From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  The part of Shep’s plan aimed at raising the consciousness of tastemakers, so they would consider chefs as great artists, was in high gear. But he had to reach the masses who would make the cash registers sing. To rope them in, as McCormack had advised, television was the key.

  “I had an event with Kenny Loggins, who I was managing, and Wolfgang was cooking. And Kenny got a couple of hundred thousand dollars while Wolfgang got nothing. Kenny got twenty-five rooms. He got one little dinky room. Kenny got first class, Wolf got coach. And when the night was over and the performance and the meal were over and there was a meet and greet, Kenny’s line was twenty people and Wolfgang’s was three hundred. It was pretty obvious. Anybody could buy a ticket to a Kenny Loggins show, I don’t give a shit who you are, you couldn’t get in to Spago.”

  —SHEP GORDON

  Shep’s timing was as good as it had been that day he decided to go swimming at the Landmark Hotel. Reading about Food Network in entertainment-industry trade publications, he realized that this was what Grasshopper had been waiting for. When Emeril was brought to New York, Shep pounced and set up a meeting with Reese. At the new TVFN offices, Shep explained his approach, modeled on McCormack’s, that chefs needed what golfers had, more television exposure. Even if the TV work didn’t pay very well—this made Reese nod—it would open up possibilities for endorsements.

  Shep commanded a ready-made roster of celebrity chefs, mostly from the West Coast, a pool Reese had barely touched. Reese had randomly grabbed whomever Sue or another expert suggested, but Shep was talking about a gold mine of talent from the region that had led the reinvention of American cuisine.

  Shep mentioned a few chefs from his orbit—Wolfgang Puck, Roger Vergé, and Milliken and Feniger. When Reese made the faux pas of referring to them as “cooks,” Shep noted the offhand insult, but held his tongue, focusing on the goal. Shep knew that if some of the chefs could get on TV, more commercial opportunities would come.

  He focused on his old friend Emeril. Shep suggested an experiment that would cost the network little but could earn it a lot. Chefs, at this time, were not likely to sell golf balls or T-shirts. But they could, Shep figured, sell spices. Why not, he proposed, give Emeril advertising time on his show during which he could sell his own line of spices?

  Reese agreed to the plan. He could make Emeril a happier employee without having to increase his paycheck directly, and if the spices started selling well, Shep promised, he would work out a revenue-sharing plan with the network.

  Shep met with Emeril and his business manager, Tony Cruz, selling them on the idea of trying to use the chef’s growing stardom to sell a branded line of spices. “Let’s try this out,” Shep told the men. “Let’s see if we can make this happen and capitalize on it.” Tony and Emeril agreed to let him give it a shot. Shep would be a 50/50 partner. Shep pushed Emeril to develop a few spice blends, found a company in Arizona to make them, and produced short TV spots. He flattered Reese by naming one of the spice blends Essence of Emeril.

  —

  Emeril, meanwhile, was doing his part to connect with the audience. First, he managed his image, by asking for a little help in the makeup chair. He was sensitive about a camera that shot down on the countertop from above. It was designed to offer views directly into mixing bowls and pans, but sometimes caught views of the back of a chef’s head as he or she leaned over. “I don’t like that camera,” Emeril told Ricki Stofsky, the regular producer of Essence. It showed his bald spot. Abandoning the overhead camera was not possible—viewers needed to see the food sizzle—so Emeril’s makeup person came up with a solution, applying black cosmetic powder to his scalp where his hair was thinning.

  More important, he stuck to his guns when he sensed he had come up with something audiences would connect to.

  Reese had dictated that none of the crew would receive on-screen credits. The network had many camera and sound people who worked nights at news jobs and “moonlighted” during the day at TVFN below their normal union rates, so it was better to allow everyone to work in anonymity. This annoyed some of the younger TVFN staffers, who yearned to see their names on the screen, but Reese would not budge. The cameramen could get awfully tired during the day shift. Emeril, flying from his unholy number of espressos, could see them nodding off as he cooked on the kitchen set. One in particular used to go slack-jawed as he passed out.

  Inspired first by the need to keep the cameramen awake, Emeril started yelling as he added ingredients to dishes—“Bam!”

  Emeril liked the sound of it. It seemed to add an extra something to any recipe. Since he no longer had to follow a script, he began improvising more exclamations—“Let’s take it up a notch!” “Yeah, baby!” and an occasional “Hey, now!”

  Emeril had only been using “Bam” for a few months when he started hearing an occasional fan in his restaurant yell it back to him. One day Jonathan Lynne came striding down to the studio area where Ricki was overseeing an Essence shoot. His official title at the network was Special Assistant for Creative Affairs, but Jonathan considered his real title to be Head of Development, and he reported directly to Reese, offering what he considered a more youth-oriented and savvy take on everything. Jonathan, showing his connection to the “MTV generation,” had come up with an advertising slogan used in print ads for TVFN: “I want my Mmm-mm TV!”

  Many of the TV veterans like Ricki did not like Jonathan. He was fancy. He showed up to work in Brooks Brothers suits and Hermès bow ties. Everyone knew his father was the head of New Line Cinema, and it was widely believed that he’d gotten his job because his father had made a call to Reese.

  Jonathan came up to Ricki.

  “Lose the ‘Bam,’” he said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Lose the ‘Bam.’ Emeril can’t say ‘Bam’ anymore. It’s a rip-off of Larry Sanders.” Jonathan was referring to The Larry Sanders Show on HBO in which one of the characters used the expression, “Hey, now!” Jonathan felt Bam! was part of the whole kit of Emeril’s expressions that were not original. It would reflect badly on TVFN if people noticed.

  “We’re not going to,” Ricki said.

  He walked away. Later, Ricki told Emeril about the request. He said simply, “Nah.” She told him she’d said the same to Jonathan.

  “The ‘bam’ thing was a serious red flag because it wasn’t original. I absolutely acknowledge that I was wrong. I was coming at it from the point of view of someone who was embedded in television. If I saw something I knew could be looked at like a cheap rip-off, I was going to try to get rid of it.”

  —JONATHAN LYNNE

  Whatever success Essence of Emeril was having was only relative. By mid-1994, TVFN was still available in less than ten million homes. In Manhattan it was on only part-time. Although Tribune owned an important channel in New York, WOR, Channel 9, Time Warner was resisting adding TVFN in the city because channel space was at a premium. The cable provider made a retransmission consent deal with Tribune and TVFN, agreeing to swap the one million homes it would have provided in Manhattan for two million homes in other parts of the country. This was a good result for the overall amount of homes TVFN was reaching, but it was awful for advertising sales. If the advertising community centered in Manhattan could not watch the food channel in its offices and its apartments, it was less likely to encourage clients to buy time on it. The problem grated on Reese and his head of advertising, George Babick.

  —

  For those who could see it, the weekday schedule for fall 1994 included the following shows:

  How to Boil Water

  7 Day Workout

  Food News and Views

  Getting Healthy

  Meals without Meat

  Feeding Your Family on $99 a Week

  The Dessert Show

  Café Olé

  Taste

  Essence of Emeril
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  TV Dinners

  Robin Leach Talking Food

  Cooking Classics

  Most were now only repeated three times a day. Critics were savage. In Newsday, Wayne Robins compared watching TVFN to watching laundry, unfavorably. Walter Goodman sat through a six-hour shift of programming, and in The New York Times drolly described Emeril as “a New Orleans chef in a shiny shirt who poppled with enthusiasm.” The critic craved an antacid after the six hours, noting that, “I caught a few commercials, too, but nothing yet for Maalox.” Writing in the New York Observer, in an article headlined “Foodies’ CNN: A Bit Undercooked,” Phoebe Hoban wrote, “One thing that’s missing from this low-tech, hi-cal network is a real sense of the joy of cooking.” She noted that for one thing, “Jane Curtin looks in need of Prozac as she sits in a dreary kitchen and drones the introductions to the Cooking Classics series.” Reese seemed to take it all in stride, embracing the technical problems and uneven programming as endemic to a start-up network. “We’ll gradually get better,” he told Hoban. “We welcome people with food intelligence, who come in with their own ideas.”

  —

  One day in the summer of 1994, an idea came with help from Shep’s assistant at Alive Culinary Resources. Lionel Wigram (who would later produce the Harry Potter films) told his boss that he was concerned that the Television Food Network was not doing well and, more important, that it was not yet using many of Alive’s chefs. Was there anything Shep could come up with to give the network a boost?

  The answer came to Shep immediately. What had made rock stars gigantic was festivals. Woodstock, Monterey Pop, the Isle of Wight had launched careers, led to recording contracts, made it possible for acts to tour solo and rake in big bucks, selling merchandise. Shep added his own twist: if you could get Emeril onstage at a festival cooking with Michael Douglas, people would think the chef the equal of the movie star—not a cook and an artist, but two artists.

  Shep started planning a festival and pitching his celebrity friends. “Hey,” he would tell an actor or a music star, “not that many years ago, none of you got paid. These are great artists, they’re no different than you. You’ve got to help these guys out. What does it mean to you to give up a day?”

  The Big Feast on the Beach in November 1994 was Shep all over. There were the key chefs from Alive—Vergé, Forgione, Fearing, Emeril, Mary Sue, and Susan. Sam Choy and Mark Ellman came from Hawaii and cooked a traditional luau. Sharon Stone was to present a program called “Cook for Peace” during which Tibetan monks would construct a sand mandala, but she did not show. The monks did. Sammy Hagar, Michael Douglas, and Fab Five Freddy came to cook, and Alice Cooper prepared Rattlesnake Chili. The Village People played their hits.

  Like the guitar and the dove in the original logo of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, the festival logo contained a guitar, a fish, a bottle of wine, a wedge of citrus, and a swirly treble clef symbol, representing the melding of worlds that Shep had been working to achieve since the night with Leary and Liddy when he’d only had eyes for Vergé: the means by which a puff of grill smoke and a power chord could transform chefs into pop stars.

  Chefs were flown in first class and given hotel rooms. The whole thing was shown on TVFN as a special, providing the kick Shep thought the network needed. Reese was excited because the cost was covered by sponsors, mostly American Express, sold on the value of being associated with celebrity chefs by a deal-making friend of Shep’s named Herb Karlitz. Plus, broadcasting a big event was something a news channel would do. Inexpensive and newsy: Schonfeld heaven.

  The Feast on the Beach was a rough-and-ready attempt at marrying pop culture with fine food, but even without Shep’s onetime girlfriend Sharon Stone, it certainly had more pizazz than some of the flim-flam food entertainment being shown on TVFN: a rotting veal chop, crazy-long fingernails, and concrete mousse.

  It did not all go smoothly. Pat O’Gorman was dispatched to Miami to be the lead television producer of the festival, which took place just a few weeks before the one-year anniversary of the network. At one point, Shep was watching Michael Douglas onstage with a chef, and he dashed into the production truck to see how they were handling the broadcast. Shep was appalled when he saw that TVFN had sent its cameras to cover the luau. Going out on the television feed was a squat group of Hawaiians digging a steaming pig from a hole in the ground. Shep went nuts and tried to get Pat’s team to run the cameras back to cover the movie star instead of the smoldering swine. “This is my event, I’m producing it!” he cried. “This is what we’re here for! The guy came down on his own dime! He’s doing it for free, it’s Michael Douglas, and you’ve got to show him!” No one in the truck took any action. A television decision had been made for reasons no one knew. When the festival was over, Shep had such bad blisters from running around in the Miami heat that he could barely walk. He canceled his flight to New York and hired a car to pick him up from the curb of his Miami hotel and drive him up to the curb of his New York home.

  While the Big Feast did not propel TVFN into the ratings stratosphere or perfectly please Shep, it did help bind him closer to the network and set the model for the modern food festival. A decade later, a festival in Miami would become a key annual event in the food television universe.

  It also demonstrated what Shep could pull off. At first, sales of Emeril’s spices had been slow. Shep did not understand the grocery store business the way he knew record stores. Then one day he was on a plane sitting next to an executive for a chain of supermarkets. The executive explained that if you want a brand to pop, you have to sponsor special displays at the end of aisles and pay for good shelf space. Shep thought it over. He arranged for supermarkets to put a special display near the chicken. Within a few years, Essence of Emeril, Bayou Blast, and his other spices were selling roughly a million dollars a year nationwide, and Shep, a 50/50 partner, was receiving six-figure checks in his mailbox.

  The network never managed to secure its cut of the profits, despite Emeril’s and Shep’s willingness to keep their end of the bargain. As a TV broadcasting operation, it was improving slowly. But as a business enterprise, something that would make enough money to keep the electric stoves on and the slop buckets rotating, the network was a novice.

  Bobby, Sara, Mario, and the Too Hot Tamales

  Rattlesnake chili on the beach was not the complete solution for what was still wrong with the network. No matter how relentlessly Reese tried to keep costs contained, losses were going beyond projections. According to the original business plan, the network was projected to lose $18 million in its first year, $16 million in its second, and much less in its third. In reality, it lost $6.6 million in its first frantic months in late 1993, $19.2 million in 1994, and was on track to lose more in 1995.

  That year, the five Class A partners received a capital call requiring that each kick in $3.65 million. Those who had been believers were starting to lose faith in the business model, and those who had never liked giving a cable channel away without subscriber fees were even less hopeful.

  Jack Clifford, ProJo’s top liaison to the cable system operators, was hearing complaints about the quality of the network’s programming. It looked awfully cheap—because it was. Some of the providers’ customers were writing letters asking them to dump TVFN. Cable operators who were investors, such as Scripps and Adelphia, were contractually bound to keep it on. Advertising sales, virtually the only revenues, were lagging.

  Reese stayed positive. In mid-1994, he was predicting the network could break even and earn back its start-up costs of roughly $50 million within three years, when it would reach 20 million homes and be able to extract more from advertisers. But by July 1995, he just as confidently told reporters they’d break even in four years, when their $70 million in start-up costs were recouped and 25 million homes were receiving TVFN. The goal line was receding.

  Jack had begun grousing to Tryg Myhren about Reese, saying
he refused to listen to anyone. Jack liked being listened to. But Tryg still believed Reese was the right man for a start-up that was bound to be chaotic and require a strong hand on top. For Tryg, there was no better evidence of the strength of Reese’s guiding hand than the extremely satisfying day, a year and a half into TVFN’s broadcast life, when Charles Dolan of Cablevision called. “It’s time for you guys to sell to me,” Dolan told Tryg. “I didn’t think you guys would get this far, but now that you are this far, you understand how expensive this is. I know you’re losing money. I’m going to be doing some other niche channels. We can spread the costs, sell ads across all the channels. We can do this in a more efficient way and cut the costs dramatically. You know I know how to run channels.”

  Tryg had to smile. If Dolan was calling, something was working. “That’s nice, Chuck,” Tryg replied. “We’re not going to do that. If you want to invest in the channel as a minority investor, you’re welcome.”

  Spurned, Dolan never did invest, but his backhanded faith in the network helped keep Tryg and ProJo behind TVFN and Reese despite the losses.

  At one of Reese’s informal hallway meetings, Joe heard someone mention the idea of TVFN starting a website. ESPN had one, as did other channels. In 1995, however, the cost of launching a website was around $100,000. For that kind of money, TVFN could produce a whole season of a television show, maybe two. The idea was dismissed, but Joe was fascinated. Joe told Reese that he and Don, the IT guy at the network, wanted to look into starting a website because it might help reduce the cost of delivering recipes.