Nov 10-18, 1999
Page One
John Strausbaugh on Publishing
Burt Kearns came roaring into the 1990s with television's barbarians,
introducing tabloid tv to America as a producer of A Curtrent Affair and later
Hard Copy. As the decade ends, neither
of these shows remains on the air, and Kearns' latest project, which happens to
air on Fox this Thursday night, is, he tells me, "a very highbrow
specal" called When Good Pets Go Bad 2.
What happened?
“I’m sorry, man," he says. "I need the work."
But he says it with a laugh. This is not a sob story. Kearns has been
up and down and up and down again over the past decade. He’s done O.J. and
William Kennedy Smith, Son of Sam and Lobster Boy, Strange
Universe and huge-titted strippers. He’s worked with Travolta and
coproduced Kim Basinger’s recent HBO special on panic attacks. He did a lot of drugs and drinking, then turned
40 and settled down in Malibu with the blonde of his dreams, the pretty
British newscaster Alison Holloway.
Along the way, he helped change forever the way the news gets told on
tv. If you’re the typical media pundit, you’d call the change a devolution into
vulgar tabloid stupidity. If you’re Kearns, it’s a democratic revolution,
teaching television how to give the people the news they want instead of the
news stuffed shirts like Mike Wallace and Jim Lehrer think they need.
In the end, he argues, television learned that lesson too well:
When Dateline and Extra rule the weeknights and Barbara Walters conducts a serious
interview with the girl who fellated the President, all tv news has become
tabloid tv. "At the dawn of the 21st century," he claims with mock
portentousness, "the networks have regained control of the mainstream, yet
the course of the mighty river has shifted irrevocably–and many of those
driving the network ships were trained in the tabloid television
newsrooms."
Kearns is defiantly, happily unapologetic about that lowbrow,
low-class effect he’s had on tv. That’s part of what makes his memoirs such an
absorbing read. Tabloid Baby (Celebrity Books, 490 pages, $27.95) is a
funny, brash,packed-with-anecdotes account of his role in the trashing (my
usage) of tv news. If Kearns lays on the mythologizing a bit thick–his
portraits of colleagues like Steve Dunleavy come straight out of 1930s
hero-worship of the two-fisted, whiskey-pounding newspaper reporter–it’s
probably just because he’s looking to sell HBO the movie rights, and why not.
Besides, even his heroes show their warts, and portraits of powerful media
figures like Barry Diller, Diane Dimond, Anthea Disney and Jeff Greenfield are
boldly unattractive.
“There is a reason my book couldn’t get published in New York,"
he remarks ruefully (Celebrity is an independent publisher in Nashville). He
claims he’s already had trouble scheduling author appearances on tv.
On the broad scale, Tabloid Baby is a simple and familiar
tale about the Aussification of the news: that is, it’s about the enormous, and
many would say enormously detrimental, impact Rupert Murdoch and his piratical
Aussie crew have had on news, both in print and electronic, both here and in
England, over the last decade. Kearns had come to Manhattan from Connecticut as
a young newsman and spent the 1980s working for the Channel 5 and Channel 4
news organizations when Murdoch’s Fox Television decided to launch an American
version of the popular Australian show A Current Affair. (Good Day New
York was similarly a New York knockoff of an Aussie show, hence the name.)
In 1989, Kearns came over from the Channel 4 newsroom, which was, he
says, still reeling from the aftershocks of parent NBC’s having been bought and
gutted by "Neutron Jack" Welch’s GE. He felt instantly at home. The
largely Australian team, which included Dunleavy and producer Peter Brennan,
were basically running A Current Affair out of the bar across the street
from Fox’s offices.They were loud, brash, boorish, vulgar, hard-drinking,
fun-loving cowboys. Kearns loved it. He’d done a lot of moonlighting for CBS
News in the 80s, and had formed a bad opinion of corporate television news.
"There was something about CBS that didn’t smell right," he writes,
"something cultish in the way the employees saw themselves upholding some
sacred tradition, carrying out some grand mission to spread the CBS orthodoxy… They
all just took things so seriously." While his colleagues at Channel 5
got up a dead pool on when Cardinal Cooke "would finally kick the
bucket," at CBS he found "the newswriters sniffling and consoling
each other over the imminent passing of brave Barney Clark, the artificial
heart recipient. Sheesh."
He found no such piety at A Current Affair, where Brennan
seriously told him his model for the show was not other news broadcasts but rather The Dick
Van Dyke Show. He wanted Kearns to learn how to tell a news story the way you’d
tell it to your friends at the bar: sex, scandal, jokes, celebrities,
heartstrings. Brennan and the Aussies had their own take on American tastes,
Kearns argues, and it was very, very different from what the Ted Koppels and
Dan Rathers thought Americans wanted–and ought to want:
The ability to recognize the undercurrents of America beyond the
Beltway and across the Hudson was key to A Current Affair’s success. The
men behind the show were foreigners who had a far better understanding of the
national psyche than the network newspeople who spent their careers in
windowless newsrooms or trading notes in gang bang press briefings. These men
were writers, trained in the cadet system of Australian newspapers,
cynical veterans of the world’s most hardscrabble newspaper wars from Fleet
Street to Hong Kong, men who had imagination and balls and little respect for
the trenchcoat and hairspray conventions of American television news.
For them, news-telling wasn’t the privilege of the elite…
Maybe Kearns’ best anecdotal metaphor for the gulf between the network and
tabloid news culturescomes from the O.J. trial. Tabloid tv crews (A Current
Affair having by then spun off imitators like Hard
Copy and Inside Edition and Now It Can Be Told) had staked out
the courthouse entrance relentlessly, a daily grind, weeks on end, fighting
like piranha for scraps of news, when one day this schmuck shows up, elbowing
his way through the cameramen and reporters and setting up a ladder. He climbs
this ladder and he’s up there, looking down on all the rest of them, when they
recognize him: network media pundit-putz Jeff Greenfield. A risible
confrontation ensues between the pompous Greenfield and a young cameraman, Joe
Guidry (now an independent producer), who effectively shames Greenfield down
off his high perch and out of the crowd entirely.
The larger point behind a story like that, Kearns says to me, is that
network tv was not only late to the party, but never would have even covered
the O.J. trial if tabloid tv hadn’t been there first and shown how popular that kind of
coverage could be. He remembers being "the only one on the William Kennedy
Smith story" for a solid week before the networks deigned to pay attention
to it. By the late 90s, as Monicagate demonstrated, all that had changed.
On a more petty level, various other famous asses get satisfying
comeuppances in Tabloid Baby. There was the time Gordon Elliott, another
Aussie, followed Bryant Gumbel’s boat around the harbor, annoying him through a
bullhorn just to get him to blow his studied cool on camera. Or the time
Elliott hired a Gorbachev lookalike, posted him on the sidewalk outside Trump
Tower and convinced Trump the Russian leader wanted to meet him. Trump
"actually took the golden elevator down and walked out to the sidewalk
with his aides for an official greeting… He was exposed as the self-important
asshole he was."
As Kearns tells it, those kinds of wild-hair antics never really sat well
with many of Fox’s executives, some of whom might very well be seeing Trump at
a cocktail party or fundraiser the next day. An internal struggle to clean up A
Current Affair’s act pitted Barry Diller and the "Velvet Mafia" in
Hollywood against the New York-based, largely Aussie crew. The Aussies
gradually lost out, and Kearns found himself moving to Hollywood to work for
Paramount’s upstart competitor to A Current Affair, Hard Copy.
He tells some great Hollywood-sleaze stories, including a meeting with
Bernie Brillstein, manager-producer and wheeler-dealer, whose clients included
Garry Shandling and various Saturday Night Live types (they called
him The Man Who Killed Belushi because he bankrolled the comedian’s final
blowout). Brillstein was too vulgar even for Kearns. Minutes into their first
meeting, he was talking about starlets he’d like to pork:
Brillstein was male bonding. I could picture him with Belushi, rhapsodizing
about how he’d like to give that skinny Larraine Newman a shot in the ass.
"I’ll tell you, all these Amy Fisher movies, you know who I’d love to
fuck?" His assistant… nodded as if he’d heard it all before. "I’d
love to fuck that Drew Barrymore. Oooh."
"E.T., yeah," I said, thinking, well, it took three years but we
were in. This was Hollywood; a powerful fat man with a commanding view of the
city, fantasizing about fucking a seventeen-year-old.
A Current Affair died in 1996; Hard Copy finally went down
last spring. They were killed, Kearns argues, by their own success. The
mainstream media took over the tabloid tv impulse, cleaned it up, softened it,
turned it into Entertainment
Tonight and 20/20 and Dateline. Meanwhile, one could also
argue that "reality tv" came on even cruder, rougher, more
in-your-face, and stole the low end out from under the Brennans and Kearnses–in
effect, home-movie and disaster-video tv eliminated these guys as unnecessary
middlemen between the raw product and its audience. So much tv became tabloid
that the original tabloids got squeezed out.
By the end of Tabloid Baby, Kearns is getting along as an independent producer
in L.A., still working largely lowbrow-sounding projects like Strange
Universe, one of those series about "the paranormal." The old gang
has scattered in many directions–Dunleavy becoming a caricature at
the Post, Brennan striking gold again as producer of Judge Judy’s show,
Gordon Elliott still flogging his doorknocker routine (now for the Food
Network). Kearns believes they’ve had a lasting impact in "opening a
window on America…opening up what we’re allowed to cover in America."
For better or worse, he’s clearly right.
