Cable Chief Not Afraid of Wrestling

“Being a Gal in a Man’s World” is a lighthearted business book that Bonnie Hammer says she would like to write.

But at the moment, she’s too busy acting it out for the testosterone crowd at General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal.

Hammer runs two of the entertainment company’s most profitable businesses, the USA Network and the Sci Fi cable channels. Together they account for nearly a third of NBC Universal’s $3 billion in profit for 2005.

That makes the diminutive executive a big star in the eyes of her bosses, especially now that the company’s once-reliable cash cow, the NBC broadcast network, is hobbling and Universal Pictures’ big summer gun, “Miami Vice,” is misfiring at the box office.

“Bonnie is playing a huge role for us right now,” said Jeff Zucker, chief executive of the NBC Universal Television Group. “There is no question that Bonnie will be playing an even bigger role for us in the future.”

At GE’s leadership meeting in Boca Raton, Fla., early this year, it was Hammer who delivered the PowerPoint presentation trumpeting the highlights of the entertainment division to a sea of male faces. She focused on the USA Network, which is NBC Universal’s most lucrative asset, hauling in a profit of nearly $700 million last year.

In February, when Stacey Snider left her post as Universal Pictures chairwoman to join DreamWorks SKG, Hammer was on the short list of possible replacements even though she had no feature film experience. She didn’t get the job, but the mention of her name fueled speculation about her next assignment.

Would she wind up at Universal, injecting the movie studio with her girl-next-door charm? Would she take over all of NBC Universal’s entertainment cable channels, adding Bravo and the start-up Sleuth to her portfolio? Or would Hammer move into a high-level job at the NBC broadcast network, which has been struggling to rebound after finishing in fourth place in prime time for two seasons?

Nearly two years ago, shortly after General Electric bought Universal and its collection of cable channels, it was Hammer who persuaded her new bosses to write a check big enough to bring the popular World Wrestling Entertainment franchise back to USA after five years at a rival channel.

NBC executives were wary, but Hammer’s gambit paid off. This spring, Hulk Hogan and the other “Raw” wrestlers lifted USA to the top of the cable prime-time ratings charts.

USA has enjoyed more success this summer, launching a new show, “Psych,” to accompany its other Friday night mainstay, “Monk,” starring Tony Shalhoub as a private eye with obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Psych” centers on a tousled dude who poses as a psychic to help police solve crimes. The show’s popularity -- episodes average nearly 4 million viewers -- prompted NBC to air reruns on Monday nights.

One dark hole in Hammer’s universe has been the slump at Sci Fi, where ratings are down 15% this year. NBC Universal executives attribute the decline to increased competition from broadcast networks, which have been airing more shows with mystical elements -- Sci Fi’s stock in trade.

But Hammer has been encouraged with the channel’s gains this summer. Last month, Sci Fi scored its biggest series premiere ever with “Eureka,” an offbeat take on a twisted town populated by geniuses.

Smart, driven and politically savvy, Hammer has spent much of her nearly 30-year career turning skeptics into believers and skillfully maneuvering situations to her advantage.

In 2004, when NBC became the fifth owner of the Universal entertainment assets in a decade, there was an exodus of top cable executives. Those who remained were nervous about GE’s obsession with bottom-line results.

But not Hammer, who was running Sci Fi at the time. When her new bosses asked her to take over USA, Hammer agreed, but on one condition: that she hold on to the channel she had managed since 1999.

“There was a lot of turmoil at that time, but I kind of adopted the attitude that with every change comes something good,” Hammer said in an interview. “Something can come out of it that moves you ahead.”

That can-do spirit and moxie have been hallmarks of Hammer’s career. When she was overseeing documentaries at the USA Network nearly a decade ago, her supervisor told her during a staff meeting that she would be responsible for wrestling. Hammer reflexively shot him the bird.

“I was so startled,” Hammer recalled. “I thought, ‘This is what my career is coming to?’ ”

Instead of pouting or fuming, she rolled up her sleeves. She put away the power suit -- she wears size 0 -- and donned a no-nonsense ensemble -- a blazer, blue jeans and flat boots. She drove to WWE’s headquarters in Stamford, Conn., to meet Vince McMahon, the larger-than-life promoter who had built a billion-dollar empire on the body-bruising antics of tattooed, muscle-bound giants.

Instead of engaging in disingenuous banter, Hammer cut to the chase. “Up until two weeks ago, I never watched your show in my life,” Hammer recalled telling the WWE chairman. “I don’t know anything about your business. But I do know how to make good television.”

McMahon said he has long admired Hammer’s straightforward style.

“There are very few people like her in this business,” he said. “She is tremendously objective, very matter-of-fact and honest.”

Hammer, 56, grew up in Queens, N.Y., the youngest of three children. Her father, a Russian immigrant, built two thriving businesses, one that manufactured pen parts and, later on, another that made hair curlers.

Bonnie Hair Products, named for his youngest daughter, whose hair is always perfectly blown dry these days, gave us the pink foam curlers and jumbo gold barrel curlers that were popular in the 1960s and early ‘70s.

Hammer thought she might pursue a career behind the camera in photojournalism, but she wound up in TV. In the early 1980s, she was the executive producer of “Good Day,” an early-morning show on Boston’s ABC affiliate. Then in her early 30s, Hammer would coax reluctant guests to appear on the show.

If “Good Morning America” tried to steal a guest Hammer had already booked, she would put up a fight. “Oooh, don’t get in her way!” said Debbie Kosofsky, a longtime friend who worked with Hammer in Boston. “Bonnie refuses to fail.”

Kosofsky followed Hammer to Los Angeles in 1985 to work on a syndicated talk show, “Alive & Well,” which was taped in a Marina del Rey hotel. They rented the oceanfront Marina del Rey home of legendary fashion designer Bob Mackey after Hammer finagled a below-market deal with the broker.

Giddy to be living so large, the pair decided to write a book called “Just Ask: How to Get Everything You Want in Life.”

“Here we were, these two flake-ettes,” Hammer remembered. “We wrote an outline, got an agent and within six weeks we had a deal. We literally sat on the beach and wrote it. Our friends wanted to kill us.”

The book was never published, but they did get a $50,000 advance.

“Bonnie has always looked for the challenge, and the next best thing,” Kosofsky said. “Her outlook has always been “Let’s give it a try.”

Hammer returned to New York in 1987 to work for the Lifetime for Women cable channel before joining USA in 1989. Ten years later, USA Networks Inc.’s Barry Diller offered Hammer a choice of two jobs: to head program development for USA or run the Sci Fi channel.

“My attitude was I would much prefer to make a mark on the whole rather than just come up with singular shows,” Hammer said. “I went for the ‘under the radar’ but the bigger risk and the bigger reward.”

She realized what she had gotten herself into after canceling Sci Fi’s “Farscape,” a cult-favorite drama that attracted mostly male viewers when Hammer sought to broaden the programming beyond “space operas” to draw more females. Angry fans pilloried her on Internet message boards as just another dumb woman who didn’t appreciate science fiction.

Some protested by sending her a box of bras to make their point.

“There were these brand-new, glorious Saks Fifth Avenue brassieres with the tags still on them and these dirty, worn bras just so the fans could prove to me that there were females watching this show,” she said.

Her big opportunity came in the form of an e-mail from Diller: What did she think about working on a miniseries with Steven Spielberg?

“Are you kidding?” she typed back.

The 2002 project, “Steven Spielberg Presents: Taken,” was a high-profile, $40-million gamble. “Sci Fi was working on pennies before that,” Hammer said.

Hammer scheduled the 20-hour alien-abduction miniseries to air over two weeks that December. The ad sales staff grew panicky. Who would tune in to an obscure cable channel night after night?

Hammer stuck to her guns.

“We knew it had to be bigger than life, it had to be an ‘event’ and we had to take the risk,” she said. “And it put us on the map.”

“Taken” became the channel’s highest-rated series. It encouraged other top talent to bring projects to Sci Fi, including producers Bryan Singer, Dean Devlin, Nicolas Cage and Joel Silver. With such critically acclaimed shows as “Battlestar Galactica,” Sci Fi has nearly doubled its audience since she arrived in 1998 and is now a top 10 cable channel.

Hammer’s mission at USA was quite different. Long a top-rated cable channel, USA lacked a clear identity when Hammer took the helm. Its audience was graying, to the chagrin of youth-obsessed advertisers. Cable providers were threatening to drop the channel.

In her first meeting with NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright, he quizzed her about why cable companies should carry USA.

Hammer knew she would be unable to sell USA unless she and her team figured out a cohesive branding strategy. Then it came.

“We realized that USA was not about the place but that it was about people,” Hammer said. “There is nothing on our air that isn’t about characters.”

Enter the “Characters Welcome” campaign. From germ-phobic Adrian Monk to the professional wrestlers, USA has become a nation of wacky but memorable characters.

USA’s audience has grown 15% since Hammer took charge, and the median age is 46.4, three years younger than it was three years ago.

“We had success very quickly with USA, and it hasn’t stopped,” said Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment. When he became Hammer’s boss two years ago, he said, he had to change his approach because she was a strong executive who didn’t need micromanagement.

“What I have been most impressed by has been her ability to be both tough and nurturing at the same time,” he said. “She fights for what she believes in.”

Producer Ron Moore can testify to that. Moore, a writer on “Star Trek” spinoffs, was brought in four years ago, when Sci Fi wanted to re-create the 1978 series “Battlestar Galactica.” Hammer and her staff wanted to modernize the show without alienating the legions of passionate fans who were nostalgic for the evil Cylons, handsome ace pilot Lt. Starbuck and other characters.

Moore vividly recalled being in Los Angeles pitching his vision via videoconference. Hammer was at her primary office in New York.

“When I said, ‘And Starbuck is a woman,’ I remember looking at Bonnie,” Moore said. “She clenched her fists in the air and said, ‘Yes!’ “