Live” the TV comedy institution it is today, and one of them, Eliot Wald, formerly of WTTW, WBBM and the Sun-Times, is amazed at how well that major Chicago talent transplant has worked out. ”In the early days it was John Belushi and Bill Murray, but now it`s Gary Kroeger and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss from the Practical Theater Company and Mary Gross and Jim Belushi from Second City and before, Tim Kazurinsky and Brad Hall.”
Writers, too. ” `Saturday Night Live` has eight full-time writers,”
says the most senior of them, Wald, ”and four are from Chicago. There`s a certain attitude we have about politics on the show that comes right out of Chicago. Our whole sense of improv and ensemble is rooted in Chicago-style comedy, too.”
Sherry Singer yanked her roots out of Chicago and went to Hollywood on Nov. 1, 1982, one of several Chicago women now rising in the ranks of TV production. ”After seven years producing `Donahue,` I felt there was nothing else to do,” she says. On her way to taking the leap, she married Tom Alderman, former Chicago actor, director and TV personality who also needed to move on to move up, and now the two of them are as secure as anyone in their crazy business ever can be, both vice-presidents involved in creating programming at Embassy Productions.
”If you`re an actor in Chicago and you`re reading for a part, you`ll tell the director about three other actors (who are) right for the part. And you`ll tell the other people waiting what the audition was like,” says Alderman. ”Well, that kind of camaraderie and support doesn`t exist in L.A. It`s very hardball out here. Everyone`s out for himself. Chicagoans are a different breed.”
They tend to help each other out. Ex-WTTW producer Mike Hirsch credits ex-WTTW producer Ken Ehrlich with helping him get some work from MGM after his ”AfterMASH” paycheck disappeared. Tom Alderman has started an experimental program at Embassy that helps turn playwrights into TV writers, and one of the first writers he connected with was Chicagoan Jeffrey Sweet, who wound up selling a script to ABC his first time out. Alderman also sent another Chicago playwright, Shelly (”Coming Attractions”) Goldstein, on to wife Sherry Singer, who helped her get a job writing a one-woman soap opera.
