My dad (Lew Wuergler) used to joke that he would been a zillionaire if only he hadn’t stopped inventing when he created “6 Up”. The joke, of course, is that if he had only gone one more little step and invented “7Up” we would have been a very wealthy family, 7Up being a very popular soft drink of the times.
I actually had that “oh, so very close” experience that I look back on and smile about. Three times, in fact.
When I was in Cannes, France at the big international spring TV market, I had purchased the broadcast rights to one of the very first rock video albums ever produced. This was ELO (Electric Light Orchestra), one of the most creative and innovative rock bands of the day. It was a truly fabulous production and I was excited to be able to sell it around the world.
One day during the market, I was at lunch with one of our great clients, Rob Pittman, and I started thinking out loud about “what if” there was a television channel devoted exclusively to rock and roll music that could be a display venue for all of these fantastic video productions that we knew were coming…ELO being one of the very first. That would be really terrific, I said, and wondered if someone would ever do that.
Little did I know at the time that yes, someone would start up what would become a highly successful venture for showcasing music video by all of the top rock and pop performers and which would soon “span the globe” - this new cable channel was called MTV.
Not me, but my friend and client, Rob Pittman. I actually don't think that he took my seemingly random comment that day at lunch and made it happen...I think he already had this idea in development and was just being cagey by not saying anything. Never play poker with Mr. Pittman.
That was the first of my three “near misses” and a great lesson learned.
The next was when my good friend Bill Little and I had laid out a new concept for television that we just knew would a real winner.
We called it The Food Channel.
This would be famous and not-so-famous chefs demonstrating their recipes and showing viewers how to recreate them in their own kitchens. The channel would be themed to the seasons or to a particular type of food. We were really excited about it and created a very good looking presentation complete with a budget for a full year of various programs broadcasting for 18 hours a day.
We took it to the largest cable operator in the country and got a great reception for the idea and were highly complemented on our presentation...but, were turned down for what seemed like a really weak reason.
And, wouldn’t you know it, but about a year later The Food Channel officially debuted on national cable, complete with a lineup of famous and not-so-famous chefs demonstrating their recipes...sound familiar? Miss #2.
Near miss #3 was a real doozy!
When the Donny and Marie Show went off the air, the family created a new show they called The Osmond Family Show which the network (ABC) aired on Sunday night. Sadly, it only lasted for one season and so they called me in to build a development team to see if we couldn’t come up with a new and different concept that would keep them on the air.
Having a background in successfully producing a show that did well in syndication (The New Mickey Mouse Club) I decided we should try something really bold.
Why not create an entire lineup of prime time programs that would air Saturday and Sunday nights and place them in syndication instead of attempting to persuade an existing network to take this on, which we know would have never happened.
What we created was really fabulous - in theory, of course. But, Wow!! If we could make this work?!
This would have been my version of “7 Up”.
We called it The Family Television Network, and it was really loaded with possibilities.
Look at this lineup...
"Lost Legends" - a fast-paced escapist action-adventure dramatic series shot on location
"Sunday Punch" - an up-beat musical/comedy variety show featuring famous performing families
"FTN Signature Series" - 90-minute special featuring the "signature" of your favorite personalities
"The Saturday Evening Post" - a true "magazine" show with departments, fiction, features, cartoons...
"Osmond Saturday Special" - an upbeat kickoff to Saturday's lineup with music and comedy
"Country Gold" - your favorite gold-record Country stars celebrating their million-sellers
"Thrills and Chills" - a zany half-hour of two performing families - animals and auto show
"Sunday Funnies" - half-hour of animated cartoons right out of the Sunday papers.
And, did you notice that the artist drew me into the Director's Chair? Fun, huh?
After we had all of our creative work completed, the estimated budgets calculated and a really good looking brochure designed, we were ready to make our pitch.
We made an appointment with Bill Bennett who was the head of the monster Metromedia broadcasting conglomerate based at Channel 11 in Los Angeles.
They had 6 huge independent stations around the country and, in our mind, would have been the perfect foundation upon which to build our “network” of independent non-network-affiliated stations. We made a great pitch and felt that he was duly impressed with what we had put together. We left his office feeling pretty good about where this might go next.
But, for where it actually went...we were totally unprepared.
Not very long after our meeting, the industry was stunned by the surprising announcement that the 20th Century Fox Corporation had purchased all of the Metromedia stations, thereby creating the cornerstone of what was to eventually become the amazingly successful Fox Network.
And, I’ll just bet you can tell how they started out, right?
You guessed it...prime time on the weekends with a variety of programming.
We wondered at the time if we had given them the idea or if they had been working on something like what we had presented. We also wondered if we had the basis of a lawsuit for stealing our intellectual property but quickly abandoned that idea because we really knew how Hollywood works. It had been pretty much a standard reply that if you gave someone a really good idea they would say something along the line of, “no thanks, because we have something like that already deep in development”.
You never knew if that was the truth or not, of course, but you truly had no recourse. You just chalked it up to yet another painful lesson learned.
So, there you have it. 3 near misses, each of which would have left each of you an amazing inheritance.
Sorry.
