Word: diller
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Actually, that is a pretty nice way to put it: Diller has been "insisting" for most of his career. His notoriously aggressive management style has left subordinates humiliated and emotionally bruised. He describes it as "bashing idea against idea to get stuff out of yourself and other people" and admits that to those unused to the process, his methods can seem "nasty...No, that's overly harsh. Or not harsh enough...
Whichever, Diller's ferocity has stood him in good stead since his William Morris mail-room days; he attended a party thrown by childhood friend Marlo Thomas and got into a characteristically vituperative argument with Leonard Goldberg, then a vice president at ABC. The older man, impressed with Diller's "willfulness"--Diller's word (again)--eventually offered him a job at the network. There he helped invent the mini-series, popularized TV movies and had the perspicacity to hire young Michael Eisner away from his job as a CBS children's programmer...
...Diller was named CEO of Paramount Pictures. With Eisner, whom he installed as president, Diller made it the most profitable Hollywood studio, year in and year out. He was considered a lock for the chairmanship of Gulf & Western, Paramount's parent company. Then he lost a power struggle and jumped ship for 20th Century Fox in 1984. His reason for subsequently leaving Fox in 1992 was straightforward: "It's not mine," he said at the time. "I'm both young enough and old enough to want to own my own store ... It's the one thing I haven't done...
What followed was what one might call Diller's John the Baptist phase. He announced that he was going to take a year off and ponder the future of the entertainment industry, then emerged after a mere six months in the wilderness, if that's a fair description of schmoozing it up with the likes of Bill Gates and John Malone. Diller was now preaching the new religion of interactivity--though, to give credit where credit is due, so was virtually every other sentient being in telecommunications in 1992. Owning a traditional broadcast network, Diller told the New Yorker with...
...that is the Home Shopping Network's prime competitor. But he hadn't quite shaken his yen for upscale properties and in short order was using QVC to launch the exhaustively chronicled bidding war for Paramount that he lost to Viacom's Sumner Redstone. By the summer of 1994, Diller was describing a projected takeover of CBS as his "destiny." But Comcast, a cable company that owned a 15.5% stake in QVC, squelched the deal and then tendered its own offer to buy out Diller's share of the channel. Bitterly disappointed but $100 million richer, Diller came...