The Wide World of Roone Arledge
LEVIN, MARTIN
The Wide World of Roone Arledge The autobiography of a television pioneer. BY MARTIN LEVIN The autobiography of Roone Arledge features a large cast of behind-the-scenes characters, about whom it...
...Cap Cities was a frugal, bottom-line operation...
...BY MARTIN LEVIN The autobiography of Roone Arledge features a large cast of behind-the-scenes characters, about whom it might be said "you had to have been there...
...When Carl Bernstein was appointed ABC News Washington Bureau chief, Arledge said Bernstein "couldn't have organized a one-car funeral...
...All of this materialized a couple of generations ago...
...On the talent side of news broadcasting, Arledge favored the star system...
...For the nervous performer I was, Roone was a lifesaver...
...There was a galaxy of unique firsts, like the Twenty-four Hours of Le Mans and the Soviet/USA track meet...
...On August 16, 1977, the lead story on NBC and CBS was a denunciation by Ronald Reagan of the Panama Canal Treaty...
...The technique involved flamboyant editing maneuvers that had not previously been associated with the news...
...CBS went from Paley to Tisch (Loews) and on to Redstone (Viacom) who had already swallowed Paramount and Blockbuster Video...
...Roone reinvented the visual aspect of TV news by the use of technology and technique...
...On Roone's watch, ABC televised over a hundred different varieties of contests, from cliff-diving to wrist wrestling...
...In the prehistoric days of television, I was doing a daily five-minute wake-up show on New York's WRCA-TV It was called The Eye Opener, and my stage manager was Roone Arledge, at the starting gate of his career...
...Roone's expansive managerial style eventually collided with the takeover era of corporate cannibalism, "where buying and selling far outstripped content...
...Diane Sawyer, paired with Sam Donaldson on a news feature called Prime Time Live, called it "a sonata for harp and jackhammer...
...Its theme was "We are going to add show business to sports...
...The long lenses of ABC's cameras "brought the third-floor balcony of the Israeli quarters so close I could almost count the buttons on the safari jacket of an Arab in a white hat—the terrorists' leader I guessed...
...ABC was sold to Capital Cities Broadcasting, the largest ABC affiliate group...
...It wasn't until five years later that the premiere of ABC's Wide World of Sports let me know what had been on Roone's mind...
...This was the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, where the games were allowed by the chairman of the International Olympic Committee to continue uninterrupted, in spite of the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team...
...Arledge was to television programming what Henry Ford was to automobile manufacturing...
...Said Ted Koppel: "Howard Cosell, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel: Is there anyone who has created more anchor monsters...
...In addition, we had the use of two cameras stationed on top of the television tower in the middle of the Olympic complex...
...It so happens that I was...
...And so on and so on...
...As he notes, "Time and Warner became Time-Warner became AOL Time-Warner and Turner Broadcasting disappeared somehow into the maw...
...The odd part of the Munich massacre coverage was that it was done not by the news division, but by sports, which mobilized the flexible resources Roone had on tap for the games...
...In a thornier venue, the 444 days of the Tehran hostage crisis were covered by a hypnotic nightly half hour of state-of-the-art television that eventually morphed into Koppel's Nightline...
...Seeing a sports event in other than linear terms opened a Pandora's box of innovations...
...But with managerial personnel, celebrity casting didn't work...
...And he confided that he was working on an ambitious sports feature...
...But overshadowing Roone's sports coverage was a major event tainted by an atrocity...
...Arledge zeroed in on human values, whether in the pop culture or geopolitics...
...Some spoilsports may claim they prefer the old days, when television cameras were stationary "like lighthouses...
...Like Ford, who introduced the assembly line, he developed a new concept: the marriage of athletic contests to dramatic values...
...It turned into a landmark moment in news coverage when ABC outran the competition by featuring the death of Elvis Presley...
...He spelled out this approach in a groundbreaking manifesto he aimed at the production company that hired him to package college football...
...He was all those things, plus a good Samaritan who held up my cue cards...
...The new management went about marginalizing Arledge in a climate that he described as "Kafkaesque...
...But Prime Time grew into a durable fixture, as did 20/20, Nightline, and other Arledge innovations...
...He earned my everlasting gratitude by offering to hold up the cue cards on my debut morning, when I was desperate because no one else would (union rules, the stagehands insisted...
...As Leonard Goldenson, ABC's president put it: "The canary has just eaten the cat...
...But to Roone, this was like "looking out at the Grand Canyon through a peephole in a door...
...New devices were employed, including an Arledge innovation called the "whip": a string of segments that followed one another without being introduced by a central talking head...
...ABC's superb performance earned 29 Emmys and propelled Arledge into the news business...
...The technology included computer-generated graphics, hidden cameras, and gimmicks that dissolved the static appearance of the television screen...
...Roone Arledge died on December 5, 2002, acknowledged as a creative innovator, a media giant who revolutionized the way we see sports and news...
...I was too distracted to know what he was talking about...
...His appointment as news chief had a mixed reception...
...From there they could peer down on anything that might happen on the roof of 31 Con-nollystrasse and the surrounding buildings...
...Roone gives a disturbing play-by-play account of televising "fourteen hours of tragedy...
...This negative response did not deter Roone from employing for news reporting the same fluid format that had worked for sports...
...Its basic technique involved telling a story by cutting from one location to another...
...Not all of this programming was an instant hit...
...They talked about product rather than programs, assets rather than people...
...Martin Levin is a writer living in New York...
...Roone's innovations were both criticized and widely imitated...
...Most of today's television audience has never known a time without "instant replay" and the bag of camera tricks Roone employed to project "the human drama of athletic competition...
...It aroused fears that this advocate of show biz lacked the requisite gravitas for the job of supervising "hard" news...
Vol. 8 • July 2003 • No. 43
