by Allen Salkin
“Yes! We’d like to schedule an audition.”
“Amy, um, I’m not sure you’re aware of this, but I have some history being on the Food Network, and you might want to just look into this before we go ahead and schedule an audition.”
“Emeril was one of the first people I met on my first day of work. He handed me a pumpkin filled with pumpkin-and-foie-gras soup. It was delicious.”
—BROOKE JOHNSON
Two hours later Amy called back to apologize.
The fact that Emeril had retained most of the rights to his shows through every contract negotiation over the years allowed him to have a last laugh of the multimillion-dollar sort when he sold his library of shows and the rights to all of his products, basically his entire brand with the exception of his restaurants, to Martha Stewart Omnimedia for $50 million. (Yes, Shep kept his 50 percent of the spice profits.)
“As soon as the deal closes, we will add EBITA to Martha’s company,” Emeril told a reporter soon after the cancellation in a 2008 interview outside his Miami restaurant, using a corporate term for earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization with a deftness he’d once saved for filleting haddock.
He tried to present himself as all business, but he was hurting and stayed that way for a very long time. Asked four years later why he thought the show had been canceled, he said, “I still don’t know why.” He still believed the network had gone nuts at some point, that when Judy Girard, Eric Ober, and Erica Gruen were presidents, the place made sense, and it no longer did. He would publicly praise Brooke, but to old colleagues like Marc Summers, he confided, “You’re one of the only sane people still there.”
And despite all the audience research studies and budget reasons and changing demographics, who is to say that maybe he was not right? Why couldn’t the network have tweaked the show a bit, streamlined it, moved it to 11 p.m. every night, and put him up against Jon Stewart and Chelsea Handler, whose unlikely cable show debuted the same year Emeril’s bowed out? The Food Network has certainly not been right about everything it’s done. By 2007, they were well profitable. Why not risk a little house money in a food-mad world and try Emeril at Eleven?
But by the end, nobody made a strong case for keeping it, damn the cost and the risk. The network had been inexorably moving toward the decision for so long that it only heard an echo chamber of consensus inside Chelsea Market and in Knoxville that it was time for the show to go.
Not long after Emeril Live was canceled, William Morris merged with the Endeavor Talent Agency and Jim Griffin was let go. He went to work for a smaller agency, where he hung a photo of Joe Namath on the wall of his new office. Emeril stayed with him for a few years, but eventually returned to William Morris Endeavor.
Jon Rosen would often tell the story of how Jim used to brag that he had Emeril, the biggest food star, and he didn’t care how many of the lesser lights the other agents signed. Since then, Jon had been made a member of the ruling board of the agency and represented some of the biggest earners at the New York branch of WME—Giada, Bobby, and Rachael. Agents in the Branded Lifestyle Group he oversaw had Guy, Alton, and many more.
Emeril was crushed, but for better or worse, the network was freed, lightened. With the show that had taken up an hour of prime time every night now gone, Brooke’s team had a lot of work ahead of it to find something that could propel Food, and those others like Jon whose careers were aligned with the network’s fate, to the new heights they dreamed of.
Channeling the Soul of a Chef
As much as Emeril Live and Iron Chef had drawn viewers and given the channel a pop-culture identity, the research showed that Food was still saddled with the original problem of food TV—a hell of a lot of people still thought food shows were for lazy weekend mornings and housewives in the afternoons. Brooke was hell-bent to change that. By canceling Emeril, she had done for prime-time programming what Judy had done for daytime when she axed nearly the entire fleet of original network talent, from Curtis Aikens to David Rosengarten. Judy’s deck-clearing had created the space for a transformative wave of In the Kitchen talent like Ina, Giada, Paula, and Rachael.
Brooke had already made major progress with Iron Chef America, The Next Food Network Star, and Throwdown, all of which were bringing in good ratings, especially on Sunday nights. But with the every-weeknight warhorse gone, she needed more category-killing content on the air as quickly as possible, especially with Bravo brewing Top Chef spin-offs.
Additional pressure on the network to improve upon its success came from Scripps, which was preparing to spin off its cable and interactive media holdings into a separate company, Scripps Networks Interactive. When the separation was finalized in July 2008, SNI’s two most valuable assets were HGTV, with $550 million in revenue in 2007, and Food Network with $436 million. Ken Lowe was made chief executive of SNI, and to continue his winning record, he would need those numbers to keep improving.
And yet as dizzying as Food’s profits were becoming, the business of television was always unpredictable, uncomfortably reliant on the miracles of creativity and chance, and on the egos of those who traffic in them.
—
The good news for Brooke was that she had tools at her disposal that no other president had enjoyed: increased budgets, nearly universal cable and satellite carriage, and an important new arena for marketing talent, thanks to an extremely ambitious Floridian named Lee Schrager.
One of Lee’s first jobs after he graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in the late 1970s had been in the coat-check room at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. One night, Diana Ross came in wearing a floor-length fur coat. After she went up to the dining room, Lee donned the diva’s fur and began vamping around the white marble entrance area.
Diana had forgotten something. When she went down to retrieve it and saw the young man prancing in the fur, she said, “That better not be my coat.”
Lee was fired that night, but he recovered. In the ’80s, Lee, a squat, barrel-chested man who favored open-collar dress shirts and resembled the actor Paul Sorvino, opened a gay bar called Torpedo in the South Beach section of Miami. Among the performers he brought in was Little Edie Beale, the eccentric star of the cult classic documentary Grey Gardens. At Torpedo, she played the piano and sang “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Torpedo also featured the Del Rubio Triplets, who billed themselves as “three girls, three guitars, one tube of lipstick.”
After the city razed the building for a parking lot, Lee spent years as director of catering services at InterContinental Hotels, building relationships with top chefs around the world. In 2000, the Miami-based liquor distributor Southern Wine & Spirits hired him as director of special events. He was assigned the task of improving the company’s annual wine tasting, the Florida Extravaganza, which benefited Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management in Miami. In 1999, the extravaganza’s first year, it had attracted six hundred people and raised about $30,000.
As a birthday gift in 2000, a friend took him to the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. Held every June since 1982 and sponsored by Food & Wine magazine, it presents rarefied wine tastings and cooking demonstrations by the world’s great chefs—Julia Child had been a regular, as were Jacques Pépin and San Francisco restaurateur Jeremiah Tower. In the high-altitude meadows was a privileged world of cuisine, restaurant industry gossip, and talk of terroir.
On the plane ride home, Lee thought, I could do that better. It was inconvenient and expensive for most people to travel to Aspen. A pass to “the Classic” cost over $1,000. He started imagining a high-season festival on the sands of South Beach where everybody could come, people who cared as much about having fun as about food education. He moved the Florida Extravaganza to South Beach and convinced his friend Jeffrey Chodorow to cajole the decorated French chef Alain Ducasse to appear. Lee was then able to leverage Alain’s commitment to lure
two hot Bay Area chefs, Gary Danko and Cindy Pawlcyn. His timing coincided perfectly with the rising popularity of Food Network. In the following years, Lee attracted the network’s stars, seducing them with flights to sunny Miami in February, hotel rooms with fresh flowers, and promises to promote whatever book or charity project they wanted. Chefs were not paid to appear, because all the profit went to charity.
Bobby began hosting an invite-only private lunch every year at Joe’s Stone Crab during the festival. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Food Network fans were buying $100-plus tickets to the raucous events Lee created—the Bubble Q, where celebrity chefs doled out heaping plates of barbecue and cocktail waitresses poured champagne; and the Burger Bash, a beer-boosted competition presided over by Rachael Ray, where dozens of chefs competed for the honor of having their hamburger judged the best in the country. Bobby would hand out his burgers at one end of the tent, Michael Symon at another, and some guys from a joint up in Boston in the middle, with the food media blogging the results of the competition. It was not Aspen, where corporate sponsors and VIPS were invited up the mountain by gondola for the annual Publishers’ Party. Lee’s festival was a populist good time, and offered fans of the Food Network a chance to meet the stars they had come to feel were members of their own families. There was loud live music, the bikinis of South Beach, and dozens of cooking demonstrations under vast tents on the beach all day long—along with arrests for public intoxication. By 2004, the festival was raising $600,000 annually. Giant pennants bearing the faces of TV chefs flapped from stanchions throughout South Beach. That year, a local columnist gushed, “Having the opportunity to watch my television idols perform live is the equivalent of MIT students seeing Albert Einstein solve a math problem.”
It was the culmination of what Shep had started with his Miami fest in 1994 and what the Food Network Live events under Allegro and Gore had been moving toward.
Food & Wine magazine recognized that the South Beach festival could be a nice adjunct to Aspen on the annual calendar and came in as a sponsor in 2002. But Lee wanted direct access to the marketing might of Food Network. When Brooke took the helm, Lee struck, just as Shep had lassoed Reese as a sponsor for The Big Feast on the Beach a decade earlier.
“Why should I sponsor the festival?” Brooke protested when Lee called her in 2004. “All my people are there. It looks like the Food Network festival already, and I’m getting it for free.”
Lee explained that the network could use the event to entertain potential advertisers and clients. “We will give you receptions. You can introduce new talent. We’ll take them even though they’re not well known enough,” he said.
She caved in time for the 2007 festival, and Lee delivered the Food Network to its fans with even more force. He bestowed naming rights to four sponsors, and renamed the four days in February “The Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival presented by Food & Wine magazine and hosted by Southern Wine & Spirits and Florida International University.” The event—referred to simply as SOBE—became the food world equivalent to the Sundance Film Festival, attracting more than 50,000 free-spending foodies annually, motivating the Today Show to broadcast live from the beach with a flurry of chef segments, and becoming a place for new talent to be showcased and numerous deals sealed between producers, agents, stars, and the network.
—
So, with the decks cleared and the launching pad set, who would be wheeled in for liftoff? A number of projects had been in development and were ready to be tried in prime time just as Emeril Live bowed out.
One had come from David Page, a former investigative news producer for ABC and NBC, who had moved into producing food programming in 2003, when he worked with Al Roker on Food Network specials such as “Diner Destinations.” Based in Minnesota, Page had been on the phone pitching show ideas to a Food Network programming executive named Christianna Reinhardt for months. Finally, in mid-2006, she asked, “Don’t you have anything on diners?”
David did not have any show ideas about diners, but he knew never to say no while pitching a television executive. “Sure,” he extemporized, dreaming up a name on the spot. “I have Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.”
Christianna liked the sound of that. It was a Thursday afternoon. She asked if David could send over a one-page explanation of the show by Monday.
David called Richard J. S. Gutman, the author of American Diner Then & Now, a landmark history of the species. Richard gave David the names of a half dozen colorful diners with notable dishes that might make good profiles for television. In David’s one-page summary, he suggested that they visit one each week.
Food Network agreed to finance a pilot and told David that the star would be the winner of the second season of The Next Food Network Star—Guy Fieri. As his prize he had won the right to star in a six-episode season of Guy’s Big Bite, set in what looked like a bachelor pad with a big TV and car memorabilia. Network executives loved him in it, and had concluded, like many others who saw him, that Guy had a magnetic personality. Now Bob Tuschman and Alison Page wanted to find a prime-time vehicle for him. Christianna had overseen the Al Roker show and was working on Unwrapped. She believed in the audience appeal of the soft road-trip format—“what’s happening in your neck of the woods kind of stuff,” she recalled. Out of discussions between the three programmers came the idea to try Guy in something like that.
David had not watched Big Bite, so he pulled up a photo of Guy on the Web and was surprised to see the spiky peroxide blond hair and multihued goatee. Guy didn’t look like any creature the producer had seen on TV before. This show is doomed, David thought. But he needed the work. At the least, he’d collect some paychecks for a few weeks while they made the pilot.
When David finally met his star on the first day of production at a New Jersey diner near an oil refinery, he was impressed by Guy’s energy. But it was quickly apparent that Guy knew little about the history of diners, which had a longer tradition on the East Coast than the West. Guy kept referring to diners as restaurants that specialize in hamburgers and criticized those that had very long menus, saying they couldn’t be good at any one thing if the menu was so big.
In fact, many old diners have long menus because, like Alice’s Restaurant in the famous song, that was their main selling point: you can get anything you want.
Green though Guy was, he was a fast learner. The pilot, which took twenty-one days to film, aired in November 2006 and was popular enough that the network agreed to finance a ten-episode season. Guy’s education continued. When a chef at a deli repeated the old line that chicken soup was “Jewish penicillin,” Guy mistakenly thought the chef had invented the joke. Nevertheless, zooming up to uncelebrated blue-collar eateries in a 1967 Camaro convertible, Guy seemed to bring a party with him, just as he had on those nights in Big Bear with the crew from Louise’s Trattoria. As Diners, Drive-ins and Dives went into weekly rotation on Monday nights in April 2007, it did for Guy what Throwdown had done for Bobby. Guy shone a flattering light on the hard work of low-paid cooks. The people he visited were presented as artists who managed to bring passion into their special cheese steaks, seafood chowders, and meatball parms. Guy would bite into the delicacy in question and, generous with his praise, developed a lexicon of Guyspeak to bring the good times home: “That’s the corner of delicious and juicy right in the middle of flavortown!” “It’s not a party without Havarti!” “Pork-tastic!” “Holy crustification!”
In 2008, Lee, fulfilling his promise to the network to elevate its new stars at the festival along with the established ones, gave Guy a two-hour slot cooking for children and their parents at Kellogg’s Kidz Kitchen, a $35 event at a park on Ocean Drive. Thestreet.com published an interview with the new star in which Guy, now apparently an expert, named some of his favorite dives and instructed that such places were about “a love affair with food.”
Everything was so in-synch, it was easy to think a food-st
ar-minting machine might keep rolling forever if you just added the right amounts of breadcrumbs, bacon grease, and sunshine.
—
Another prospect had ambushed Marc Summers one day in 2005 in his accountant’s office. When Marc walked in, a hulking figure said, “Hi.”
“Who are you?”
“Robert Irvine. I’ve been trying to attack you from three different angles.” He spoke with intensity, emphasizing every word in a rounded accent particular to Southwest England. Robert, forty, had tried to reach Marc, then the host of The Next Food Network Star, through a mutual business associate in Philadelphia, through calls to Marc’s office, and now through his accountant. The accountant had buckled under the force of Robert’s personality and agreed to arrange the meeting.
Marc, fifty-four, had been in the TV business for three decades, and was so often pitched ideas for new series that he had formed his own small production company in Philadelphia. “What do you want?” he asked Robert.
“I want to be on Food Network.”
“You and a million other people. What do you do?”
Robert said he’d cooked for British royalty and dignitaries in the military and elsewhere, and had an idea for a show in which he would cook the dishes he made for them.
He was freakishly fit, with the triangular frame of a bodybuilder and a crew cut. Marc decided that he appreciated Robert’s persistence. It was kind of how Marc himself operated, sometimes phoning casting directors so often they would give him work just to stop the calls.
Marc went to see Robert do a cooking demonstration at a food show in New Jersey that weekend. With his muscle-head short hair, big ears, and overbite, he looked like Popeye’s foil, Bluto, but he told story after story about the fabulous things he’d done. The audience was rapt.
This doesn’t make sense, Marc thought. He had been at other demos where chefs offered careful technical instruction and the crowd shifted in their seats and some left. During Robert’s demo, the cooking tips were squeezed in between mentions of the royal yacht. No one stirred. “What the hell do you want to do?” Marc asked again after the demo.