Word: tartikoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Whatever the fate of Last Call, Tartikoff will be just about everywhere next season. "To use a baseball metaphor ((as he does repeatedly)), I have a slugging percentage of about .600," he says. "For every 10 things I've brought to market, six of them will end up in homes." Some have unusual venues. He is developing two shows for PBS: a 13-week comedy series starring offbeat stage performer Steven Banks, and Under New Management, a Coronation Street-style serial with topical humor, set in a New Orleans restaurant-bar. For CBS he is producing Nashville...
...could nurture a "quality" show such as Hill Street Blues while singing the praises of Punky Brewster. "He has an absolute disdain for anything intellectual," says one less-than-admiring colleague. "He'd rather eat hamburger than steak." Yet in a world of slick network suits, Tartikoff has always been one of the most articulate, thoughtful and candid programmers around...
...also one of the most tenacious. Tartikoff has survived two bouts of Hodgkin's disease; in 1982 he underwent a year of chemotherapy while continuing to run NBC programming. His car accident served merely to emphasize again where his priorities lay. "I don't know how many times a person has to be clobbered over the head to be reminded of what's important in life and what's not important," he says...
...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...