A Great Idea and a Great Business Education all rolled together...

     If the low-power television business was considered to be the “minor leagues” I was about to be called up to the Major League business of hard-ball full-contact rough-and-tumble television syndication. It was time to really “buckle up” for the bumpy road ahead. And, boy, what an education I was about to receive.

     It didn’t take long to wind down the JPD closure and, sadly, that whole experience also created a rift between the LCM partners, up to the point of them also choosing to go their separate ways. My financial backing from them also dissolved in the same wave but it really wasn’t too much of an issue because my forced neglect of the Wuergler Productions business during the time I was in California had caused all of my proposed projects to dry up anyway. It was an amiable departure between me and my partners and I was grateful that they trusted me enough to manage their investment in JPD and in the low-power world. Sadly, the federal government’s failure to issue construction permits for stations was what really killed that business.

     So, on to the next gig, right?

     And it didn’t take long. My good friend Randy Largent knew of an energetic venture capital investor who had been approached with a deal for a totally new scheme of television syndication that sounded promising to him, but since he knew nothing about that business he was looking for someone to run it for me and Randy knew just the guy…me!

     And this idea was truly brilliant. The concept that was created by Tom Hughes was to offer first-run movies to syndicated TV stations so that audience would get to see films long before they hit the cable networks. We would build our own network of stations and give them one new movie per month that had not yet been on the pay cable networks. I called it the “First Wednesday Film Series” and I started building the business by hiring an excellent syndicator, George Back, who went to work right away selling this idea to stations around the country. We were off and running.

     We went to the NAPTE convention with this idea and created a lot of “buzz” about the idea. And I wound up on the front page of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times. 

     I had already been to several major movie distributors and started to make offers on their newest movie releases, and also generated a lot of serious interest with them as this was truly a brand-new market for them and an exciting new source of revenue.

     We were thrilled to go on the air with our very first offering “Godzilla 1985” and had built a solid group of stations. One of my artist friends created a fun ad which we placed in TV GUIDE and which loudly proclaimed our “World Television Premiere”.  

     We were really making some noise in this business.

     Here is the terrific article that appeared in Daily Variety:

Syndicators Plan Ad-Hoc Web for 1^st-Run Features

New York, April 8 – Two syndicators have joined forces to set up an ad-hoc network that would funnel theatrical features into tv syndication before they get any runs on pay-cable.

The plan, put together by All American TV and a new company called Alternative Network Television, kicks off with “Godzilla 1985” which goes out on barter May 16 in primetime on a lineup that already has reached 81% of the country.

Just about all of the stations taking “Godzilla 1985” including those in the top 22 markets and in 39 of the top 40 will run it day and date, giving the advertisers a genuine alternative network and allowing the distributors to launch a national promotion effort.

“This is a syndication first,” says George Back, president of All American TV, which will sell the 14 minutes of national barter time in “Godzilla.” “To my knowledge, all of the previous nationally televisied movies in recent years have had multiple runs on pay-cable.”

Mike Wuergler, president of Alternative Network TV (ANT) says, “Independent tv stations are severly hampered in the ratings when they play a movie that has had a number of runs on pay. That’s why we’ve cleared so many stations so fast – “Godzilla” will be coming to them without any pay-tv exposure at all.” ANT is clearing the stations for the ad-hoc network.

Sources say ANT paid New World, the theatrical distributor, about $550,000 for two runs of “Godzilla 1985” within a 60-day window between mid-May and mid-July 1986.

Tom Hughes, v.p. of programming and station relations for ANT, says his company is negotiating with a number of independent theatrical movie distributors to outbid HBO and Showtime for the first post-homevideo window. (New World released “Godzilla 1985” to homevideo late last year.)

If “Godzilla” get good Nielsen ratings for its May 16 telecast, Buck says he and Wuergler plan to buy at least 12 new theatricals (with no previous pay-tv exposure) for a proposed monthly ad-hoc network that would run from September 1986 through August 1987.

Wuergler says he’s negotiating with the following theatrical distributors for new pix: Hemdale, Concorde, New World, Cinema Group, Sandy Howard, Dino De Laurentis and Samuel Goldwyn.

     What we were about to discover what that we had been “tickling the tail of the sleeping tiger” in being so successful so early in our efforts and were about to get hit with a large dose of financial reality. This is what I meant earlier when I characterized this business as “hard-ball full-contact rough-and-tumble”.

     We had made the cable network giant HBO take notice, especially with the Variety article that outlined our battle-plan…and our apparent challenge to them. They knew that we were, in effect, stealing away a potentially large audience from them by offering free movies to television audiences long before those films would ever show up on their Pay TV channel.

     What happened is that HBO simply went around outbidding us with the movie distributors. And, they must have felt that we were a credible threat because their offers were far and above what we were offering so producers and distributors took HBOs offer and left us “all dressed up with no place to go”. We had a wonderfully viable company with a terrific idea but were outbid by the “tiger” we had awakened and were, quite effectively, simply put out of business. Hard ball, right?

     Our principal investor was really good about this in that he realized that he just didn’t have deep enough pockets to get into a bidding war with such a giant organization as HBO, so we parted ways in a good way and I then went about folding my executive tent, saying a sad goodbye with my deepest thanks to all of our television stations who pioneered this concept with us, and, then…with a heavy heart but with a fantastic learning experience under my belt, I turned out the lights.   

     And, as a fun little add-on for you, I received a terrific mention in Mark Wolf’s article in the Rocky Mountain News after the NAPTE convention in New Orleans. After talking about the ATN Network and what we were doing in the business, his final three paragraphs were a nice nod to me and a bit of my history in Denver.

     Here is a portion of that article 

ANTv’s package has not yet been sold of a Denver station, but Wuergler’s roots to KWGN-Channel 2 go back nearly 20 years.

Wuergler is a Denver native who graduated from Aurora Central (then just Aurora) High School and the University of Colorado, with a degree in speech and drama. He hosted Teen Time, an afternoon music-and-dance show on Channel 2, live from a teenage nightclub near East High School and performed for seven years in and around Denver as a member of the band The Hustlers.

He appeared in productions of Oklahoma and The Boyfriend at Country Dinner Playhouse and returned to Denver as production stage manager of the national company of Fiddler on the Roof at the Auditorium Theater. Wuergler produced the revival of “The Mickey Mouse Club” for Disney in 1977, served a hitch as president of Osmond International, then became a film producer for Comworld. Among his movies were “The Avenging” (filmed in Telluride in 1981), “One Dark Night” and “Hit and Run”. “They were tax-shelter movies,” joked Wuergler.

     Ok...now what?