I Want My MTV (60 page)

But the MTV brand—the core of their huge business—was videos. Now key executives—most notably Tom Freston, Doug Herzog, and Judy McGrath—wondered if the network was big enough to untether itself from record labels and rock stars.

 

TOM HUNTER:
My first official day at MTV was June 1, 1987, six days before Sumner Redstone bought the network. He won the takeover battle with Gorman and Elkes, and he got it on June 6. The company's name was pronounced
VEE-a-com
. But Sumner Redstone said
VY-a-com
, so suddenly the entire world called it
VY-a-com
. We thought that was hysterical. He owned 85 percent of the stock, so he could call it whatever he wanted.

 

JOHN SYKES:
Sumner Redstone said to Tom, “Stay with me and you're gonna be my guy.” And it became Tom's place.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
Around six months after I left MTV, Sumner Redstone called. He'd been buying stock in Viacom and wanted to take it over. I had a couple of meetings with him and gave my opinions of what was going on at the company. A little later, he asked if I could see him at the Carlyle Hotel. He says, “Listen, management told me they're going to walk out if I take over the company.” So I called Freston and Gerry Laybourne, the head of Nickelodeon, and said, “You should come have dinner with Sumner.” And Tom says, “Are you crazy? Viacom would fire me in a second if I met with Sumner.” I said, “Look, here's the logic. Right now, you're the outsiders at Viacom. You're never going to be on the inside. But if you throw your lot in with Sumner, he'll owe you forever. You're going to have a lot of power.” And so Tom and Gerry went to see Sumner and agreed to support him. Based on that, Sumner bought the company. And Tom Freston and Gerry Laybourne became the center of the empire.

 

TOM FRESTON:
At first, the Viacom guys said MTV was an advertising-based business, and I didn't know anything about advertising. So they made me co-president with Bob Roganti. He was president of ad sales and operations, I was president of entertainment. Then there was a battle for control of Viacom, and Sumner Redstone took over in an LBO. He hired Frank Biondi, who had been head of HBO, to be CEO. We had breakfast at the Warwick Hotel in the summer of 1987. By the time I was finished, he says, “You're now CEO of MTV Networks. Go fire Roganti.” I walked out of the Warwick, bouncing down the street.

If Sumner hadn't prevailed in his battle for Viacom, I don't think that MTV Networks would have gotten the financial resources that it needed to grow. Even though Sumner assumed a lot of debt to buy the company, he was eager to spend money to make money. He invested in programming. I don't know that the Terry Elkes regime would have been as generous. Elkes had an aura about him that said
The end is near
. Those guys thought that we had peaked. When Redstone took over, I thought, “Man, I don't know this guy, but he's
got to
be better than these guys we have.”

 

JUDY McGRATH:
When Bob Pittman left, it was unsettling. There was a period after that where we had copresidents, and a revolving door at the top. At different times it seemed like distribution was more important, and then advertising was more important. But Bob, John, Les, and Fred had already established the DNA of the place. The main rule was that there were no rules.

 

MARK PELLINGTON:
Freston was the guy who'd come into your office and say, “Hey, what are you listening to?” and rifle through your albums.

 

RICK KRIM:
Everybody will always love Tom. Until the day he left, the culture of MTV emanated from him. He was a music guy who believed in doing the right things for artists. The fact that he'd been at MTV from day one had resonance for almost everyone who worked there, even if they'd started ten days ago.

 

JON LANDAU:
Tom Freston was the fucking best. If you were to call him and say, “Could you take a look at this video that we sent over there?,” even though he was running the network and not programming it, you always got a straightforward response. I called him when he got fired [in 2006]. I said, “Tom, if there was ever a ‘no good deed goes unpunished' moment . . .” I don't know Sumner Redstone, but my feeling is that he must have been jealous, because he was not a popular or well-loved guy. And people loved Tom.

 

ALLEN GRUBMAN:
Tom Freston is the best-loved guy I've ever seen in the music business. People who worked for him loved him, and people at record companies loved him. Even in the heat of a negotiation, where it got hairy, nobody ever had a bad word about Tom.

 

ADAM CURRY:
He took the subway to work, he didn't have a limo, and he really didn't know what the fuck was going on at the channel, which kind of made him cool. He always looked drunk. That's the kind of CEO MTV should have, a disheveled-hair-looking guy who was hanging out with Bono and all the superstars.

TABITHA SOREN:
He's a genius, a good person, a colorful character. He's the reason there's MTV Asia, MTV China, MTV Europe—it's all Tom Freston.

 

CHIP RACHLIN:
Freston was the most down-to-earth, unpretentious guy. In a movie, he'd be played by Ted Danson. I don't think any of us assumed he had the ambition to become the wealthy, wealthy man he became.

 

TOM FRESTON:
MTV and Nickelodeon went from the smallest part of Viacom to the biggest. Back then, Sumner was learning the business from Frank Biondi and others. He was a theater operator. He'd sit through meetings for six, seven hours and not say a word. He was like, “If you make your numbers, we'll leave you alone.”

Problem was, people started to feel they'd seen it all with regard to music videos. And this was a period when music wasn't especially vital in the culture. It became clearer and clearer to me and others that when you're programming ten three-minute programs every half hour, it's hard to grow ratings. Prior to MTV, no network had pursued a young audience. Then Fox came along and took aim at eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds with cutting-edge scripted fare. And we saw that as a threat.

Doug Herzog, Judy McGrath, and I would talk about “What if MTV wasn't just about music?” We looked at
Rolling Stone
, which had repositioned itself to be more about popular culture—they had comedians and movie stars on the cover. We knew nothing about developing programming, and we couldn't afford to have stuff made somewhere else, so we came up with simple ideas. We did
The Week in Rock
and got into the news business. We had shows about movies. We ran old episodes of
The Monkees
. Eventually we had Cindy Crawford and
House of Style
. But the real breakthrough was a show called
Remote Control
.

 

TOM HUNTER:
We'd gone from a 0.9 rating in 1983 to a 0.5 on some days. We were going like crap. A tenth of a ratings point was worth millions in revenue. Everyone still believed music videos could sustain the network, if only we could find the right balance and combination. Judy always said, “Music is our first name, and our first, second, and third priority.” It was a great line, we all used it. But in reality, we were now in a multichannel universe. Barry Diller had launched Fox, so there was another channel on television that kids were noticing.

LEE MASTERS:
I tried every single trick that had worked successfully for years in radio; I narrowed the music selection, I changed rotations, I changed the VJs. None of it worked.

I don't know what other people are telling you, but the idea to do long-form programming—and it's really strange to give them credit—the idea came from the ad sales department. The sales guys started pushing the idea internally that we needed to do shows. They didn't know what the shows should be about; they didn't have a clue.

 

TOM HUNTER:
We batted around the idea of purchasing established network programs and rerunning them. Lee Masters became obsessed with the idea of running repeats of NFL football games. He was very attentive to research that said we were young, male, teen, and affluent. The other ideas were
Letterman
and
Saturday Night Live
. We thought we could cut up
SNL
episodes and sprinkle in videos. We played with all those ideas. And I give Judy McGrath a lot of credit. She said, “It doesn't make sense to take network programming and put it on cable. It doesn't have the integrity of authorship that we think our brand reflects. We should take what we have and change everything up.”

 

LES GARLAND:
Bob Pittman, John Sykes, and I had been against long-form programming. We were okay with non-music-video programming, so long as it had a music foundation or was in the spirit of MTV. We were doing countdown shows, and stunts like
Amuck in America
, where we sent some guys across America in vans. Nobody had ever done anything like that on TV. We made it wacky and sent some rock star to meet them in the middle of Texas. But we hadn't sold ourselves on the fact that music doesn't work on television. That's the line we'd never cross. This was music television. I'm sure if I had stayed, I would have been the last soldier still fighting to do music television.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
The marching orders were specific: “We're going to do a dance show, a game show, and a news show.”
The Week in Rock
was our weekly news wrap-up.
Club MTV
was the dance show.
Remote Control
was the game show. I embraced it. I thought it was the right time to become a true television network.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
When
Remote Control
came on the air, people were ready to egg the building, because it wasn't music. But it began to position MTV as being about pop culture, in addition to music.

MIKE DUGAN, MTV writer:
The MTV attitude was irreverent and a bit fed up with buttoned-down society. Judy was good as realizing that MTV was more than just playing videos—it was a lifestyle.

 

TOM HUNTER:
We lived in a
TV Guide
world. People decided what to watch by looking at the programming grids in
TV Guide
. MTV had a slot in the grid, but all it said was “Music Videos.” And the next hour it would say “Music Videos.” And the next hour.
Remote Control
made us a TV network. It was the first time we acknowledged that we lived in a television universe and not in a music universe. People didn't turn off MTV and turn on the radio; they turned off MTV and put on
Married with Children
.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
Remote Control
was controversial within MTV. There was a lot of Sturm und Drang about whether we should be doing a show that wasn't about music. “What are we doing to the brand?” “This isn't what we set out to do.” Yadda yadda. Doing a game show on MTV was heresy. Game shows were
The Price Is Right
. Of the three new shows we started,
Remote Control
was the most transformative.

 

LEE MASTERS:
Remote Control
was extremely controversial. The research department was adamant that we couldn't do a game show.
Adamant
. They would ask focus groups, “Should MTV do a game show?” And everybody would answer, “No. That's stupid.” When Doug Herzog assigned Joe Davola to develop the show, Davola said, “You're gonna ruin my fucking career.” Those were his exact words. And of course, it went on to make his career.

 

JOE DAVOLA:
One day, Doug Herzog brought me in with two other producers and said, “You guys are in charge of putting new shows together.” I was told to figure out a game show.
Remote Control
was a standard game show, with the MTV attitude.

 

MIKE ARMSTRONG, MTV staff:
Doug Herzog hired me and John Ten Eyck as writers. I was completely unqualified for a job on a game show. I'd been a speechwriter for Dan Hill, who was ombudsman for the province of Ontario. But Doug and I had gone to school together, and he knew Ten Eyck and I were both half-crazy, and we probably embodied the spirit of MTV at the time.

It was strange, because offices are usually filled with adults, but this place was overrun with kids. I kept thinking,
Who's running this thing? Where are the authority figures?
A writers' meeting would devolve into lunch, or watching
Club MTV
and discussing which dancer you lusted after. Given how unprofessional we were, it's a miracle the show ever got on the air. From the writers to the cameramen, it seemed less professional than a college production. Everybody was having so much fun that the work was an afterthought.

My impression was that people inside the network were rooting against us. They were predicting, first, that it would be a big bomb, and second, that when it bombed, it would be a good thing for MTV, because it had to stay true to its original purpose, and we were a bad precedent. Before the show went on the air, all the writers were saying, “Who knows if this is gonna work?” We felt like the best thing about the show was giving a
fuck-you
to the people at MTV who didn't think it was a good idea. That was our motivating factor. None of us had much respect for traditional television. We'd grown up on it, and we were addicted to it, and now it was time to make fun of it, to attack it. That was
Remote Control
's job.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
One reason we did a game show was because Nickelodeon had put on
Double Dare
, which was a huge success. And the Nickelodeon people were smug about it. We really wanted to one-up them. And we were very pleased when we did.