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...TIME: What are the origins of your dispute with Diller in the early '80s at Paramount...
Tartikoff's latest career move was actually in the works three years ago. Just before his accident, Tartikoff says, he was making plans to leave NBC and form his own production company. First the accident and then the offer from Paramount delayed the scenario. Now he talks excitedly about creating a broad- based production company. Says he: "I want buyers to look at Brandon Tartikoff not as a producer but as a studio...
...president for 11 1/2 years, Tartikoff was probably the most influential and broadly successful TV programmer of the 1980s. He guided NBC from last to first in the ratings, overseeing such hits as The Cosby Show, The A-Team, Cheers and L.A. Law. Later he was named chairman of Paramount Pictures, but he abruptly resigned in October 1992 after just 18 months on the job. The reasons, he insists, were strictly personal: on New Year's Day 1991 he and his daughter had been severely injured in a car accident near Lake Tahoe. Tartikoff, who sustained a broken pelvis, recovered...
Tartikoff admits that he occasionally clashed with his superiors at Paramount, Stanley Jaffe and Martin Davis. "I didn't realize just how spoiled I had been during my last six years at NBC. Nobody contested my decisions, my choices, the schemes that I was up to. It was a little unsettling ((at Paramount)) to have to go up the hall every time I had to spend what some might regard as a considerable amount of money...
...Paramount he had to face another jarring life experience: failure, or something very close to it. Both Tartikoff and his bosses insist his resignation was voluntary, but his record was mixed at best. Though his tenure was too short to judge definitively, many of the movies he was most associated with (Coneheads, Leap of Faith, the low-budget holiday comedy All I Want for Christmas) were box-office disappointments...