HOME VIDEO MOGUL KARL OWES A LOT TO 2 WOMEN
You know what the video store of today looks like: rows of movies, and just a sampling of anything else. But Stuart Karl says the video store of tomorrow will be different. “If you look at a bookstore now and imagine all the books replaced with videos, that’s how it’s going to be. It will probably balance out at about 50-50: 50% movies, 50% alternative.”
Take Karl’s word for it. Plenty of people do--the 33-year-old president of Orange County’s Karl-Lorimar Home Video is the king of the “alternative” video, the type that’s just about anything but a movie.
And, just to complete the picture, Karl’s Irvine firm also began releasing films-on-tape earlier this year. But Karl-Lorimar’s specialty remains non-cinematic videos, and its success with them has partially revolutionized the industry.
Karl’s star, of course, is Jane Fonda. Her “Workout” videos changed the tiny Karl Video Corp. into the top “special-interest” company in the business, leading to a clout-adding merger with Lorimar Telepictures, a Culver City company with such a big roar that it recently took over the MGM lot.
But even before Fonda’s first tape wowed ‘em in 1984, Stuart Karl was making informational/instructional videos and breaking the resistance of reluctant store managers. And since “Workout” became the biggest-selling tape in video history, he’s used it as a springboard for videocassettes on everything from a big-selling series of “Playboy Centerfolds” to a one release where Esther Williams shows you how to teach your baby to swim.
Karl may be the industry’s chief idea man, but he doesn’t think there’s anything all that extraordinary about his concepts. It’s just that he’s often the first one to try something out that seems positively aching to be done.
Take his latest venture. Everyone knows how popular romance novels are among American women. So making videos of the same ilk seems a natural. Still, when Karl-Lorimar launches its “Shades of Love” series next month, it’ll be the first time anyone’s done more than stuck a toe into this potential market.
Such ventures could make 1987 earnings top even its hefty 1986 total--which will be somewhere around the $100 million mark. “We’re convinced we can be the second or third largest company in the business in a year or two,” Karl believes. “Maybe even first.”
Despite this confidence, Karl doesn’t come across as cocky. In his spacious offices, lined with dozens of plaques picturing everything from company products to his family, he’s quick to point out that he owes a lot to two women.
One, of course, is Fonda. The other is his wife Deborah, whom he met early in his business career. In the late ‘70s, following the example of a go-getter father, Karl started a waterbed trade magazine, then went on to selling successful publications and buying others. One of these was Newport Mesa News, where Deborah was an editor.
After they were married, Deborah helped her husband with his newest venture, a shoestring video enterprise whose chief claim to fame in its early months was distribution of--remember this TV cooking series?--”The Galloping Gourmet.” It was Deborah Karl’s idea to try to talk Fonda into making a video version of her best-selling exercise book, and Deborah remains her husband’s chief adviser. “If it wasn’t for my wife,” Karl says, “I wouldn’t have succeeded at all.”
Still, even after convincing Fonda to go along with doing a video version of her best-selling book and making the initial “Workout” tape, there was the usual problem of getting video stores to carry more than one or two copies--if that many. “They were so used to just renting movies,” Karl remembers with a laugh, “that some would even complain about not being able to keep a copy of the Fonda tape on the shelf to rent. ‘The customers keep buying these things,’ they’d say.”
Even now, Karl-Lorimar’s salesmen are working hard to get latest releases into video stores--and a determined target: other outlets. Says Stuart: “If you want a video on camping, you should be able to walk into a camping-supply store and buy one.” Currently, however, “alternative” videos are largely sold by mail order--you may have seen one of K-L’s recent TV plugs for its Minnesota Fats how-to-play-pool tape.
As the market for “special interest” grows, Karl-Lorimar’s competitors increase, too, but they’ll have a hard time beating Karl at his own game. Early in the interview, he seemed determined to point out that he unashamedly looks upon video more as a business than as an art form or social service: “I’m very product-oriented.” One of his people, he proudly notes, helped introduce Doritos at General Foods. Another worked on Tide soap at Procter & Gamble. And at Karl-Lorimar, he says without apology, “We sell a packaged good.”
But Stuart Karl isn’t simply a master merchandiser. A great many of his tapes show people how to improve their lives. Point that out to him and his tough business facade melts momentarily.
“Yes,” he nods. “That’s really the biggest satisfaction. If one person saves a kid from drowning because they saw the Esther Williams tape, or if one person got healthy because of Jane or Richard (Simmons), that’s--and I don’t say this lightly--that’s even better than the money.”
