THE BEN SILVERMAN SHOW

 October-November 2009

Ben Silverman arrived in LA in a borrowed Jetta and hit it big producing shows like The Office and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire- until he tried to remake NBC and slammed into a corporate wall. Now, as he launches his latest venture, a studio backed by Barry Diller, Silverman talks about success and survival in Hollywood's cutthroat culture.  

For CEO Jeff Zucker, hiring Ben Silverman as the co-chair of entertainment at NBC Universal, the man responsible for primetime programming, must have seemed like a good idea at the time, and in many ways it was. Silverman, just 36 in May 2007, had already compiled a remarkable track record in the entertainment industry. Born on August 15, 1970, Silverman grew up on New York City’s Upper West Side and moved to Los Angeles after attending Tufts University. First as an agent at William Morris, then as head of Reveille, his own production company, Silverman would help spearhead three of television’s most significant shifts this decade. He pioneered the transplantation of foreign programs (The Office, Ugly Betty) to American TV; he helped launch the reality TV phenomenon (Survivor, The Biggest Loser) in the United States; and, in an age when viewers began fast-forwarding their DVRs past commercials, he developed new ways to finance programming, partnering with advertisers and distributors to create “branded entertainment.” And while Silverman was making money for television—heaps of money—NBC had tumbled from its throne as proud purveyor of must-see TV to the hapless recipient of the worst network ratings in prime time.   

You could see Zucker’s logic.

But from the start Silverman attracted as much buzz for his colorful behavior as his professional decisions. Whether it was the parties he allegedly threw or the jibes about rival executives he delivered, NBC’s new star became a pop culture obsession, particularly in the gossipy world of media blogs. “He gave us so much to write about,” Gawker would explain.

 Many of the shows he put on the air died hasty deaths—a writers’ strike and the recession were partly to blame—and NBC remained mired in last place. In late July, Silverman announced that he was leaving NBC to form a new production company—as of Worth’s deadline, to be called Electus—with IAC and Barry Diller, an original investor in Reveille. 

Worth spoke with Silverman not long after at his bachelor-pad home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. The walls are lined with photos of Silverman and TV legends he admires—Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, Brandon Tartikff. In conversation, he is animated, funny and likeable— a combination of Willy Wonka’s “Mike Teavee” and Tom Hanks in Big, with a little ADD thrown in to spice things up. Silverman sounded equal parts excited about his new partnership with Barry Diller and relieved to be leaving behind the melodrama of NBC. Whatever the future of television may be, Ben Silverman—passionate, brash, irrepressible—won’t be just watching it.

Worth: Where did you acquire your love of entertainment?

BS: My mom worked in cable television in the early days—at Court TV, USA, Lifetime, the BBC. My father is an avant-garde composer. So our living room was a salon of creative people, from Arthur Miller to Tommy Tune. 

How did your parents influence you?

My mom and dad loved what they did and had a cultural confidence that I really respected. They didn’t view money as a field worthy of competition. Cultural knowledge and intellectual prowess dictated the philosophy of our kitchen table. 

But you also watched TV.

I was a latchkey kid—my parents divorced when I was young. I could play in front of the building, but this was mid-70s New York City—you’d get mugged all the time. So watching TV was very acceptable. 

When did you start thinking about a career in television?

In high school I read an article about [the late former head of NBC’s entertainment division] Brandon Tartikoff, whom I was fascinated by. In my senior year at Tufts I wrote a paper about how one day I’d work for Brandon.

What about him appealed to you?

He was incredibly optimistic and had put on what were my favorite shows— St. Elsewhere, The Cosby Show, Hill Street Blues. My mom would watch those with me. Normally she’d hear a car crash and walk out of the room, but those we could watch together.

After you graduated in 1992, how did you make your way to LA?

I volunteered to drive a rich girl’s Jetta cross-country.

So you’re in LA, unemployed …

My grandma had given me $2,500 for graduation, and I was dating the daughter of a car dealer, so I was able to get a car for $2,500. It was an Accord, no air-conditioning, and the clutch was broken. So it was athletic work to drive it. Plus it was 111 degrees in the summer in Burbank. I’d sweat through my clothes. I’d drive to job interviews in my underwear and put on my suits in the Disney parking lot. I landed a job at CBS and kind of became a pawn between Jonathan Levin, the head of the drama team, and Marian Davis, the head of the international team. They’d call me into meetings and I’d have to type the notes—like, single-digit typing on a typewriter.

Was it a good first job?

It was great until they greenlit a show called Thunder in Paradise with Hulk Hogan, Chris Lemmon—Jack’s son— and Carol Alt. It was about a boat— them on a boat. And I’m like, “You know what? This is not right for me.” 

What was so awful about that show?

It was the pinnacle of everything that was a turn-off. We’d have meetings where Robert Altman would come in and be smoking a joint and pitching us a show—something extraordinary, like Short Cuts meets The Player. And everyone would be like, “We can never do that.” I’m like, “Why?” And then comes Thunder in Paradise. “That’s what we’re doing?”

So I go to work for Barbara Corday, who had created Cagney & Lacey, at her production company. The first day, she’s enjoying me. “You’re bright, you have all these ideas. We should do an announcement in Varietythat you’re going to be the coordinator here.”

After lunch she says, “We should call you the manager of development.” At the end of the day—“You should be my director of development.”

I got three promotions in the first 12 hours.

Soon you were working with Tartikoff, your idol. How did that happen?

In 1993 Barbara gets named president of New World Entertainment [an independent production company]. She brings me over, and I direct-report to her. I’m 24. All these people are like, “What is Silverman? This fucking kid is driving us nuts.”

And then [in 1994] they hire Brandon Tartikoff as the chairman and Barbara heads out. But she says to me, “You need to stay here.”

Did you and Tartikoff get along?

Brandon took a shine to me also. He says, “Why don’t you come to Europe with me and take the creative meetings?” So now I’m in Europe representing my hero. And I found [British cartoon] Wallace and Gromit. We weren’t able to acquire it—I ended up losing out to [Steven] Spielberg—but it validated my eye.

What did you learn from Tartikoff?

Leave nothing to their imagination. In terms of selling a concept or a show, spell out everything to everyone. If you say, “It’s a guy like Keanu Reeves,” show a picture of Keanu Reeves. Be as literal as you can so that you don’t have to go back and answer another wave of questions. Because they’re looking for questions to say no to.

What was his philosophy about TV?  

He had good and bad ideas. He had roller-skating cops one day and art the next.  That high-low thing made me shed some cultural arrogance that I brought with me from New York. It was more, “We’re here to entertain, not just to elevate.”

He also showed me you could have fun—he would make me do tequila shots. “If you want to learn this business, son, you have to have a sitff right leg.” I’m 24 doing shots with this 50- year-old guy who’d just crush me.

So why leave in 1995?

I saw Brandon being slowly handcuffed in the job because MacAndrews & Forbes were going to flip the company. And I got called by William Morris—they had seen me in pitch meetings. I went to work in their LA office to learn about being an agent.

What did you have to learn?

There’s three things that an agent does. Finding talent and ideas. Procuring deals for that talent or ideas. And then negotiating those deals. I had an eye. I knew how to sell because I was passionate. But I didn’t know the deal templates, which is a huge component of the agent’s job.

Later that year you went to London.

I was actually frightened by LA. We had earthquakes. We had fires, mudslides. I was really close with River Phoenix [the actor who died of a drug overdose in 1993]. I took all of these things as only a 24-year-old could. Oh my God, there is a hell motif here. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah. I had to get out of town.

And what did you find in London?

That the international market was underwriting the Hollywood system. Basically, this side of the world financed and controlled and made the product, and the other side of the world offset that finance by consuming it all.

For example?

You make Pirates of the Caribbean in LA and you sell it to the BBC and BBC Theatrical and you take money from each piece and they get no ownership. So I said [to the Europeans], “Wait a minute—you guys are paying almost 60, 70 percent of this business. If you’re willing to invest earlier, you could own your markets.”

Give me an example of a deal structured with international financing.

I did Rogue Trader, a [1999] movie with Ewan McGregor. It was a British story, but we put it together globally. Then I realized that the intellectual property base of Europe was leverageable also. The foreign owners of ideas were never entering our market.

How did you capitalize on that?

In 1996 I go hit on [British media company] ITV and the BBC. I cold-called: “I’m William Morris London. My name’s Ben. Let me represent you.” Their worst nightmare—the guy in a suit that’s going to lead them to the gold of Hollywood. They said, “Agents don’t represent us, agents sell us writers.” And I said, “No, no. Let’s remake your ideas in the U.S.”

In retrospect the idea seems obvious. But at the time …?

No one had done it.

Why not?

Hollywood is an incredibly insular community. The product travels more than the executives. There was a history of Americans who would come to London, spend a week, set up shop at the Dorchester, sit at the Ivy, and not come back for five years.

When did deals start to fall into place?

I found Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and helped orchestrate the sale of that to America. That was so big, it opened up everything with an accent. We signed up everyone from the BBC to [UK independent production company] Tiger Aspect. Whether they were a hip indie or a global player, if they wanted to break into the American market, there was one person they had to call.

When did you know that transplanting English shows to American TV would work?

I remember being on holiday with a friend and getting a fax of the first day of ratings for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and going, “Is this right?”  And then the next day: “Oh my God.” And then the third day: “My life’s changing.” The arrival of reality TV prompted a huge debate about its merits. A ton of debate. I thought at that moment if I was to write a book it would have been called It’s Your Fault. It would have been my face, this 26-year- old’s face. It’s all his fault. But I was proud of the shows that I didn’t do—I was asked to produce The Swan [in which allegedly unattractive women received plastic surgery].

But you did Fear Factor, with bikini-clad women in snake-filled tanks.

I represented the company that produced it. I view the reality shows with the company I [later] founded and the ones I executive-produced as more defining of the “Ben Brand.”

What’s the “Ben Brand”?

It’s more optimistic and aspirational.

Whatever their artistic merits, reality shows made money.

Exactly. A big issue in Europe is that there were no secondary markets. [European producers] couldn’t invest deficits against scripted programming because they didn’t have a secondary market to make up that money. So there was this business reason driving why they did reality shows. But also, there weren’t generations of writers there. The Nazis wiped out the intellectual base of Europe. There weren’t as many scriptwriters.

So you were thinking not just about what you wanted to make, but how to pay for it.

Always. It was like watching my dad struggle to get a grant for six minutes of music and watching my mom put together a co-production for 80 hours of television. The Restaurant [a 2003 show in which advertisers were woven into the plot] was born of that. The advertisers needed to be more integrated.

So with all this success why did you leave London in 2000?

I wanted to see the birth of the digital age—how technology was going to en- able but also hurt how broadcasters reached their audience. And, in turn, how the advertisers reached their audience. How does our funding base— the advertiser—still communicate?

I have this great intellectual property base in Europe and I realize that I also need to represent the advertisers. I went to New York for William Morris to run their consulting division and sign up Fortune 100 brands. I represented eBay, Anheuser-Busch. I helped Time Inc. magazines, including InStyle and People, establish a [TV] presence and bring their advertisers with them.

So you started to think about going out on your own?

A client of mine was running Barry Diller’s USA Network businesses, and he would ask me, “Well, what do you
want to do?”

I said, “Start an alternative studio— a new production and distribution company selling globally.”
He said, “Come meet with Barry.”

So I flew to LA and had breakfast with Barry. By the time I was back in New York the next morning, they had sent a term sheet to me that reflected everything we had discussed. I was like, “Oh—that’s how a mogul works.”

Why did you name your new company Reveille?

I wanted it to be a wake-up call to the business.

You founded Reveille in March 2002. For the next five years, you had a great run.

Almost every show I did made it through at least its second season, which is unheard-of. Thir­ty­ Days, Biggest­ Loser, The ­Restaurant, Date My­ Mom,­ The­ Office, Ugly­ Betty, The Tudors—every one was successful.

In May 2007 the CEO of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, asked you to join NBC as head of entertainment. With all your success as an independent, why join a huge corporation?

I put 24 hours a day into Reveille. I hired everyone. The first four executives had all been my assistants at one point. I started to make a lot of money and I’m like, “Wow, this is really successful. I can be set forever with this thing. I’ve built a brand and a company and a culture that can outlast me.”

I was about to do another deal with Barry where we could own more scripted product and maybe acquire some companies. I sat down with Jeff, who had a first-look deal with Reveille, to tell him. And he said, “I’m looking to make a change at NBC right now. Would you be interested in coming here?”
I said, “Absolutely.”

Why?

I had been working from the outside and I thought,  Maybe I could change all this from the inside.

What could  you do on the inside that you couldn’t at Reveille?

I really did feel that NBC was the rational voice and that there was an opportunity to use that platform.

NBC is the “rational voice”? What does that mean?

They present multiple sides to issues in an empathetic way. Whether it’s the Today Show or Saturday­ Night ­Live, through Brian Williams or Tom Brokaw. I thought NBC was representative of the ideals I had.

So Zucker wanted an outsider to shake things up. Did you anticipate how hard that would be?

No. Saying that broadcast is in trouble, I didn’t think would get so much anger. But people love the status quo.

Though Zucker had been making the same argument.

He had, and I didn’t know how much animosity he had already created and I was  inheriting.

Two months after taking the job, you told the New York Times you had to impose your personality on NBC Universal. What did you mean?

We were so stagnant. We were in a [writers’] strike, years away from anything I do hitting the air. So I’ve got to go be a dancing monkey. To drive some shift by sheer force of will and energy and personality. How do I make sure that the A-list [talent] comes back? How do I make sure the advertisers are excited? How do I get the press to stop attacking us daily?

You arrived at NBC with a glowing public image. That changed almost overnight.

It was shocking how stupid some [reporters] were in their lack of research or their lack of knowledge. [In 2007] I’m the only two-time comedy Emmy nominee as an exec producer, and I throw a party for it and all people talk about is that I threw a party.

You’re referring to the infamous “White Tiger Party,” featuring bikini-clad women dancing on floats and a white tiger in a cage.

Someone else threw the party for me. I didn’t know that there was going to be a tiger there. Once I was there, I went with it.

Another controversy came when you compared rival network heads to “D-Girls,” meaning powerless female executives. Would you take back
that remark?

Yes. Totally. That I totally regret.

Nikki Finke, the blogger who writes DeadlineHollywood.com, was brutal to you, posting frequently about what she calls “the Ben Silverman experiment.” What was your response?

How do you have time? You’re either in the business, moving the business, or you’re sitting at home with your left-over food bitching about the business. I’m like, “Who cares”?

Still, bad press is a factor in your business.

It’s only a factor when you’re at NBC. Because NBC cares.

How much money have you made for other people?

Multiple, multiple billions.

Let’s get back to what you were trying to do at NBC. You had two years there.

The shortest time in the history of things to do anything.

So what is your legacy?

The Infront—we just transformed our entire selling process. International co-financing. The acceleration of the dialogue that has to happen between advertiser and creative infrastructure because of digital distribution. These are all legacy things. And Jay Leno in prime time will play—you’re going to see that be a marathon, not a sprint. It won’t be clear for 18 months whether it works.

In the past two years, though, you had a lot of shows that died quickly, and NBC remained stuck in last place.

They were all strike-induced. You did everything you had to do to make it through two years. And everyone else had a tough time too.

Isn’t network TV fighting a losing battle against cable?

Totally. Our number-one competition is television, it’s cable.

You’ve called cable a better business model than network TV.

Yeah, a much better model. It’s a dual revenue stream. The question is just going to be, does the [broadcast] business model follow it?

So leaving was your decision?

Yeah. I said [to Zucker], I know exactly what I want to do and I’m just going to make one call about it. I had breakfast with Barry. He totally got what I was laying out and said, Let’s do it.

Are you relieved?

 [Smiles] I’m so happy.

Your successor is Jeff Gaspin, the former head of NBC’s cable division. What’s the significance of the cable guy taking the helm of broadcast?

NBC Universal is a predominately cable-profit center. A lot of the decisions made at the network were made in service of the cable company. Now one person can run them transparently.

Does it signify a shift in the balance of power from broadcast to cable?

The financial balance of power shifted to cable years ago.

What will TV look like in five years?

We’ve seen technology change the business models, the distribution platforms. What we haven’t seen yet is the evolution of the content. You can watch a TV show on the Internet, on a BlackBerry, but it’s still a cop show and a sitcom.

So how could content change?

Maybe we’ll have the next generation be more interactive. Video games do that—first-person storytelling. The Choose Your Own Adventure book series [in which the reader decides what the protagonist does] could manifest. There has to be an evolution. The story form has not changed much since the birth of cinema.

Where will you be in all this?

Hopefully at the head again.

Tell me about Electus, your new company.

It’s a new studio that takes these silos that separate all these businesses—distribution, advertising, creative—and matches them together. This is a studio meets ad agency. We’re going to work as a global platform connecting advertisers, creative talent and distribution. Then television migrates to all these platforms—Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, your iPhone app. I know how to do all that.

Will viewers play ball? At NBC, you had some branded entertainment that worked and some where the viewers and the creative people pushed back.

The audience doesn’t get mad. The shit’s for free,  it’s got to be funded somehow. The younger generation, they get the joke. They’ve watched their extreme sports shows labeled more than NASCAR. They’re watching the Red Bull Olympics.

So now that you’re on your own again, will we get the old Ben Silverman back?

(Laughs) He never left.  

Photo by Jonathan Beckerman