If all he ever did was create Turner Classic Movies that would be reason enough to celebrate Ted Turner. There was so much more, however, to the maverick entrepreneur, adventurer, sports team owner, conservationalist and philanthropist, as captured in the TCM Remembers video, above.
Jane Fonda’s favourite ex-husband (as she characterizes Turner) passed away Wednesday age 87 at his 29,000-acre Avalon Plantation in Lamont, Florida. (Turner was the second biggest private land owner in the United States.) For the past several years, he had been suffering from Lewy body dementia, the same neurodegenerative disease that took down Robin Williams in his final years.
Turner made his first million or two taking over his father’s outdoor advertising business in the early 1960s. He went on to buy and sell radio stations, trading some in on a UHF TV station, building that up into an Atlanta-based Superstation. In the ’70s, he crammed the early media properties he bought with a lot of tired old TV shows nobody wanted anymore, reruns of things such as Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy, Star Trek, Hazel and Bugs Bunny. Turned out that people still wanted them. Yes, he was hunting for bargains, but as Turner once told TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz, he had a strong belief that people simply liked “old things.”
He took that hunch to a whole other level in the mid-’80s when he bought the MGM/UA film studio, leveraging his other assets to come up with $1.5 billion. Seen as a staggering amount at the time, Turner has to split off and sell parts of that acquisition, including the studio business and the backlot (to Lorimar/Telepictures). What he kept were the vast film holdings, including MGM classics such as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
He was mocked in the trades for such a deal with headlines such as “Ted Turner now a librarian.” What he cornered, however, was the market on content. He syndicated his classic film collection to networks and independent stations and later used them to stock his cable stations TBS and TNT. In the ’90s he created one of his proudest legacies, TCM, a film buff’s dream channel packed with 2,200 gems from MGM, Warners, United Artists and RKO, as well as licences to 1,000 other films.
All those Bugs Bunny cartoons he acquired in his MGM/Warners film deal got a further boost when he also bought the once mighty TV ‘toon factory Hanna Barbera. Turner used Fred and Barney, as well as The Jetsons and Scooby-Doo, to create, what else, The Cartoon Network. Again: “people love old things.” Studio heads now treasure them as Intellectual Property.
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They laughed in the late ’70s when Turner helped create CNN. Who is going to watch a news channel 24/7? Answer: The world. Now CNN is the hot potato that will likely be sold off in the fall out from the monopoly-busting 110-billion Paramount-Warners/Discovery merger.
Turner was also savvy enough to see that owning sports teams was another way to offer a deep supply of TV content over several platforms. As the Toronto Blue Jays started to become competitive in the late ’70s, early ’80s, many of us had to suffer through Ted and Jane doing the tomahawk chop in their private box at Turner Field. Ditto owning a wrestling network, and creating his own answer to the Olympics with the Goodwill Games, part of his initiative to warm up relations between America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He even stuck his nose into hockey with his Atlanta Thrashers eventually winding up in Winnipeg as The Jets.
If all this running around putting your name on everything sounds unnervingly familiar, Turner was not the T-dogg before Trump. He donated a billion dollars to help bolster the United Nations. He worked to curb the population explosion despite fathering five children of his own. He lobbied for health care reform and conservationism.
As a cable TV boss, he was a change maker, dubbed by Slate magazine as the “Alexander the Great of broadcasting.” Networks under the Turner banner included ESPN, MTV, CNN, TCM, Bravo, Showtime, BET, the Discovery Channel and The Weather Channel.
As far as I can remember he never attended the semi-annual Television Critics Associsation press tours, although for decades his various networks took up a lot of real estate during those sessions. It would have been memorable to meet such a risk taker, in television, sailing, real estate and life.
Fonda, who remained close despite their 2001 divorce, saluted him on news of his passing as someone who “swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same.” Not a bad epitaph.
