by Allen Salkin
“Okay,” Eileen said, trying to be a good mentor. “I’m going to help you, but you have to help me pitch this. It’s great, but it’s going to be a hard sell here.”
Before they could sell Iron Chef inside the network, they needed to find out how much it would cost. Bruce Seidel, whom Eileen had hired from Discovery Channel, had been appointed head of acquisitions and she assigned him to negotiate with Fuji. The Japanese company said the least it would take was about $25,000 an episode, a price that would include dubbing and editing to fit the ninety-minute show into an hour of American commercial television. This was far more than Food Network had ever paid for an outside production. Yet Fuji also had conditions. It wanted Iron Chef to be treated with respect, not as some kind of foreign freak show. Japan had long been showing dubbed versions of American imports like Dallas. In Japan, spending money on good dubbing was a show of respect.
As talks continued, Heidi had to make a trip to Japan on other business. She visited the Fuji offices and, following Japanese tradition, she bore gifts, ties and scarves printed with New York icons like the Twin Towers and the Statue of Liberty. Heidi had her own ideas for how to broadcast Iron Chef in the United States. She was a fan of the show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a man and his robot friends were shown in silhouette at the bottom of the screen as if they were sitting in a theater watching old science fiction movies. They would heckle and snicker at the film. Stoners and college students loved the show; she thought the same audience would like Iron Chef. Heidi told the people at Fuji that she wanted to keep the main soundtrack in Japanese and run a humorous voice-over in English. As her words were translated, the executives’ faces dropped. Her suggestion was sacrilegious to them. The show was a celebration of the artistic mind, not something to be ridiculed. The Fuji executives quietly showed Heidi the new Iron Chef cookbook. It was one of the most beautiful books she had ever seen. The photography was of the highest quality. The Japanese words were rendered in precise calligraphy. The layouts were as good as any the finest design firms in New York could produce. It made her understand what Matt had known from the first time he saw the show: Iron Chef was no joking matter to the Japanese. She bowed deeply as she left and dropped the Mystery Science Theater 3000 idea.
Back at the network, Matt, Eileen, and Bruce were trying to keep the project alive internally in the face of skepticism from Ed Spray, the Scripps executive Ken sent to oversee Food Network. At a meeting in the fall of 1998, Ed said he could not believe anyone in their right mind would consider putting a foreign-language show on an American channel in prime time. “What do you mean, Japanese?” he asked her with scorn in his voice.
Eileen chalked his attitude up to the cultural differences between the Midwestern Scripps and the coastal Food Network. But when Ken was shown a tape, he also told Food Network programmers, “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”
But the Scripps people did not kill the show outright. They allowed the Food Network staff to keep tinkering with it, which was a victory of sorts.
“I said, if we do the show, we need to keep the parts that are keeping the sense of this larger arc, the origins of the battle, in place. . . . Here’s how it needs to be subtitled, here’s how we’ll edit it, here’s why cutting is important, here’s how we’ll make a story arc still fit, as opposed to just chopping it up so we can make it a one-hour show. . . . The show was about a particular sect of Japanese food traditionalist—in all seriousness, they would challenge Morimoto and say, ‘We have a serious bone to pick with you, and we’re going to battle you. Your French-Asian cuisine is BS.’ There were real rivalries. That’s what made it compelling. . . .”
—MATT STILLMAN
Had the new president of Food Network known how deeply Matt was tied to Iron Chef, he might have nixed it pronto. Before he was named president, Eric Ober had set up meetings with Eileen to suggest ideas for shows the Knoxville facility might produce. Eileen, the hootenanny at Blackberry Farms still vivid, was wary of Scripps’s influence and told Matt, her assistant, to stall Eric. He was good at it. When Eric called, Matt, speaking with brusque officiousness, explained how busy Eileen was.
When Eric arrived for the meetings, Matt would tell him Eileen was unavailable.
Shortly after Eric knew he was going to replace Erica Gruen, but before anyone at Food had been told, he got off the phone after jousting with Matt, turned to a colleague, and said, “I’m gonna fire Matthew my first day. I’m just going to walk in there, stride over to Matthew, and say, ‘Matthew, I don’t even want to bring you to my office. I’m just firing you right here. Just for being an asshole.’”
But by the time Eric took the job, he had a slight change of heart. He knew Eileen mothered her assistant, and Eric didn’t want to antagonize the head of programming off the bat.
Eric spent most of his first week as president of the network hanging around the studios watching shows being made. After decades in the news business, he believed you could really tell who was competent and who wasn’t by observing the action from the control room and the studio floor.
During that week, Eileen pulled him aside. “We have a show from Fuji that we have to make a decision on by tomorrow because we have an option at a really good price,” she said. She did not describe Iron Chef as Matt’s baby.
Eric watched an episode in her office. It was in Japanese, without subtitles or dubbing. Eric stared at it, taking it in. He thought, This is fucking hysterical. Screaming chefs! The guy with the pepper!
“What is this?” he asked Eileen.
“It’s produced in Japan. It’s very popular there. We suspect that somebody like Discovery will pick it up if we don’t buy it.”
Eric thought the Food Network had plenty of room to experiment and even fail on air. After all, almost no one was watching, so almost no one would notice. The important thing, he thought, was just to make decisions fast and to try new things. It wasn’t like launching a prime-time show on CBS where millions were at stake with every gamble. Iron Chef might cost a lot in Food Network terms, but Scripps had pledged to increase his budget. He had the money and, he thought, the autonomy to green-light it.
“I’m in,” Eric said. “Let’s just buy the show.”
Eileen explained there was still the question of whether it should be subtitled as Matt wanted, and as it had been successful on public access, or dubbed as the Japanese wanted. The Scripps executives had said the only way they’d ever consider it was if it was dubbed. Eileen was not sure what to do.
“I don’t want subtitles,” Eric said. They were difficult to read. In 1998, almost no one had wide-screen TVs; high-definition was a thing of the future. Eric also remembered going to Godzilla movies when he was fourteen. He knew comedy was inherent in the flaws of dubbing, and he saw comedy in Kitchen Stadium. It would work.
“Dub it,” he said. “I don’t give a shit whether it’s good dubbing or bad dubbing. Even if it ends up with a lot of lip-flap while the judge says in Japanese, ‘This tastes most delicious, very piquant,’ and the dubbing says just ‘I like this,’ I don’t give a shit. It will be funny, like Godzilla movies.”
The decision to dub Iron Chef pleased the Fuji executives, but they did not trust the Americans to do it: they might do something disrespectful. Fuji insisted on doing the dubbing themselves.
Bruce worked out the final price—around $10,000 an episode with an option to buy more at a higher price later, and the papers were signed. Eileen approached Matt with a little smile on her face. “We did it,” she said. “You did it, we did it.”
Matt resisted the urge to cry or jump up and down. “Yes,” he said quietly.
“It was not by focus group. When Eric came on, I loved his style. He said, ‘Hey, there are only twenty thousand viewers watching us on any night. It’s not going to be big news if we pull a show.’ He said, ‘Let’s try it and if it doesn’t work, we’ll pull it.’”
/> —JOE ALLEGRO
Around the time of the Iron Chef purchase, network executives thought they had identified a chef who could capture the same crossover audience as Emeril and create a solid evening programming block. Chef David Ruggerio, a Brooklyn native and former boxer who’d started his food career cleaning sidewalks outside a fish restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, had blue-collar charm and a serious cooking pedigree. He was running Le Chantilly, a high-end French restaurant in Manhattan, but could also sling entertaining stories about his outrageous family, such as yarns about his grandma’s gambling junkets.
The network had developed Ruggerio to Go, intending it to appeal to the same Giants-jacket guys, grandmothers, and children as Emeril did. The show was shot in the same studio as Emeril Live, with most of the same crew, and by the time it debuted in October 1998, the network had produced dozens of episodes and spent a fortune marketing Ruggerio. But just a few weeks after the first episode ran, Ruggerio was arrested and charged with $221,000 in fraud. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s indictment, Ruggerio had been submitting charges to credit card companies far in excess of what the restaurant’s customers had signed for. In one case, he added a $30,000 tip to a $1,000 dinner tab. Facing up to fifteen years in prison, Ruggerio eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay over $100,000 in restitution, spend five years on probation, and do 500 hours of community service.
The morning after Ruggerio’s arrest, Eric met with Eileen, Heidi, a Scripps programming consultant named Judy Girard, and an in-house lawyer. Ken Lowe attended by conference call. Eileen and Judy argued to keep the show on the air, contending that they had spent heavily on it, only a few episodes had aired, the network was badly in need of new content, and the charges did not impugn the chef’s cooking credibility. Heidi was vehemently opposed to keeping the show. No matter how famously thick the foie gras at Le Chantilly, no matter how charming his patter, Ruggerio’s arrest would be awful for public relations. “He has stolen from our viewers,” she argued. “Whether or not they were there. He has broken the law.” Eric and Ken agreed with her, and Heidi’s argument won the day. Ruggerio was out—and, with a hole in the schedule, the idea of airing a wacky show from Japan suddenly seemed less wacky.
“I am absolutely petrified by people in white coats. I don’t care if it’s a dentist, a doctor, or a chef. They all scare the hell out of me. I don’t hang out with chefs. They frighten me.”
—ALTON BROWN
Hit-making is not a repeatable formula. It can’t be bottled; a set of people at a certain point in their lives meet in a certain place under certain circumstances. They will never meet again in this way with exactly the same powers, nor will the world again be in just the same state of receptivity. Crucially, the show, the song, the sculpture must find a way to be seen, heard, or experienced by others in its moment. As Linda McCartney once said, “You can’t reheat a soufflé.”
Matt was regularly on the phone to the American office of Fuji TV, discussing Iron Chef edits, and choosing which actors would dub which characters. David Rosengarten adopted him. He took Matt to Kurumazushi, where they ate hundreds of dollars of raw fish and quaffed sake, all paid for by the critic’s expense account from Gourmet magazine. Macallan sent David a 140-year-old bottle of Scotch to taste on In Food Today. After the show, he walked a glass over to Matt. “You have to try this!”
Fuji, eighty-dollar toro, and antique Scotch—Matt had made it. He just knew that he was a genius, that rare person who was ahead of the curve—even though, truthfully, he had not invented anything. He had just recognized something good, understood what was magical about it, and advocated for it with all his might. This was a talent, unquestionably, but it was not the same as the talent of actually giving birth to an idea whole as Osamu Kanemitsu had. Likewise, Matt took pride in having been a part of Upright Citizens Brigade from its early days. Some of those from his era had gone on to perform on Saturday Night Live. But he hadn’t.
It didn’t stop his ego from growing due to the feeling that he was on a winning streak—because in a way he was. His particular talent for recognizing and associating himself with brilliance came in to play again when he was sitting at his desk outside Eileen’s office one day paging through a film trade magazine and saw a small mention of a pilot food television show shot on a new type of Kodak film. Matt went to the Kodak website and read a little bit more about the pilot’s star, a former cinematographer named Alton Brown.
Alton’s father had worked in radio in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. At one of his parents’ cocktail parties, he’d met the producer Gene Roddenberry, spurring his interest in science and television. Gene was working on a new show called Star Trek. On a napkin, he drew for Alton, wide-eyed, a picture of the starship called Enterprise.
His parents moved the family back to their native Georgia when Alton was seven. Alton Brown Sr., a workaholic, became a local media mogul, buying a radio station, a newspaper, and three printing shops. His death at home at thirty-eight, when Alton was eleven, was ruled a suicide. The son retreated into science fiction television and movies. He hated high school. He viewed the teachers as regurgitation machines uninterested in inspiring students. It took him seven years to finish college, flunking science and math and changing schools twice before graduating from the University of Georgia with a degree in drama. Along the way, he spent a summer in Italy studying bilingual drama, learning how to communicate with an audience by performing in Italian even though he didn’t actually speak the language. His interests had expanded to include cooking. For dates, the awkward young man taught himself to make a meal he called “The Closer,” sole au gratin Florentine, which was designed to be impressive, inexpensive, and suitable for serving as leftovers for breakfast. He found work as a cameraman. In 1987, he landed a gig as the director of photography on the video for R.E.M.’s song “The One I Love,” became a cinematographer and then a director. He worked on small television commercials until he burned out, telling himself the world had enough radial tires and diapers.
At the age of thirty, he was dreaming of what he might do next. What didn’t the world have enough of? Alton’s mind brought together the things he loved: cooking, science fiction, and theater. He wrote on a piece of paper a rough idea for a television cooking show he’d like to star in: “Julia Child, Mr. Wizard, Monty Python.”
Man, he thought, I could really make something out of that.
This is part of what makes the alchemy of a hit unrepeatable. It’s easy to say, “We need more groundbreaking shows!” But go find yourself another director of an R.E.M. video who met Gene Roddenberry as a boy, studied bilingual drama, and was so lame with the ladies that he learned to cook out of desperation but ultimately found a wife who would support him.
His wife, DeAnna, was skeptical, pointing out that watching a lot of cooking shows wasn’t much of a credential for being the host of one. They made a deal. Alton could apply to three culinary schools. If he got into one, they would sell their Atlanta home, and she would support him. He got into the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vermont, and attended in 1995. After graduation, he worked as a grill man at a North Carolina restaurant and wrote scripts for the show he imagined. DeAnna came up with the name Good Eats.
Alton had been befriended by Chris Gyoury and Sarah Burmeister, a team of television commercial producers in Georgia. Also bored of the work, they wanted to expand into something more creative and took to Alton’s idea, a sort of comedy focused on the science of cooking. Not only did they finance two pilots, which together cost around $150,000, but Sarah invited Alton and DeAnna to live at her house in Roswell, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. The pilot shows were shot on film, not video, in Burmeister’s home kitchen, which had a picture window overlooking a garden. Chris removed the backs of ovens and refrigerators, allowing Alton to open a fridge door, poke his face in, and speak directly to the camera. The effect lent the show one of its distinctive loo
ks. They completed two pilots for Good Eats in 1997, “This Spud’s for You” and “Steak Your Claim.” In the latter, Alton showed viewers, via chalk marks on a live cow, where steaks came from, instructed how to shop for them, and finally, how to best cook one (sear in cast iron, then bake).
More alchemy: have producers bored with their day jobs hire a fiendishly smart salesperson, Tara Burtchaell. A New York University graduate who worked for advertising producers in Manhattan, Tara brought the city hustle with her when she moved back to her native South. Tara was baffled by Alton and his show, but put everything she had into selling it. She created a “bible,” basically a pitch book, for it, putting Oh, No! Not Another Cooking Show! on the cover, and a list of potential future episodes inside. She brought it to the cable TV convention in New Orleans and stopped at the Food Network booth. She was told she ought to contact Eileen Opatut and that it would help if she could add information about audience response to the pilot episodes. Tara had heard that a PBS station in Chicago was looking for new programming, and they agreed to run the Good Eats pilots a few times to gauge if ratings were going up or down. Meanwhile, she contacted Kodak and pitched the idea that there might be an interesting story in the fact that the producers had shot the episode with the company’s film instead of videotape. The strategy came together when WTTW aired it, good ratings resulted, and the Tribune ran a review praising Alton and “the spiky, energetic camera work.” The review by Steve Johnson concluded, “This lively, well-made and refreshingly different show deserves a place at a television table overcrowded with cookie-cutter cooking programs.”
All good news, and yet when Tara prepared to reach out to Food Network, she admitted to Chris and Sarah, “I don’t know if we’re going to get our money out of this one.” Tara knew that programming chiefs are always overwhelmed with unsolicited pitches, so she found out who Eileen’s gatekeeper was and targeted him.