Word: diller
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...would have to count a lot higher before you got to QVC. It is one of cable's quieter moneymakers: lots of cash, little cachet. In Diller's first year at QVC, its revenues rose 14%. John Malone, the zillionaire head of Tele- Communications, Inc., had lured Diller to the home-shopping network at the end of 1992, shortly after he left Fox. Perhaps there had been a dispute with Murdoch, his boss, over a Diller request for equity in the company; perhaps he was just tired, as he said, of working for other people...
...Beverly Hills builder, Diller joined abc in 1966. This was a young man in a hurry. Diller was soon developing two important formats: the mini-series (QB VII) and the made-for-TV movie (such as Duel, Steven Spielberg's debut feature). In 1974 he moved to Paramount, where he, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Frank Mancuso and some other sharp people spurred a renaissance of the studio, with such hits as Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flashdance and Terms of Endearment...
...Diller tangled with Martin Davis, chairman of Gulf & Western, which owned Paramount, and left the studio to become chairman of Fox. (The same year, Eisner and Katzenberg went to Disney; Mancuso stayed to run Paramount.) Murdoch, who bought the studio a year later, gave Diller the mandate to create a fourth prime-time network. That he did, with his patented management style: creative listening. "What Barry does," says Garth Ancier, Fox's TV programming chief under Diller, "is assemble teams of people and then bring them into the room to debate different ideas. He obviously ran the whole thing...
Some would say he was also a very good predator. Stories of Diller's temper and hauteur still raise hackles around many a Hollywood campfire. It's said that Diller, furious at Fox programmer Stephen Chao, threw a videotape past Chao, making a dent in the wall; Chao framed the dent. Thus does Diller, whose stare can go through you like a power drill, inspire passions and animosities. Says a studio executive: "People who have worked for Barry and then escaped have a secret handshake. They consider themselves lucky survivors, like the Schindler Jews...
That harsh phrase has been used before about Diller, and all it does is add the glamour of menace to his mystique. No question that this hard-driving entrepreneur has an intimidating manner and visage ("He looks like his head is meant only to cover his brain," says one former Fox executive). But he $ wouldn't have succeeded just by being a slick shark among the entertainment industry's countless barracudas. He made his reputation by making movies and TV shows, by making things happen, by making money for men with more money...