Walk into the average television executive`s office and you`ll find it jammed with trophies, awards and testimonials. Robert L. Johnson`s sunny office in Washington`s trendy Georgetown prominently displays two construction hard hats.
One of them was awarded for putting together the group that landed the city`s first cable franchise. The other honors the state-of-the-art studio Johnson built and opened in February for his broadcast operation in the city`s northeast quadrant.
The hard hats say it all, as far as the founder and president of cable`s Black Entertainment Television channel is concerned: Johnson, first and foremost, is a builder-of buildings, ideas and dreams.
BET, the only channel in cable`s narrowcasting universe that specifically targets the nation`s 30 million blacks, was launched on the strength of a blueprint borrowed 12 years ago from an entrepreneur named Ken Silverman, who was trying to set up a cable channel for the elderly.
Johnson, then a lobbyist for the National Cable Television Association, escorted Silverman to the office of U.S. Rep. Claude Pepper, the nation`s primary advocate for the elderly until he died this year, and looked over his proposal on the way.
”We were riding in a taxi up to Capitol Hill,” Johnson said. ”I said,
`Ken, that sounds like a good idea, and the things you`re pointing out about the elderly also apply to black Americans. Can I borrow your proposal?` He said, `Sure,` so I took it, and wherever he had the word `elderly,` I wrote in `black,` and it worked!”
It did not work for Silverman, however. His proposed ”Prime Time”
channel never did get off the ground.
But when Johnson took its black counterpart to John Malone, president of TCI, the nation`s largest cable operator, Malone was impressed. He lent Johnson $320,000 and bought 20 percent of the nascent company for an additional $180,000, and Johnson was on his way.
But the way was rocky. For six years, BET floundered in a sea of red ink, and Johnson eventually had to bring other corporations-notably Time-Warner`s Home Box Office and Great American (formerly Taft) Broadcasting, which owns Hanna-Barbera and World Vision syndication-into the partnership. BET, sustained by their cash infusions and growing at a rate of 2 million households a year, finally broke into the profit margin in 1986, but Johnson never lost sight of his goal.
”We have a specific definition of black entertainment,” he said. ”It`s programming that addresses itself, in fact or in fiction, to black cultural themes and lifestyles. It can be extremely broad, but the idea is that the programming should show blacks in dominant character roles and have as its primary interest, black information, black culture, black thought and black philosophy.”
The nation has come a long way from the bad old days of Hollywood`s Stepin Fetchit stereotype of blacks, but Johnson said elements of it persist, and his goal is to build his company into ”the pre-eminent black media company in this country and indeed the world,” so that the black populace can control the image it projects.
”The problem is that Hollywood is controlled by so few people,” he said. ”There are about 10 people who make all the decisions about what gets on television. You don`t really have a way to get into that old-boy network, so black programming, when presented on television, is filtered through those 10 or so people who make the decision about what white America will accept.” Johnson illustrated his claim with a hit list of television shows starring blacks in roles of dominance and power that never made it through a single television season on the commercial networks: James Earl Jones as a detective in ”Paris,” 16 episodes; Lou Gossett as a doctor in ”The Lazarus Syndrome,” 13 episodes; Avery Brooks as a private investigator in ”A Man Called Hawke,” 13 episodes; and Carl Weathers as ”another detective who didn`t last.”
”There has never been a successful series where a black has played a role where he has power over other individuals in that environment-a policeman, a businessman, a detective, a doctor, a real-estate magnate,”
Johnson said.
” `Cosby` is a throwback to `Father Knows Best.` It is a very benign family that threatens no one with their views about race or racism. It`s an acceptable black family that we`d all love to live next to. I take absolutely nothing away from Bill Cosby. He`s a tremendous actor, but if you`ll recall, he was turned down by CBS and ABC before he landed on NBC, which was in the basement.
”Look at `Frank`s Place,` ” Johnson continued, referring to the show that starred Tim Reid as the owner of a restaurant. ”It was a brilliant show, critically acclaimed, and it should have received the same treatment that `All in the Family` got when it started. All its (`All in the Family`) ratings were in the basement, but they stuck with it and stuck with it, and it went on to become one of the all-time hits. Most black males who have made it in television have been in comic roles: Sherman Helmsley, Bob Guillaume, Redd Foxx. Even Eddie Murphy, who`s a big box-office draw now, started out as a comedian.
”Television has said, `We will accept blacks, but in clearly structured, nonthreatening roles,` and until that changes, that`s what you will get out of Hollywood television, because the cultural orientation of people who make television is, `We cannot put blacks in strong, powerful, dominant roles, vis- a-vis the white population.` ”
Not quite `news is news`
To grapple with the situation, which he said is driven in part by a
”conscious or unconscious” racial bias on the part of the majority white audience, Johnson has steered BET into a specific image of black interest and accomplishment that extends even to the news.
”Now you can argue that news is news, that it has no color,” he said.
”Well, it`s not quite `news is news` here. If there`s an oil spill off Malibu, that`s a story, but if there is a major initiative on lower-income housing, BET News is likely to say, for our audience, that the housing story is more important. If two people of equal stature die and one`s black and one`s white, we`ll play the black higher. It happens in magazines all the time. You`re not going to find an article about guns in Mademoiselle.”
To extend its reflection of black interest, BET this season is out with seven new programs ranging from ”Black Agenda 2000,” a town-meeting-style forum, to ”Teen Summit,” a talk show for the young, designed to draw them out of what Johnson regards as a sociological ghetto in which young blacks are found only ”in sports, in music and in trouble.”
Following the lead of network counterparts, Curtis Symonds, BET`s vice president of affiliate marketing, said the new shows will be taken on the road, just as ”Black Agenda” was taken to Chicago last month. Symonds said what BET most needs now is promotion.
”It amazes me,” he said. ”In nine years in this business, this network has not been promoted. People have picked up this network just on perceived view. BET has never developed good promotion material, good tune-in ads or good consumer marketing ads. It`s unbelievable, and I credit Bob that he could get 25 million subscribers by not doing any marketing. Now I`m coming in and saying, `Let me put the icing on the cake.` ”
Large white audience
BET, which had only 3.8 million subscribers at its launch on Jan. 25, 1980, now plays to 25 million cable households, and Symonds predicted an audience of between 30 million and 40 million by 1993. To date, despite the black orientation, about 35 percent of the audience consists of whites who avidly follow the channel`s sports, vibrant music videos and jazz. A boost in drawing advertisers is that the A.C. Nielsen Co. says television is on in black homes, on average, 11 hours a day, compared with just over 7 for whites, and market statistics peg their annual ”consumption spending” at $250 billion a year.
Johnson said support from the corporate partners he was forced to take on when BET was a fledgling now offer him his best chance of financing his next move, production of home videos to generate income for original production.
”You won`t see any major black thrust in dramatic television until blacks have access to their own distribution system,” he said. ”This is what I think BET`s role is. If BET has any strategic goal, it is to forge a major media company that will drive the distribution of black product directly to the consumer.”
TV`s Big 4
The spirit of the entrepreneur emerged like an aura as Johnson warmed to his blueprint.
”This black population of 30 million equates to about 8 million homes,” he said. ”Let`s suppose one in eight will buy four videos, at $10 each, a year. That`s $40 million, and with $40 million, you can make low-budget movies, in the neighborhood of $3 million each. So you make low-budget features and make them available to home video first, and generate some revenue there, then sell them in pay-TV (in this case, corporate partner Home Box Office), which is the natural sequential marketing move for regular movies, then air them on BET. You will, in effect, have created a different distribution system for a filmed product.”
Johnson said that, with a little help from his friends, he can ”make a major thrust” toward the goal in about three years.
”Look at what we`ve got in the way of talent today,” he said. ”The top box-office draw is Eddie Murphy; the top morning television host is Bryant Gumbel; the top late-night host is Arsenio Hall; and the top mid-day host is Oprah Winfrey.
”That`s tremendous talent, and if they just lend themselves to cameo appearances in some of our shows and you wrap them around some of the other talent that`s out there, and you tell black America on BET and on black radio and in Ebony and Jet magazines that two or three video releases a month are coming to your video store, you would be able to sustain a video industry.”
For Johnson, another hard hat may be just on the horizon.
