Return of the Slugger

By Richard Zoglin

Don and Ann Ballinger have been married for 50 years. For 46 of them, they haven't said a word to each other. That, at least, is the "true" story being re-enacted for the TV cameras on this particular afternoon in a rented house near Orlando, Florida.

"Louis, will you please tell your father to pass the pastry?" says the actress playing Ann, seated at the dining-room table. Louis, their middle-age son, obliges: "Dad, will you please pass the pastries to Mom?" Dad picks up the pastry dish and, smiling, gently places it next to his wife.

Brandon Tartikoff watches from a cramped seat against the window. Wearing ! Reeboks, an open sport shirt and a Boris-and-Natasha wristwatch, he is an easygoing but focused presence. After a few rehearsals of the scene, he huddles quietly with director Hannah Hempstead. For the next run-through, the husband picks up the pastry tray without a smile and drops it abruptly in front of his wife.

"If he just plops it down," says Tartikoff, "we'll get a laugh."

They'd better. The show, Weekly World News (based on the supermarket tabloid of the same name), teeters precariously between sensationalism and spoof. It is one of those high-concept, high-wire acts that Tartikoff was known for at NBC, like the "MTV Cops" that eventually became Miami Vice (big hit), or the crime fighter who could transform himself into a jungle beast in Manimal (big bomb). Weekly World News, a proposed series for CBS that will air for two episodes this spring, is as good a show as any to serve notice to the TV world that Brandon Tartikoff is back.

Few doubted he would return. As NBC Entertainment president for 11 1/2 years, Tartikoff was probably the most influential and broadly successful TV programmer of the 1980s. He guided NBC from last to first in the ratings, overseeing such hits as The Cosby Show, The A-Team, Cheers and L.A. Law. Later he was named chairman of Paramount Pictures, but he abruptly resigned in October 1992 after just 18 months on the job. The reasons, he insists, were strictly personal: on New Year's Day 1991 he and his daughter had been severely injured in a car accident near Lake Tahoe. Tartikoff, who sustained a broken pelvis, recovered fully, but Calla, then 8, suffered brain damage. Tartikoff and his wife Lilly moved with her to New Orleans for rehabilitative therapy, and Tartikoff said he needed to be with the family full time.

Away from the Hollywood power-breakfast scene, Tartikoff struck out on his own road to recovery. First he produced shows for New Orleans TV, among them a quiz program called N.O. It Alls, which he hopes to adapt for other cities. As his daughter's condition has improved, he has plunged back into his old world, this time as seller rather than buyer. "Anybody who has been in a position of power for 14 years," he observes, "says no far more often than he gets to say yes. And people remember those nos. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be glad to see me under an overpass with a cardboard sign that says, WILL CREATE SHOWS FOR FOOD."

Tartikoff, 45, won't exactly be panhandling next week at the annual * convention of the National Association of Television Program Executives. He will be peddling Last Call, a new late-night talk show featuring a panel of journalists and critics (among them former Esquire editor Terry McDonell, entertainment critic Elvis Mitchell and London Times correspondent Sue Ellicott) discussing the day's news. Designed as a sort of hip McLaughlin Group, the pilot looks more like an MTV remedial class for the news-impaired (after trading quips about Michael Jackson, these hang-loose journalists scoot over to a pool table for a couple of shots before the commercial).

Whatever the fate of Last Call, Tartikoff will be just about everywhere next season. "To use a baseball metaphor ((as he does repeatedly)), I have a slugging percentage of about .600," he says. "For every 10 things I've brought to market, six of them will end up in homes." Some have unusual venues. He is developing two shows for PBS: a 13-week comedy series starring offbeat stage performer Steven Banks, and Under New Management, a Coronation Street-style serial with topical humor, set in a New Orleans restaurant-bar. For CBS he is producing Nashville X's and O's, a nighttime soap about the lives of ex-wives of country singers. ABC has ordered The Gospel According to St. Ann, a four-hour mini-series starring Ann-Margret as a self-made sports mogul. For NBC he is developing a Tom Clancy mini-series and several sitcoms, including a comic version of Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte and a Love, American Style with animals.

This eclectic slate has the Brandon brand: audacious, often innovative, sometimes tacky, always commercial. This was the man who could nurture a "quality" show such as Hill Street Blues while singing the praises of Punky Brewster. "He has an absolute disdain for anything intellectual," says one less-than-admiring colleague. "He'd rather eat hamburger than steak." Yet in a world of slick network suits, Tartikoff has always been one of the most articulate, thoughtful and candid programmers around.

He is also one of the most tenacious. Tartikoff has survived two bouts of Hodgkin's disease; in 1982 he underwent a year of chemotherapy while continuing to run NBC programming. His car accident served merely to emphasize again where his priorities lay. "I don't know how many times a person has to be clobbered over the head to be reminded of what's important in life and what's not important," he says.

At Paramount he had to face another jarring life experience: failure, or something very close to it. Both Tartikoff and his bosses insist his resignation was voluntary, but his record was mixed at best. Though his tenure was too short to judge definitively, many of the movies he was most associated with (Coneheads, Leap of Faith, the low-budget holiday comedy All I Want for Christmas) were box-office disappointments.

Tartikoff admits that he occasionally clashed with his superiors at Paramount, Stanley Jaffe and Martin Davis. "I didn't realize just how spoiled I had been during my last six years at NBC. Nobody contested my decisions, my choices, the schemes that I was up to. It was a little unsettling ((at Paramount)) to have to go up the hall every time I had to spend what some might regard as a considerable amount of money."

Tartikoff's latest career move was actually in the works three years ago. Just before his accident, Tartikoff says, he was making plans to leave NBC and form his own production company. First the accident and then the offer from Paramount delayed the scenario. Now he talks excitedly about creating a broad- based production company. Says he: "I want buyers to look at Brandon Tartikoff not as a producer but as a studio."

"For the first time in his life, he can let his creative instincts lead him and show results," says CBS Entertainment president Jeff Sagansky, who worked under Tartikoff at NBC. "I haven't seen him this comfortable ever before." Another former protege, NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield, says Tartikoff seems "back in touch with the things he likes to do -- roll up his sleeves and really have a voice in the creative process."

He is also back in touch with the Hollywood hurly-burly he abandoned 13 months ago. Tartikoff plans to keep his New Orleans base but expects to spend about 10 days a month in Los Angeles. Except for occasional visits to his old Saturday-morning softball game at a high school field in Brentwood, his L.A. sojourns are practically all work. "I have triple breakfasts and 18-hour days," he says. "What I've learned is that if you're organized enough and you're compulsive enough, you can make your 10 days count for 25 days of a normal person." Tartikoff at double speed: Hollywood may be used to it, but this sounds like a story for Weekly World News.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and William Tynan/Orlando