Disney to Make Big Push Into TV Syndication

Walt Disney Productions announced Tuesday that it is taking a big jump into television syndication and has hired Robert Jacquemin, a successful innovator in the field at Paramount Pictures, to head its effort.

Under the new setup, hundreds of decades-old Walt Disney cartoons and movies will be grist--for the first time--for licensing to television stations around the country. Typically, packages of films and cartoons are made available by movie studios to networks and local TV stations by means of “syndication” deals that are negotiated individually.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, Disney’s president of motion pictures and television, said that, besides making full use of the Disney film library, a top priority for the new division is to be a “major force” in TV production for first-run syndication, both on its own and with other major producers.

Jacquemin, 42, was appointed senior vice president of domestic TV distribution at Burbank-based Disney. He will oversee all sales, marketing and production for syndication.

Jacquemin is now executive vice president of sales and marketing at Paramount, where his contract runs until the end of May.

Coincidentally, both Katzenberg and Disney Chairman Michael Eisner left Paramount in recent months to take positions at Disney.

Eisner called the formation of the syndication unit “a turning point . . . representing the further expansion of the company into all facets of television,” adding that Disney is fortunate to get Jacquemin.

Katzenberg emphasized that the major syndication effort will in no way lessen Disney’s commitment to its fledgling pay-TV Disney Channel. The two are “not mutually exclusive,” he said.

In response to a question, he said none of Disney’s films will be excluded from syndication sales because of commitments to the pay-TV channel. He said the only Disney products exempt from future TV syndication will be the so-called crown jewels, certain feature films--such as “Snow White” and others--that the studio carefully re-releases from time to time in theaters.

Disney said Jacquemin, who entered TV syndication as head of a regional company in his native St. Louis, has been with Paramount domestic TV and video programming about seven years. There, he has inaugurated more than 40 syndicated projects and was associated with the development of first-run syndication programming such as “Entertainment Tonight,” “The Jesse Owens Story” and “America.”

In an interview Tuesday, Jacquemin said the challenge of analyzing Disney’s film library is not only enormous but unique, representing the greatest reservoir of movies and cartoons still untapped for the syndicated marketplace.

The value of the library, he added, is “in the timeless nature of the product.”