Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers

By James Andrew Miller

Tinderbox tells the exclusive, explosive, uninhibited true story of HBO and how it burst onto the American scene and screen to detonate a revolution and transform our relationship with television forever.

The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, The Wire, Succession…HBO has long been the home of epic shows, as well as the source for brilliant new movies, news-making documentaries, and controversial sports journalism. By thinking big, trashing tired formulas, and killing off cliches long past their primes, HBO shook off the shackles of convention and led the way to a bolder world of content, opening the door to all that was new, original, and worthy of our attention.

In Tinderbox, award-winning journalist James Andrew Miller uncovers a bottomless trove of secrets and surprises, revealing new conflicts, insights, and analysis. As he did to great acclaim with SNL in Live from New York; with ESPN in Those Guys Have All the Fun; and with talent agency CAA in Powerhouse, Miller continues his record of extraordinary access to the most important voices, this time speaking with talents ranging from Abrams (J. J.) to Zendaya, as well as every single living president of HBO—and hundreds of other major players.

Over the course of more than 750 interviews with key sources, Miller reveals how fraught HBO’s journey has been, capturing the drama and the comedy off-camera and inside boardrooms as HBO created and mobilized a daring new content universe, and, in doing so, reshaped storytelling and upended our entertainment lives forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250623997

James Andrew Miller

JAMES ANDREW MILLER is an award-winning journalist and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN; Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, which spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list; and Running in Place: Inside the Senate, also a bestseller. He has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications. He is a graduate of Occidental College, Oxford University, and Harvard Business School, all with honors.

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Prologue

Although Chris Albrecht owned a beautiful Mediterranean-style house in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, for his East Coast sojourns HBO rented its CEO a showpiece apartment in Midtown Manhattan’s Museum Towers, not far from Radio City Music Hall. In the late spring of 2003, Albrecht played host there to more than a dozen invited friends and associates for an urgent meeting, one that concerned the pay network’s most important show, and one of the most celebrated dramas ever—The Sopranos. Then in its fourth season, The Sopranos was proving immensely popular with audiences and was in the process of becoming as much a watershed for television as Citizen Kane had been for motion pictures.

And yet the show that had come shockingly close to never existing in the first place was, at that moment, on the cusp of collapse.

David Chase, auteur of the series, had originally written the pilot script for the Fox television network, but after a short flirtation Fox executives passed on the project, condemning it to turnaround, that limbo from which many a series or film has failed to return. HBO came on board shortly thereafter, however, and produced a pilot. After it was shot and edited, the pilot was test-marketed in several cities, to a tepid response. Most broadcast networks confronting such a meager reaction would likely have passed on the pilot then and there. At HBO, where things were done differently, Albrecht and colleague Carolyn Strauss—fully supported by HBO CEO Jeff Bewkes—decided to go with their guts rather than succumb to the research. The Sopranos was ordered to series.

At this point, the show’s leading man, James Gandolfini, was a little-known character actor who tended to disappear artfully into his roles—some of them, appropriate to his size, heavies. Whether he was playing a ruthless mob henchman in True Romance or a bearded Southern stuntman in Get Shorty, his work had not been wildly auspicious or lavishly praised by critics. Nevertheless, Chase—who had earlier considered actor Michael Rispoli and musician Steven Van Zandt for the lead role (both men would end up in the series—as Jackie Aprile and Silvio Dante, respectively)—personally picked Gandolfini as his guy because he passed the real world test. Simply put, he looked the part. Casting Gandolfini turned out to be a stroke of brilliance. When, on January 10, 1999, The Sopranos premiered with Gandolfini, then thirty-eight, in the plum role of Tony, the Soprano paterfamilias, the actor would soon find himself aglow in the brightest spotlight of his career. The series didn’t start with that big a bang commercially, but then, in episode five of that first season—when Tony strangled and sent an old nemesis to hell while touring potential colleges with his teenage daughter, Meadow—something on the show clicked confidently into place. Gandolfini’s life would never be the same and, arguably, neither would television.

The Sopranos—for anyone who was in a coma or visiting other planets at the time—is a drama about the double life of Anthony Tony Soprano, husband and father to an upper-middle-class family in suburban New Jersey and, simultaneously, capo di tutti i capi to another sort of family, organized-crime division. For both Tonys, the times they were a-changin’; a series of panic attacks rattles his world, compelling him to secretly consult a psychiatrist, brilliantly played by Lorraine Bracco. They have lots to talk about, including the fact that Tony’s Machiavellian mother and his sinister uncle Junior figure prominently in the crime family’s operations. Real-life realities would impose themselves on the narrative; Nancy Marchand, the veteran character actress cast as Tony’s mother, who served as one of the show’s most essential arteries, became very, very sick, and ultimately died, at the end of season two. But by that time Chase, who ran the show tirelessly, had been hard at work creating countless new dimensions to his magnum opus, expanding it to a much larger scale than previously envisioned. The New York Times would call The Sopranos the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century. As a result, even more weight was placed on Tony’s, and Gandolfini’s, shoulders.

To say that Gandolfini rose to the occasion would be putting it mildly. His complex, nuanced, and inspired performance demonstrated remarkable range, not just over the course of the series, or any one episode, but often within a scene, a confrontation, even a single moment, that seemed to transcend mere acting. No matter how despicable Tony’s behavior appeared on the surface, Gandolfini was so persuasive and affecting—whether conveying Tony’s rage, passion, or some fleeting flash of guilt—that the audience never turned its back on him. In a troubling age of antiheroes, Tony Soprano was royalty. His eyes told a million tales, and his performance elevated him to the upper echelon of American actors. He adapted handily to the series’ widened scope, its growth from intimate portrait to rich, blood-splattered tapestry, and he was enormously instrumental in making The Sopranos an epochal cultural event—unofficially the start of what some would call television’s second golden age. Whether that’s true or not, it was a golden age of Gandolfini.

Jimmy, to his friends, wasn’t just the lead actor in a cast of character actors—adroit professionals all—but was also the leader of the surrogate family that evolved off-screen. Gandolfini set the tone, not by asserting star clout on the set, but because his fellow actors shared great respect and admiration for him as both artist and friend. He returned their affection with a sincerity that embraced deeds as well as words, typically declining interview requests from the press until reassured that another cast member would be included to share the limelight. Gandolfini was so patient with clamoring fans that he didn’t even balk when one of them asked to shake his hand as he stood at a men’s room urinal.

Gandolfini’s worldview soon exceeded the boundaries of show business. He became, for instance, deeply involved in the plight of battle-scarred veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, even to the point of later producing a documentary about their struggles, conducting many of the interviews himself. When playing Tony, though, Gandolfini underwent an awe-inspiring facial and bodily transformation; the lovable pussycat turned into a ruthless and philandering gangster. Somehow it seemed beyond acting, beyond even intuitive skills; Jimmy became Tony, an actor of unimpeachable credibility.

There’s no way of knowing if The Sopranos would have been the sensation it became if some other actor had been cast in the role that Gandolfini made so irrevocably his, but chances are that magical alchemy would not have happened. He elevated his fellow actors, as well as every script, and was incalculably instrumental in making The Sopranos an international phenomenon. People didn’t just admire Gandolfini; they were drawn to him, and the character he played, passionately.

For all his brilliance in the central role, however, the road to glory for Gandolfini and The Sopranos would be cratered with potholes. There were, for instance, fitful bouts of disruptive incredulousness as he reacted to certain scripts he was handed. Gandolfini, who once remarked that after a day of shooting, he often had to take a shower because he felt dirty playing the role, would sometimes balk at a particular scene and instead of asking Chase, Do I have to do this? he would wonder out loud, "What the fuck is this? and then declare flatly, I’m not doing it."

Gandolfini’s longest and strongest tantrum erupted over a script that called for Tony to dash into a gas-station bathroom and masturbate during a period when Tony was having an affair with feisty realtor Julianna Skiff, played forcefully by Julianna Margulies. But even that time, despite his earlier protests, Gandolfini relented and played the scene as written. As it turned out, the gas-station sequence was shot but then edited out of the finished episode. To his credit, Gandolfini never complained to Chase that the difficult scene ended up on the cutting room floor.

Gandolfini and his team would prove much more formidable when it came to business. They understood how indispensable he was to the series. They knew no one could replace him. So Gandolfini, at the urging of his representatives, staged a notorious holdout during particularly prickly contract negotiations. Gandolfini’s contract wasn’t even up, but HBO had agreed to open up discussions in 2003 to give him a new deal, a concession it didn’t legally have to make. What began as a stubborn standoff between star and network grew increasingly nasty, so much so that at one point during negotiations, an angered Albrecht called Gandolfini a fat slob, an outburst that he later regretted, especially since he’d been one of Gandolfini’s most devout champions from the beginning. Indeed, the show and its star would never have made it through the HBO chain of command if not for Albrecht’s essential and passionate advocacy. As for the big blowup over contract terms, the two sides found a way through the impasse after three months, and Gandolfini was back in action.

A long-running television series can be hard on everybody involved. Cast, crew, and network executives get tossed together in a pressure cooker for years on end, and it’s rare that some don’t suffer accordingly. The very success that many dream about can become a gilded cage; confinement on a show—even one like The Sopranos, with its long, built-in hiatuses between seasons—can’t necessarily exorcise agitated personal demons.

It wasn’t just a matter of coming up with quality scripts and continuing to make talked-about episodes, although that’s hardly child’s play, by any means. Even with new contract terms in place, Gandolfini and the show weren’t out of the woods. One of the reasons Gandolfini had been able to hold such a tough line during contract negotiations is that a part of him had realized a horrible secret: Tony Soprano’s struggles on-screen not only often mirrored his own but at times amplified them. So there was a part of Gandolfini that wanted to leave the show because he understood, as he told a friend, that in order to become Tony, he had to connect with his darkest side. In essence, the cost of him playing Tony went beyond just being an actor. He lamented several times, You don’t understand what this is doing to me.

The more audiences watched and praised Gandolfini as Tony, the more his personal journey became problematic. Jimmy had suffered from alcohol and drug abuse—those twin consoling companions of both success and failure—for years, and the stress of occupying the lead role in a smash hit was formidable. Of his substance abuse, Gandolfini said: When I was twenty or eighteen, it started … and it progressed through the years. In 1997, he was arrested for DUI and adopted antics befitting a living legend, which at the time he had yet to become.

Fame rarely, if ever, makes past struggles disappear. Since The Sopranos’ premiere, dark murmurs had circulated regarding Gandolfini’s behavior, tales that admittedly started out more amusing than alarming—such as when, at a glittery Golden Globes affair, upon hearing Time Warner chairman Jeff Bewkes griping that this wine is shitty, Gandolfini grandly reached under HBO’s table and produced three bottles of Brunello that he’d just happened to bring along. It was hardly scandalous comportment, but it did qualify as quixotic and thus in character—not Jimmy being Tony but just Jimmy being Jimmy.

Many more, and considerably worse, stories were to come.

There followed a spate of awkward MIA situations—Gandolfini arriving late for a shoot or failing to show up altogether. One day filming was halted while a search party looked high and low for their star, eventually locating him in a Brooklyn nail salon. In the wake of such episodes, Gandolfini appeared at times embarrassed to be around those who knew of his issues, and, ever the good soul, would express his contrition by spreading gifts among all those affected.

Nevertheless, Gandolfini misdemeanors mounted. There were several more disruptive disappearances that resulted in halted production, costing HBO several million dollars. Executives at HBO and Time Warner, HBO’s corporate parent, initially believed the best policy was that, no matter what, the Great Gandolfini was not to be issued ultimatums or otherwise threatened. As one executive noted, the object was always to be helpful, not punitive. Accordingly, the errant actor was gently reminded that he was a member of the great HBO family and that his ongoing issues would be dealt with in that spirit.

The approach failed. Gandolfini had been announced as a star presenter for the Golden Globes telecast in 2005 but was missing when the curtain was about to go up. Word circulated among the tightly knit group that Jimmy was MIA again. Minutes later, Gandolfini was located lying on the ground outside the Los Angeles Hilton where the ceremony took place, making snow angels on the lawn, so inebriated that he didn’t seem to notice the absence of snow. Clearly, a Golden Globes plan B needed to be hurled into action. Michael Imperioli, who co-starred in The Sopranos as headstrong Christopher Moltisanti, was quietly approached to take over presenting chores for Gandolfini, but he was hesitant to attempt filling the big guy’s shoes. Besides, a worldwide audience was expecting Gandolfini. When it became clear there was no practical alternative, Imperioli relented and executed his role deftly, later telling Gandolfini that he thought he, Michael, deserved the $25,000 goody bag of gifts that presenters received from the sponsoring Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Gandolfini was more than glad to hand it over.

It was the type of situation close friends, family, and key individuals involved in The Sopranos had hoped to avoid when they gathered in Albrecht’s elegant Manhattan apartment that night in May 2003. Most shared the belief that the intervention they were about to attempt was not just advisable but a matter of life and death—Gandolfini’s, and that of the entire series.

When Gandolfini entered Museum Towers, he was still under the impression that he and Albrecht were having a casual get-together, little suspecting he’d be confronted by an intervention committee of about a dozen—among them, David Chase and several friends and family members. Nor did Jimmy know that a private plane was standing by to take him directly to rehab. There had even been two days of intervention rehearsals testing myriad scenarios and trying to anticipate Gandolfini’s possible maneuvers.

As it turned out, none of that preparation proved helpful. The entire intervention lasted ten seconds. Gandolfini walked into the apartment, saw everyone, sized up the situation in a snap, and immediately barked, Oh, fuck this. Fuck all of you. Glowering at Albrecht, Gandolfini dared him with Fire me, then stormed out. While the others sat stunned, one of Gandolfini’s sisters chased her brother down the hall and begged him to come back.

But Jimmy was having none of that.

Introduction

HBO transmogrified television.

Claims like that are usually hype, right? But by any measure, television has not been the same since the meteoric arrival of Home Box Office.

And HBO’s impact surpassed the world of media, having a powerful effect on American life.

The supporting evidence begins with HBO’s Original Programming, a bill of fare that rocketed across screens with series, movies, specials, and documentaries, many of which were so vital, so novel, and often so electrifying that they changed the way stories are told. Audiences had never encountered anything like them on television. HBO built a reputation for high-quality shows beginning with the breakthrough prison drama Oz, and the wickedly hilarious comedy The Larry Sanders Show, followed by HBO’s now-legendary The Sopranos.

These game changers highlighted the fact that HBO was able to broadcast language, violence, and nudity that the networks couldn’t (or wouldn’t) touch. Exceptional writing and production values began to obscure, or erase altogether, the line between TV and motion pictures. A-list actors, along with top-notch writers, producers, and directors (many making their TV debuts), flocked to the fiesta. HBO was the first outsider to begin to compete with the broadcast networks at the Emmy Awards; soon enough, it was blowing the competition away, year after year, when the trophies were trotted out.

And HBO didn’t produce programming exclusively for its own use. It also became the first cable entity to create shows for other networks—including Everybody Loves Raymond on CBS and Martin on Fox.

HBO’s impact on the world of comedy alone was unprecedented, elevating the art of stand-up to new prominence. Comedy concerts—usually replete with language and subject matter previously unthinkable for television—came early and often. HBO made comics into celebrities, elevating them to rock star levels of fame. Robert Klein, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Rodney Dangerfield, and others made signature career appearances on the network.

HBO created a business, an art form, and a format with stand-up comedy events; they were hot tickets, whether for audiences attending in person (thus conveniently serving both as laugh tracks and as props in reaction shots) or for those watching at home. Proof of HBO’s tremendous influence: nationwide there were only ten major comedy clubs when the network launched in 1972; by the end of the next decade that number had grown to four hundred.

Long-standing restrictions that had dulled the potentially sharp edges of broadcast comedy—including many an outdated holdover from the sponsor-controlled, three-network era and, earlier, the radio generation—exploded upon HBO’s arrival. The obstructive Hays Code had long banned words like damn and shit from the screen (in perhaps the most notorious case, even eliminating the wholesome word pregnant from the 1950s megahit I Love Lucy); HBO simply ignored old standards and practices and fought back, not just with naughty words and risqué subject matter, but by attacking the institution of censorship itself. This breakthrough—a liberation of ideas as well as mere words—was a significant move in the evolution of movies and television; indeed, perhaps culture itself.

A pivotal moment occurred when HBO aired comic George Carlin’s now immortal routine Seven Words You Cannot Say on Television. Not only did Carlin say all seven words, and plenty of others, on HBO, but his performance generated a ripple effect for the network. Soon, long-forbidden words and phrases, in both drama and comedy programming, were commonplace. HBO fueled the collapse of the language barrier on television. Standards changed to such a degree that HBO started to encourage producers to include adult language in scripts so that viewers know it’s HBO. The network’s programmers insisted that what appeared on the channel be far removed from the tame, timid fare folks were used to seeing on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Much of what had been forbidden—violence, nudity, vulgar language—soon became unexceptional.

Major changes were due in the world of the documentary as well. We go low, but we also go high would have been an apt motto. While there was sex and titillation aplenty in some HBO docs (Real Sex, Taxicab Confessions, and Cathouse, for example), other documentary films produced by the network took on controversial, emotional, and even incendiary subjects—such hot topics as abortion, race, and sexuality. HBO’s programs won Peabodys, Emmys, and other upstanding awards; they made headlines and reinvigorated old narrative structures and, in the process, reached record numbers of viewers.

Remember TV boxing before HBO Sports? It was a dying format, at least until HBO came along to make it competitive again. Friday Night Fights had long since faded from the three-network landscape, victim of various demographic vagaries, but HBO dusted off the sport and made it classy, fueling the careers of larger-than-life superstars. Boxing wasn’t just for the TV down at the corner bar anymore. Its locus moved to—where else?—the home. HBO Sports also brought investigative sports journalism to new heights via Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

In movies, HBO’s exclusive theatrical film franchise was the bedrock of the service’s value proposition to the consumer, even before there was enough notable original programming to make a difference. For many years, film programming constituted the majority of total programming hours on HBO (and 100 percent of Cinemax). HBO became the first location on the dial to showcase the majority of theatrically released films in their original uncut, uncensored versions. In fact, many of those films might never have been released through large swaths of the country, due to limited screens or local censorship. HBO could also boast the majority of major studio releases in its repository and the best library of classic films, too. Blockbuster titles were always among the highest-rated programs in their premieres, not to mention in repeatability, and HBO paid dearly for them. If it didn’t build a network on top of those exclusives, somebody else would.

Later on, as its swagger and sway increased, HBO was no longer at the mercy of Hollywood studios to supply movies. The company rewrote rules, determining which movies would end up on pay TV and when. Then HBO began heading Hollywood studios off at the pass, dealing directly with filmmakers, buying pay-TV and home video rights to some titles in advance (sometimes based only on the script), a sea change that delivered an important lifeline to the nascent independent film business.

Finally, in its zeal to further diminish the controlling power of the studios, HBO went into the movie business for itself, ensuring a reliable stream of high-quality content for its ever-increasing viewing audience. With this brilliant expansion of its turf, HBO created a safeguard against erratic movie droughts and found yet another way to lure in subscribers and win coveted awards, both of which mattered (if not always equally) to HBO management.

HBO was also the first network to show viewers what a commercial-free viewing universe might look like: a veritable paradise, compared to what had come before. Since TV’s beginning, commercials had been virtually inescapable, disrupting the viewing experience and shattering narrative continuity. Even noncommercial public TV subjected viewers to advertising of some sort—sponsorships by underwriters whose initially tasteful entreaties would later turn into unabashed hard sells.

For much of its history, HBO continued to innovate. It was a satellite pioneer—before the Turner networks and ESPN—and among the first television companies to expand overseas, with programming beamed to Asia and South America. One senior HBO executive described HBO as a programming company that floated on a sea of technology. And HBO’s introduction of multiplexing—providing numerous HBO and Cinemax channels to consumers—fundamentally altered the nature of all cable TV.

All this would appear to be enough to ensure HBO’s place in entertainment history. But to understand fully its nothing-if-not-meteoric rise, one must understand how and why HBO became the first successful television subscription service, proving that people would pay for content and thus enabling pay TV to evolve from a pipe dream to a high-concept, high-revenue horn of plenty. There had been many attempts before; a plethora of failures dotted pay TV’s version of Boot Hill.

On January 1, 1951, approximately three hundred fortunate families in the city of Chicago had the opportunity to witness a wonder called Phonevision, which, despite its clunky name, emerged as the leader in a new generation of pay-TV systems. Unlike some others of the era (and there’d be many), this gizmo employed a set-top converter box and marked the biggest step forward, so far, in the borderline-wacky experiment then known generally as subscription television, the precursor to pay TV. Offerings, typically, were movies. Phonevision’s creator, Zenith Electronics, tellingly billed it as a home box office for the delectation of the Great American Family.

Zenith CEO Eugene McDonald Jr. tried to frame Phonevision not as problem but as, voilà!, solution. The American family, put on the road by Henry Ford, could be encouraged back onto the living-room couch (like the Simpsons would be at the start of each episode) by the Phonevision miracle. Or so they claimed.

In the spring of 1954, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted Zenith approval for expanded test-marketing of Phonevision, this time on the big stage—New York City. Simultaneously, test runs of the system were also approved in Australia and New Zealand. Other entrepreneurs couldn’t help noticing, and patent applications exploded from 1955 through 1957. Inventors Isaac Blonder and Ben Tongue filed for their own pay-TV patent, consisting of twin signals, one scrambled and the other clear; the former could be unscrambled by the simple payment of a fee.

Zenith sought to reassure the movie studios that they could all co-exist harmoniously in the new communications paradise. This was a wise move, considering the studios had originally sought to block even the tiniest blip of their massive output from appearing on television screens.

But some movie industry veterans were smart enough to perceive the inexorable and to tactfully adjust. The great producer-director Cecil B. DeMille, who’d literally been present at the birth of Hollywood, put it well: "What the movies did to the theater and vaudeville, television is doing to the movies. You can’t stop progress."

On December 12, 1968, the FCC—despite dogged and noisy opposition from movie theater owners—gave its approval for the development of pay-TV systems across the country. Ever the surly churls and sore losers, theater managers blacked out marquees in mourning for one day of protest—and sponsored as many Ban Pay-TV rallies as possible.

The futility of it all was just short of tragicomic.

Three years later, in 1972, Home Box Office was born, and despite several ensuing near-death experiences it managed to survive a painful infancy.

Since then, many an attack has been launched, from a range of enemies, and there’s been no shortage of gladiatorial struggles within. The battles ended with more victories than defeats for HBO, and the company prevailed to become one of the most venerated brands in entertainment history.

Despite what movie traditions and clichés often suggest, the notion of living happily ever after is pretty much out of the question—for HBO anyway. Today, HBO’s future is more tipsily unstable than it has been in more than four decades. Those three iconic letters that form the company’s name are embroiled in a fight for their lives. HBO survived its infancy on the wings of new technology—specifically the communications satellite—and, along the way, was able to twist ancillary technological advancements to its benefit. But that began to change after 2010, as new competitors rose up against the once-indomitable King of Content. As a result, HBO now faces the most competitive climate in its history. It is a scary time to be HBO.

This, then, is the story of a half century’s long, helter-skelter, topsy-turvy roller-coaster ride—replete with bruises, woes, and joys from sets of shows and movies, a look behind closed-door meetings and inside musty corporate boardrooms. Power struggles, creative battles, flagrant jealousy, toxic personalities, cutthroat rivalries, and sheer ambition all play starring roles. Indeed, the company’s saga is stocked with enough Sturm und Drang to fill years of comedy and drama programming—though even HBO, who proved willing to air almost anything, may consider some or much of it unfit for public consumption.

Enjoy …

1

Time Immemorial

NOVEMBER 3, 1971–JUNE 30, 1974

HBO’s birth was a quiet affair.

Gestation began in 1971 when a hush-hush memo revealing a big, bold idea from salesman-turned-entrepreneur Charles Chuck Dolan made its way into the executive offices of Time Inc., at that point one of the country’s most venerated journalistic institutions.

CHUCK DOLAN, Entrepreneur:

I got a check for $150,000 from Time Inc. as an investment in our Sterling Communications company on a Friday, back in the mid-1960s. I was so proud of it that I displayed it on our mantle for a day, then brought it into the den. Monday morning, one of the kids was gathering up a bunch of Valentine’s Day cards his mother had gotten for him to give to classmates and accidentally took the envelope with the check in it. I was on the train headed to a bank downtown when I realized I didn’t have it, so I got off the train, took another train back home, my wife drove me to the school, we looked through their things, found the check, and I went back into the city.

Time Inc. became a partner in our new cable start-up in the southern half of Manhattan in the mid- to late 1960s. We were little guys, and they were a well-known powerful corporation in a big building up in Midtown. It was a thrill to have them with us.

Before we delve into nearly half a century of programming that would change the culture and refashion the medium; before we assess actions and motives of stars, writers, and directors caught up in the allure of this new playground; before we explore maneuvers of executives brimming with gumption, ego, and paranoia, making business decisions that ran the gamut from the seemingly shrewd to the debatably preposterous; and before we consider other arcane intricacies of HBO’s growth, we first need to understand how HBO survived its troubled infancy. That is key to all that followed.

A determining fact to remember regarding its genesis—and the decades to come—is that HBO has never been on its own.

Nobody has ever traded a stock called HBO.

HBO was always, and remains to this day, attached to some larger entity. That would prove to be both boon and bane throughout its life, and in terms of origins, nothing would be more critical. Chuck Dolan would come up with the idea that became HBO, but the network would never have seen the light of day if Dolan’s partner hadn’t been that player of players Time Inc.

Founded in 1922 by two twenty-three-year-olds, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, Time Inc.’s pedigree was solidly Establishment, run by a coven of white businessmen who were nearly all proud products of the country’s top schools. Through the decades, Time Inc. would become a media superpower, home to a prestigious weekly magazine bearing its name as well as to more than a hundred other household titles including Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Life, and People, all of them gigantic brands in their own right.

In addition to traditional print, the company expanded into the world of movies, acquiring a minority investment in one of the most iconic of Hollywood hit factories, MGM, while Time-Life Books was busily mutating into Time-Life Films. By the late 1960s, a new video-strategy contingent was making its own waves inside Time Inc., operating outside the sphere of the mighty publication divisions and with designs on the wider media landscape.

Such diversification is what fueled Time Inc.’s investment in Dolan’s operation—Sterling Communications—which was awarded the franchise to wire all of Lower Manhattan for cable TV. This was thought to be a gift for Manhattanites who had long suffered poor reception due to skyscrapers; but wiring Lower Manhattan for cable turned into a project to rival the building of the pyramids. For much of the country, wiring for cable meant relatively easy installation on civic telephone poles; there was no such option in New York City. There, it was a costly subterranean affair, besieged by bureaucracy and unions, and requiring cables to reach up into high-rise apartment buildings, then wend their ways into individual units. From 1962 to 1967, Dolan managed to complete wiring for only thirty-four blocks, and it had cost a cool $2 million to connect just four hundred subscribers.

By 1970, Dolan and Sterling Cable TV were both facing financial collapse. A large loan from Chase Bank to the company—one guaranteed by none other than Time Inc.—was nearing default. Already, the other two major investors in Sterling—William Lear and Elroy McCaw—had backed out, each unloading his involvement on a less-than-eager Time Inc. The situation, as one Time Inc. executive recalled, was: Most unappetizing.

After completing a stellar trifecta at Andover, Princeton, and Harvard Business School, Nick Nicholas joined Time Inc. in 1964 and moved nimbly up the ranks, establishing a reputation for astute financial analysis and serious-minded decision-making.

NICK NICHOLAS, Executive, Time Inc.:

When Time Inc. initially invested in Sterling Communications, it had one asset, a cable operation in the southern half of Manhattan, and we initially owned 20 percent of the company. Wiring Lower Manhattan was a struggle for them. It was proving to be very expensive, and it was attracting little interest. Urban cable hadn’t been successful anywhere in the United States, because all cable back then was a master antenna system. If you got the networks from rabbit ears or had a roof antenna, you didn’t need cable because cable wasn’t offering any original programming. This was the late 1960s, and the idea for HBO had not been launched. It wasn’t anywhere on our radar.

Sterling was bleeding cash and had a negative cash flow. In 1970, Jim Shepley, who was president of Time Inc. at the time, said to me, Nick, how do we fix this? So I in effect became in charge of the cable company’s operations for Time and served on the board of Sterling along with a guy named Barry Zorthian.

The banks wouldn’t lend Sterling any more money, so we advanced funds to the company—not out of great pleasure, by the way. At first, we took shares of Sterling stock based on the market price. Later on, we took converts [convertible debentures] because they were less risky and gave us more equity.

Apart from innumerable mechanical challenges facing Sterling as it made Herculean attempts to wire Lower Manhattan, there were local politicians and other fiefdoms to deal with as well.

CHUCK DOLAN:

The unions were pretty tough. We had some difficult times with them, including sidewalk brawls. John Tatta handled them well, but I don’t remember anything unlawful. John was just a great facilitator. He could accomplish anything.

John Tatta was a key Dolan operative in the project, and an appropriately take-charge man. At one point, Tatta hired a tugboat from which workers proceeded to staple cable wire along the seawall in the East River—without bothering to get anyone’s permission. That wiring might have gone undiscovered had a little boy not toppled off a boat into the East River one afternoon, prompting one of the New York tabloids to run a picture with the sea wall and its illicitly attached wires visible in the background. When authorities saw the photo, they were livid. But the agile Tatta proved masterful at dispensing with that crisis, along with numerous others.

Tatta’s approach to doing business, however, didn’t exactly mesh with the starchy corporate ways of Time Inc. Its executives were, not surprisingly, aghast at Tatta’s ends-justify-means philosophy, particularly when urged to join union reps on visits to shooting clubs, or when told to pony up cash donations to union coffers.

NICK NICHOLAS:

This was my first big operational job, and it was not easy. There were tons of issues. Apart from huge costs, we were dealing with city unions like Local 3, and those guys were tough. There were stories written about how they would lock down LaGuardia Airport if they had problems receiving their payments. They would drive their trucks onto the ramps at LaGuardia, turn their motors off, then just walk away. It would paralyze the whole airport. They were famous for things like that, and I had to deal with them every day. John Tatta had great relationships with these guys, but I was new and couldn’t operate the way John did. I had to figure out how to survive. I wound up befriending a key union shop steward working on the project and letting him know what was at stake, meaning, we were in danger of shutting this thing down. Once they understood this wasn’t about cash in an envelope but whether or not the operation would survive, they realized their jobs were in jeopardy. That was a whole different thing. So together we figured out a way to get things done without putting the company in danger.

In the summer of 1971, Dolan, then a forty-five-year-old communications entrepreneur, took his family on a cruise from New York to Le Havre, France, aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2. Perhaps it was the luxurious surroundings of the ship, or the contemplation offered by bobbing up and down on the Atlantic Ocean, but by the time the QE2 reached France, Dolan had a big idea in his head.

CHUCK DOLAN:

I grew up on radio, and radio was free. Then television arrived and it was free, too. The only reason anybody paid for cable was that their reception was bad. They lived either behind a mountain or behind tall buildings, so they needed a wire service in order to get reception for their television.

I had been at a cable convention in 1971 in California where I saw a new device, a twelve-channel box that would receive cable television signals by wire. It involved customers getting a box and connecting it to a cable. I thought we could reserve one of those channels to use for a pay-TV operation and offer programming you couldn’t get elsewhere.

We came along with the idea that regardless of how their reception was, people would pay for content they couldn’t get elsewhere. This was fundamentally new at the time, and it was a big bet.

While his wife and children frolicked at the château they had rented for a family vacation, Dolan put pen to paper and created a proposal for a new type of TV service. The memo, submitted on July 29, 1971, to the Sterling board of directors, discussed the feasibility of a Coded Channel Network, a pay television network where Sterling would charge a subscription to consumers.

The basic needs of the coded network are A) Programming B) a means of transmission, and C) affiliation contracts. Dolan wrote that he believed affiliation to be the critical element but that programming was an immediate priority. In programming, our primary interest is in live, professional sports, particularly the regional games of the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. From discussions with team owners, we believe it is now possible to write contracts with enough NBA and NHL teams to create the sports programming source that would be required by the network.

CHUCK DOLAN:

I sent the memo weeks before we returned from our vacation, and I could hardly wait to find out what they thought of it. But I was shocked when I got home. They hadn’t read it yet.

Soon after Dolan returned, the memo was read, and on November 3, 1971, the Sterling board of directors—including Time Inc. representatives Nicholas and Zorthian—approved the idea for the Coded Channel.

It was one of those fateful decisions that can rewrite history. And did.

Two other actions of note took place at the meeting. The name Coded Channel was replaced by The Green Channel and Time Inc. made a further investment with Dolan of $300,000.

The idea for the new endeavor was far from a slam dunk. Subscription-only services had been tried before. There had been coin boxes back in the 1950s and prepaid ticket schemes, for example, but they had all failed. Beyond programming, marketing, and technological challenges, the big three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) regularly fought hard against any encroachment on their turfs; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was equally unreceptive to change; and movie theater owners campaigned vigorously and self-protectively against any subscription-pay model that offered films at home.

Perhaps equally significant was concern from several key Time Inc. executives that old movies and second-rate sports would not be enough to attract paying customers. One Time Inc. executive scoffed at the prospect of obtaining significant sports programming, writing: I suggest that pay-TV entrepreneurs examine introductory offers from sports promoters as cautiously as if they were come-ons from Mephistopheles or a heroin dealer.

Nevertheless, the Green Channel moved forward with plans to launch, perhaps as early as late 1972. Subscribers would pay $6 per month; movies, along with sports, would be central to the programming strategy. Sterling would rent uncut versions of films from the Hollywood studios, thereby distinguishing them from airings on the broadcast networks. And of course, because this was pay television, there would be no commercials, nor any of the pressures traditionally associated with pleasing advertisers.

CHUCK DOLAN:

Around this time, Jack Diller, a friend and associate of ours, was working at Madison Square Garden, and he introduced me to a young attorney who had just returned from an assignment in the Middle East. His name was Jerry Levin. Jerry was smart and loved movies, so we engaged him right away to run programming for our new network. We put Jerry in a small office that had a television, and he sat there all day watching movies.

JERRY LEVIN, Executive:

I had two careers before I joined Time Inc., but I had no real knowledge of who I was before I arrived there.

Gerald M. Jerry Levin was born the son of a piano-teaching mother and a father who ran a local store in Philadelphia. At school, Jerry was a stand-out student; at his local synagogue, he knew enough Hebrew by the age of ten to substitute on occasion for the congregation’s cantor. After attending Haverford College, he destroyed his own college papers in an effort, he said later, to avoid the pitfalls of ego, at least as defined by the Roman poet Virgil. He received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963.

Levin began his working life as an antitrust lawyer at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett in Manhattan; in 1967, he joined an international consulting firm called the Development & Resources Corporation and, in late 1970, spent almost a year working for them on a dam construction project in Iran.

JERRY LEVIN:

When I began to work for Chuck, there was no Home Box Office, there was just a memo Chuck had written, which at the time was tied to Sterling Manhattan Cable. So we just started dreaming about it. A lot of the time, there were only four people in the room: me, Chuck Dolan, Frank Randolph, an attorney, and Tony Thompson, who came from Time’s magazine division and was a marketing type. That’s all. Reva Melniker helped me with business plans, which Time Inc. appreciated, but we were faced with a lot of decisions right away, like what do we put on the screen? What do we do between programs? Play music? What do we want the consumer to feel? It was all primitive. This was the first time these questions were ever being asked, because there had never been a subscription service like this before.

We thought a lot of the answers didn’t matter as long as people would subscribe, but then we asked ourselves, "Well, why do they subscribe?"

Members of the Green Channel’s brain trust realized they needed a snappier name, one that signaled to potential customers that here, finally, was a place where movies came to you, not the other way around. The new moniker was created right before a printing deadline for a research brochure and was meant to be a placeholder only.

JERRY LEVIN:

We were at a pivot point in our door-to-door research, and it became very clear that people didn’t know what the Green Channel was and where it was. There were a few of us sitting around a table. Chuck wasn’t there. We were like troops who were going to overthrow the name. It was time to start selling it as something else. Seeing the name Sterling Cable Network attached wasn’t helping at all.

The term box office came up because if it’s a box office, you can justify getting paid for it—it’s more like being in a movie theater or a sports stadium. People feel like they are getting value for their money at a box office.

I’ll take credit for inserting the word home in front of box office, and the reason I take credit for it is because my whole instinctual base concerns the home. I wanted people to experience the word home like in The Wizard of Oz: Oh Auntie Em, there’s no place like home. Everybody wants to go home. There’s something about home, and the word home, that I believed would put people in the right frame of mind, especially since it was being delivered into the home.

Home is a place that indicates who people are, and what they select on Home Box Office gives them a sense of who they are. I’m on dialysis now, but I’m not doing it at some big clinic where they don’t give a shit about you. I’m doing it from my home, and that makes all the difference in the world. I’m in an environment where I feel good about it, and I wanted people to have a good feeling back then about HBO. I know it may sound strange to connect all these things, but my sister had autism. We didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, but she was very violent, never spoke, and they put her in an institution outside of Philadelphia. She left our home. That continues to haunt my soul.

So it’s all very simple. I lived in Tehran, worked in Vietnam, and I’d come home—literally, figuratively, and metaphorically to Home Box Office. It’s not just another network. I had a life before HBO. It was fascinating, but my real life began with HBO. It was my first kiss. It was my first and greatest love.

CHUCK DOLAN:

There was a franchise provision that prevented us from doing pay TV in Manhattan, so we started looking for a location where we could launch. John Walson worked at a place called Service Electric out in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a giant cable system. The TV reception was very bad there, so they had put a transmitter up on the mountain to reach customers. But the transmitter was limited, and when we came along with our box, John was very supportive and enthusiastic.

In addition to the franchise provision prohibiting pay TV in the city, there was another problem: security. Sterling had yet to figure out a way that would prevent nonsubscribers from stealing the service outright.

In suburban and rural areas, in order for a customer to be connected to HBO, an installer would need to come to their property, climb the pole in front of their house, and put in what was called a trap, an electronic device that was attached to the cable wire and would allow the HBO signal to enter the home. Later, cable company technicians would use binoculars to see if there was a trap at the home, and thus whether the service was being stolen or not. But in a city full of apartment buildings, there was a vertical wire in each building going up a conduit from the basement to the top—and if a trap had been installed on that wire, all the apartments would have access to HBO if they paid for it or not.

This was 1972, a big year in the worlds of film and television, with the top-grossing theatrical films headed up by classics-to-be The Godfather, The Poseidon Adventure, What’s Up, Doc?, and Last Tango in Paris. More notoriously, Deep Throat made a splash in the adult film world.

Prime-time television was dominated by genius producer Norman Lear, who masterminded three of the four top hits—All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and Maude (Hawaii Five-0 was the fourth show)—and they were having an incalculable effect on the mores and manners of the American people.

This would also be the first year of a new cultural touchstone, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. At the other extreme, ABC’s 1972 Olympic coverage from Munich was shattered when Palestinian terrorists took nine Israeli athletes hostage and eventually viciously murdered them. ABC’s Olympic sportscasters were suddenly thrust into a new spotlight, becoming breaking-news reporters for one of the most tragic stories in sports television history.

HBO’s premiere came just twenty-four hours after Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern in one of the nation’s most decisive presidential victories.

CHUCK DOLAN:

HBO’s official premiere was November 8, 1972. That evening, because of the box, we took the audience to a higher level for sports and movies. We launched with 365 homes in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

We were down on Twenty-third Street at our new studio. There was a lot of anxiety about whether everything would work. We had never done this before. A lot was tentative.

For all the planning, no one imagined weather would be a factor in the first transmissions of HBO.

HBO’s signal was transmitted by microwave from New York via towers to a microwave dish on the top of Bear Creek Mountain in Wilkes-Barre, and then on into John Walson’s cables and subscribers’ homes—all 365 of them. But extremely heavy winds blew the receiving dish sideways.

DICK MUNRO, Executive, Time Inc.:

There was a huge rainstorm in the city; Tony Thompson and I got stuck on the West Side Highway. We wound up having to get out of our car, which was trapped in traffic, and walk up the highway so we could get a taxi back into the city. We never made it to opening night.

DOM SERIO, Producer:

There was no press, no photographers. The only way we commemorated the official start of HBO was when Jerry put his hand over mine, and together we connected the video patch cord from the output of the studio to the line of the microwave system that was on the roof of our studio, which then sent the signal to Wilkes-Barre.

JERRY LEVIN:

It wasn’t pleasant when the dish blew down, but we got it repositioned. We went on at seven p.m. and I was the first image on camera from our small studio operation down on Twenty-third Street. We had set up a sofa, a lamp, and a TV to simulate what a living area would look like, and I was enthralled with it. I wore a suit and a tie, and I looked into the camera and said something to the effect of, Welcome to your box office in the home, which will be here for eternity. It’s never going to stop. But you won’t be able to watch my opening because given the austere financial constraints of our operation back then, we only had so many two-inch tapes. I said, Let’s use them for what’s really important, and we erased our beginning to rerecord on that tape.

After my introduction, we wanted to start with a live event to demonstrate who we are, and we went right to Marty Glickman at Madison Square Garden for our hockey game, the New York Rangers against the Vancouver Canucks.

NICK NICHOLAS:

If the Knicks or the Rangers hadn’t been available, we may not have had a business. Chuck did that, and he was in the process of negotiating a Lakers deal at the time, too, as a way of strengthening program offerings on the West Coast. It was remarkable. And don’t forget, Chuck was smart enough to have hired Marty Glickman, HBO’s first play-by-play announcer—a man with one of those great ballsy broadcaster voices that audiences found unforgettable.

Martin Irving Glickman played a key role in the infancy and growth of Home Box Office. His ties to Madison Square Garden (MSG), one of America’s—if not the world’s—most iconic sports venues, would help HBO acquire a wide variety of attractions. Well known and highly regarded, Glickman had for some time been calling games from MSG for Manhattan Cable, and, more significantly, had served as the fabled voice of the New York Knicks. He also called Jets and Giants games.

These were minor matters compared to events that occurred decades earlier in his life during the ominous pause between two world wars, when Glickman and Jewish teammate Sam Stoller would play roles that were more conspicuous in the annals of sports history than deciding who did play-by-play.

During a drama that played out in the global political arena at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Glickman (then eighteen) and Stoller were set to run in the Men’s 4x100 meter relay until the details surrounding the event were mysteriously altered. With the starting gun just hours from being fired, as dreams of gold medals jingled in the athletes’ imaginations, word came suddenly that the two Jewish runners had been summarily yanked from the lineup—obviously, it was felt, in deference to Adolf Hitler’s notorious anti-Semitism. Glickman and Stoller, the only Jews on the team, were replaced by Ralph Metcalfe and none other than Jesse Owens, the illustrious Black superstar, who had just run the 200-meter dash, in which Mack Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s older brother, had beaten the Olympic record. Unfortunately for Robinson, his time was 0.4 seconds behind Owens’s.

Ironically, Owens would have preferred to sit the relay out and let the two Jewish athletes have their moments in the sun. I’ve won my three gold medals, Owens told team coach Dean Cromwell. I’m tired, I’ve had it. Let Marty and Sam run; they deserve it. Cromwell, however, was less than sympathetic. You’ll do as you’re told, he said to Owens, thereby ending the discussion. Glickman and Stoller were banished to the stands where they watched Owens and the US team win the gold. Glickman would later call it the most humiliating episode of his life.

CHUCK DOLAN:

If you want to give anybody credit for HBO getting underway, give it to Jerry. He was the backbone of HBO’s beginning. He didn’t start with an official title; he was master of everything. Another key person at the time was Lou Wasserman over at Universal. Nobody would give us their new movies because they didn’t want to offend the theaters, but I met with Wasserman and he said, Okay. He gave us our start.

After the Rangers won the game, 5–2, HBO’s premiere night continued with Universal’s movie Sometimes a Great Notion, directed by and starring Paul Newman—and co-starring Henry Fonda and Lee Remick—which had been nominated for two Academy Awards but failed at the box office. It wouldn’t air on commercial television until five years later; by then, it had been renamed, somewhat illiterately, Never Give a Inch.

JERRY LEVIN:

That first night I said, This is an experience. I go by experiences, and if the experience is something that is fundamental to human psychology, that’s more important than any analytics that ask what’s the market, how fast is it growing, or who’s the competition?

When we began, we only had enough programming for two months. In retrospect, that sounds hairy, but we just had to figure out how often we were going to repeat things, and what else we could do to gain subscribers.

Two months after the Rangers had bested the Canucks, the new channel aired its first boxing match, signaling the start of a storied partnership between the sport and HBO. And it wasn’t just any old fight.

In the ring on the night of January 22, 1973, in the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica, stood thirty-one-year-old legend Joe Frazier and the pre-grilling upstart, twenty-four-year-old George Foreman. Frazier had defeated Muhammad Ali in the Fight of the Century two years earlier in Jamaica. Not surprisingly, few gave Foreman much hope against the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. This was supposed to be a cakewalk for Frazier.

Don Dunphy began his fight commentary with the simple detail that the two men were wearing 8-ounce gloves. Then blink and you missed it—the fight was over at 1:35 of the second round. But it wasn’t Frazier celebrating; Foreman had battered his opponent, knocking him down six times before the ref, Arthur Mercante Sr., stopped the fight. Howard Cosell, commentating on the ABC broadcast of the fight, famously chanted, Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!

JERRY LEVIN:

When boxing started on HBO, I would go to every match. There was a bout at Madison Square Garden where one of the fighters was Jewish and the other fighter was Irish. In the end, the Jewish fighter won, and the Irish fans were furious and started to throw things at the ring. We had been sitting ringside, and I didn’t know what to do, until Don Dunphy said, We better get under the ring, it’ll be the only safe place. So there I was next to Floyd Patterson under the ring, and I hear Don say, And this is Don Dunphy for HBO Boxing, signing off under the ring at Madison Square Garden.

With Levin running programming for Dolan, and Nicholas overseeing the operation for Time Inc., the two men began to take stock of each other. Each knew from the start that they were different creatures; they had little in common and didn’t socialize with each other.

From his vantage point at Sterling, Levin began to press his nose up against the glass at Nicholas’s envied Time Inc. spot. Nicholas had no reason to believe their paths would cross in the future. In his mind, there was nothing coming from Levin’s management of Sterling that would suggest a future career at Time Inc.

NICK NICHOLAS:

By early 1973, no one had a firm grasp on what HBO’s future would be, but my area of responsibility—and concern—centered on the financial health of Sterling. It wasn’t well-run. Don’t forget, we, Time Inc., were the guys at this point putting all the money into what was then still called Sterling, HBO’s parent company. We only wanted to maintain our 25 percent share, but Chuck was now out of money. Chase was refusing to lend him any additional funds, and he was struggling to maintain control and influence. Meetings were going on and on. Chuck was just a pain in the ass in a very polite way. Ask anybody who’s negotiated with Chuck, anyone, whether they love him or not. He looks and sounds like he’s being truthful but it’s what he doesn’t tell you that usually turns out to be important. It was almost as if we had to translate information from hieroglyphics. As a result, we were never comfortable doing business on a handshake with Chuck.

JERRY LEVIN:

Time Inc. was uncomfortable with Chuck from the start, and with the whole setup. He wrote the memo that became HBO, it was very forward-looking, but he wasn’t the Time Inc. type. Frankly, neither was I, but with Chuck it was more apparent.

Chuck hadn’t grown up in the Time Inc. system, and hired friends and family, many from Long Island. Let’s just say they weren’t exactly Time’s type. And the way Chuck ran a meeting, the way information was exchanged, the way the driving force of HBO was articulated, was all over the place and problematic for Time Inc. Chuck’s cable aspirations, as brilliant as they may have been, didn’t have the gravitas or stability required by a place like Time Inc. But the employees who were all hired by Chuck were the ones who gave me a crash course in how you make television. I couldn’t have been luckier.

NICK NICHOLAS:

Jim Shepley and I decided that from a business perspective we needed to have better and quicker meetings with more transparency. And we started to realize Jerry wanted to take Chuck out because he didn’t want anybody in his way.

JERRY LEVIN:

I wasn’t looking to overthrow Chuck—I didn’t have any problem working around him. Someone had told me that Andrew Heiskell [Time Inc. chairman and CEO] had asked about me, saying, Who is this brilliant kid? He’s very articulate. It was also a lesson for me as to what business is all about. It’s not about loyalty. It’s about who’s got what and how you’re

Reviews for Tinderbox

[Daniela Tahitoe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another excellent oral history from James Andrew Miller. Because if its track record, there’s always an aura behind HBO. This book shows how special the company is and the people who did the hard work to keep it that way. Very interesting read.

[carmenere_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I simply loved this book. Yes, it is tremendously huge, probably contains more information than the average television viewer needs to know and yes I didn't read it in its entirety but the information it does contain is enlightening and worthy of trivia lovers everywhere. After reading the introductory section on HBO's beginnings I focused on HBO's offerings that I have enjoyed. Soprano's, Sex and the City, Game of Thrones, The Larry Sander's Show, not to mention concerts and Comic Relief.Remarks from the creators and actors of each show shed's light on just how special HBO is and continues to be. The venue has touched most everyone's lives and is certainly worthy of a look through. You just may find that once you get started, you won't be able to stop.

[mrmapcase · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Everybody knows about HBO today, its status as the original premium network and Warner Bros. flagship streaming platform, but do you know the history of the channel? Told in the oral history style so all the people involved have their actions spelled out in their own words.

[wdwilson3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

When "Tinderbox" became available in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, I was interested. I've always been interested in media, and I was assuming that this was a straightforward business history of HBO. I was wrong. It is not so much an objective history but an oral history, splicing together interviews from hundreds of people associated with HBO with little commentary by the author. The problem with this, for me, is that I haven't heard of most of the people quoted here and I don't know their credibility. If two of them (or more) recall an event differently, who am I to believe? Who didn't grant interviews to the author that might paint a different picture. Additionally, it goes into far too much detail about things I have little interest in -- nearly 1000 pages worth. I gave up.

[gothamajp · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had been hoping for a insightful narrative into the foundation and rise of a media giant. Instead I got an “oral history” (which is not mentioned on dust jacket at all) that is basically 900 pages of extracts from interviews with unpleasant ego-driven executives you’ve never heard of alternating between bitching about each other and stating how brilliant they are as individuals. This was a boring slog and I had to stop before it put me off ever watching the network again!