On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision BOLEN'S REVENGE BY MARVIN KITMAN met Lin Bolen only once, during her reign as the first woman head of daytime programming at NBC (1974-5). We were both guests on Barbara Walter's...
...Behind every great man, the noted publisher Sam Vaughan once observed, there is a woman pushing him off the cliff...
...here you have just a random sampling of things going on in this?what...
...For such a major event, the numbers were amazing: Part 1 ranked 46th (of 49 programs on that week), and Part II ranked 48th...
...they are very, very good...
...belongs...
...Second, when Ellen goes to the snake, Jack Kiley, who has not yet given her proper credit for her idea, and asks for some help with this massive project that the network's prestige is riding on, he refuses...
...T ^L...
...Walter, the good guy at the network, who is Ellen's old boss in daytime programming and her supporter, has ten kids at home...
...She carried on as if some crummy soap opera, because of her elevation to top TV management, had been turned into a Shakespearean revival...
...He finds the creative genius young producer having dinner in the home of Ellen Cunningham, a struggling young assistant to the head of daytime programming at the network...
...Despite the fact that it is now about midnight and the show is more than 30 hours long, she rushes over to the network and watches three or four reels at a time...
...she was motivated by a force greater than money...
...Lin Bolen is lucky that Fred Silverman doesn't believe in ratings, as I reported in my New Leader column of September 11 ("New Man at NBC" ). W.E.B., the season's first bomb, will be a test of the new spirit at NBC and of Silverman's integrity...
...Jack Kiley, who should have been looking at the show all along, is not called Cobra for nothing...
...Consider this steamy one: A gal and a TV guy are in a car...
...Don't worry...
...I am not sure in what genre W.E.B...
...If you don't have an idea about how to change the whole show by tomorrow morning at 8:30," Kiley hisses at him, "my friends in Vegas will break your legs in eight places...
...Even without knowing exactly what W.E.B...
...The show was sneak previewed two consecutive nights by NBC (September 13 and 14) before beginning its regular run on Thursdays at 10 p.m...
...Those are true words...
...Two is not enough...
...it was actually based on Roone Arledge...
...Terminology is one of the more creative aspects of the TV art today...
...It is one of the medical miracles of all time, a sequence that perhaps belongs on NBC's Lifeline...
...could not possibly be intended as parody, for it is missing one important element: an occasional deliberate, written joke...
...The story concerns a crisis at tab that Ellen Cunningham resolves...
...Gus is a cross between Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner and Morley Safer...
...Bolen's real achievement in that position, however, was putting people into bed together during the day on screen...
...It is too negative he tells his top management team, headed by programming chief Jack Kiley (Alex Cord), and then warns: "By tomorrow morning at9A.M., ifyou don't have a new concept, you're all fired...
...So Ellen decides to present her idea alone...
...During the night Ellen gets a brilliant idea: The show needs a new editorial point of view...
...Another cut was the scene where a bitchy salesman calls so and so "a kike...
...Unfortunately, when the top dog at tab sees the show prior to its going public, he is aghast...
...they are super bad...
...Also Dick Salant...
...He'll have something for you," Ellen says for her shaking friend...
...Not everyone, though, would acknowledge the purity of the innovation...
...Her true ambition was to produce shows that her former bosses might buy...
...He later became known as the Mad Programmer...
...Another possible category for W.E.B...
...The job did not meet her creative needs, she insisted...
...It is, one gathers, the inside story of what's really happening at Trans American Broadcasting (tab), a fictitious fourth network...
...And there were moments in the first two episodes when tab reminded me of UBS, the network in Martin Mull's America 2-Nite show...
...Encouraged, Ellen has a second bright idea: The show needs a narrator...
...Bolen's adversary in the power struggle, I seem to recall, was Marvin An-tonowsky, head of the NBC research department, who, that same season Lin made her incredible leap to artistic freedom, emerged as president of the NBC network...
...Ellen tells her boyfriend not to panic, the two of them will think of something, but first she has to see the program...
...No one is just bad...
...To produce this extravaganza, tab had hired one of those avant-garde, artsy-craftsy prestigious creative producer types...
...It was, in fact, almost as if the sneak previews of the first two episodes had not occurred...
...The ratings for the first two episodes indicated that W.E.B...
...may be one of the all time disasters in NBC history...
...They are too busy living off it," Ellen Cunningham sneered in episode two...
...But I was wrong: Ellen Cunningham, the cute, headstrong kid was saving the network by getting a bunch of student volunteers from communications departments at New York colleges to rip out the whole sound track and redo the whole video...
...But all sorts of problems stand in the way...
...he is a snake...
...All of the other characters in the cast—the men —are quite believable, being a bunch of heavy drinking, lecherous, morally corrupt, gutless degenerates who don't watch television...
...It is now about 10 or 11 at night...
...The boyfriend, meanwhile, sleeps...
...He is always in bed sleeping while she is burning the midnight oil, a reversal of the usual male-female roles in these dramas...
...She suggests they hire craggy Gus Dun-lap (Richard Basehart), a former war correspondent who is now the network's top newsman...
...Happily, said a source at the network, these were very short scenes and had nothing to do with the plot...
...One of his wild and crazy schemes involved buying for the network a wide selection of Universal/MCA programs—gems like Gemini Man and Invisible Man—that had a tendency to disappear very quickly...
...She has to do it all herself, he implies...
...The big boss buys the new concept...
...Indeed, Bolen has often taken credit for being the model for the film's Faye Dunaway character—incorrectly, I believe...
...Our heroine, played by Pamela Bellwood, comes across as a combination of Marie Curie, Joan of Arc and Buffy St...
...The action revolves around one Ellen Cunningham, a woman executive at Trans American whom everyone agrees is based on Bolen...
...It must mean something other than Worst Ever Broadcast...
...I went to the bathroom at about this point in the story...
...A final possibility is that the show is pure or high drama...
...In any case, the new season has brought us the initial major issue from Lin Bolen Productions: W.E.B...
...is, I strongly urge you not to erase your Betamax tapes of early W. E. B. For there is no way of knowing how long this prime example of NBC's new quality programming under Freddy Silverman will last...
...It would seem to be a great parody, like the movie Network...
...she is the only woman I have ever encountered in TV who takes herself as seriously as the producer...
...I wonder what the craft unions made of this...
...We were both guests on Barbara Walter's influential public affairs program, Not For Women Only...
...But some of the details about how things work in the business are outright fabrications, at least judging from the early installments...
...She has her hand on his leg and is moving it along his groin to you know where...
...This is how the phrase "overnight success" originated...
...He rolls over...
...Everything is carried to extremes...
...I was seeing one of those old Andy Hardy movies where Andy and Judy get all of the kids and one or two kindly old men to put together a slam-bang Busby Berkely number with a cast of thousands dancing among the hay bales...
...The official premiere September 21 was actually the third episode...
...stand for...
...Yet W.E.B...
...Not surprisingly, Antonowsky was himself deposed soon after Bolen lost her head...
...The blockbuster, called "On America," took forever to get into the can, and is supposed to kick off the new season in roughly three weeks...
...The network has a big 30-hour miniseries coming up...
...Marie...
...They will also cut off your ears...
...He, in turn, went out and hired other artsy-craftsy, chi-chi film directors to make various segments...
...No one is just good...
...It was a way for Spring Maid, Cannon, Wamsutta, Pepperell, and the other mills to get their products on the air, since sheets were the one part of sex you got to see on the "breakthrough" programs...
...This first prime time series to be based on television itself is said to depict "the behind-the-scenes struggle for success and survival in a competitive, tension-filled industry...
...Have you heard the expression they threw a party and nobody came...
...Incidentally, what exactly does W.E.B...
...I suspect that deep down in her heart, Bolen believes W.E.B...
...There was a nasty rumor, for instance, that Bolen was under the influence of the sheetmakers, and that in fact they were behind all the sex on such shows as How to Survive a Marriage...
...Before you dismiss this notion out of hand, I should note that important, powerful scenes were cut from the original version shown to the press during the California junkets of June...
...First, Gus' wife, described as a schizoid paranoid, is in the process of having a breakdown, although when Gus himself suffers physical exhaustion the sick woman quickly gets out of her bed in a sanitarium somewhere in Middle America and rushes to New York to help him...
...But this theory of Bolen being corrupt was nonsense...
...is soap opera...
...on my return, I thought the channel had changed...
...She said so herself a couple of months after I met her, when she jumped or fell from power as the country's most powerful female TV executive...
...And without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow he went on to become a major executive at Universal/MCA...
...Even then she was a legend in her own mind...
...The NBC vice president had an overdra-matic way of talking...
...The slant has to be changed from negative to positive...
...She runs back to the apartment where the boyfriend slumbers and shakes him once...
...Before her, sex was something everybody only talked about in the soaps...
...is Death of a Salesman, only more contemporary...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 20
