Grant Tinker Tries Again : Entertainment: The last three years have been filled with disappointment for the TV producer. Now he hopes to make a comeback, show by show.

There is an unhappy silence these days at the Culver Studios, where Grant Tinker still occupies a corner office on the second floor. The leafy 17-acre lot is as motionless as a college campus on summer break.

High above, on one of the hangar-size studio buildings, is emblazoned in 10-foot letters “GTG Entertainment,” which stands for Grant Tinker Gannett, the partners in Tinker’s now defunct production company.

Tinker glances over his shoulder, cups his hand above his eyes and squints at the sign. “I’m going to come back some morning and find that painted over,” he sighs. For Tinker, the producer who built MTM into the best independent production house in Hollywood and who turned NBC into the most profitable network in history, the last three years have been a black hole in otherwise stellar career.

“I’ve been working for 41 years, starting at a scut level at NBC in 1949 and a variety of jobs, all in broadcasting or the programming business, and I don’t ever remember failing before,” he reflects as his voice tightens.

“The expectations were so high and what’s happened is disappointing.”

It is also the end of a bold--and very expensive--dream of re-creating another MTM, which in its heyday in the 1970s gave us Mary Richards, Lou Grant and Bob Newhart’s TV persona, Bob Hartley, three of the most loved characters in television.

Tinker now says he’s going to start over, the way he did in 1970 when he launched MTM based on a series commitment to his then-wife, Mary Tyler Moore. “I would like to do one show. And when I get that up and running, another show.” This time, however, there will be no Gannett or anything approaching that scale bankrolling him.

That was always the Tinker way: one show followed by a second show, followed by a third. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” begat “Lou Grant” and “Rhoda,” which led to “The Bob Newhart Show,” which was followed by “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere.” There were no deep-pocket bankrollers, and the networks, at least when MTM was starting out, paid fees that matched a show’s production costs.

So Tinker is drawing up a list again, like the one he kept in his final months as chairman of NBC when 17 companies approached him about joining up. He will not divulge who’s on it, only saying there are “several” names. “I’m going to be meaner and leaner,” he promises.

By anybody’s guess, the GTG partnership should have been, instead of an unmitigated flop, the Hope diamond in Tinker’s crown. It was a marriage between Tinker, the executive who claims no talent other than spotting and nurturing other talent, and Gannett, which had turned the staid newspaper business upside down with its flashy, for-the-people USA Today.

The pact, according to Tinker, was simple: “Gannett put up all the money and we would do the work.”

The work disappeared almost as fast as it appeared. Only one network series, “Baywatch” on NBC, ever ran a full season; the other three, on CBS, were never picked up beyond their initial order. A second season for “Baywatch,” which ranked 45th this season, is doubtful.

Tinker chose Gannett because he was impressed by the straight-ahead style of Alan H. Neuharth, the former Gannett chairman and self-described corporate maverick who struggled with his own lieutenants inside Gannett to launch USA Today.

It was Neuharth’s unwaivering support of the newspaper, coupled with Gannett’s financial muscle, that impressed Tinker. “The newspaper’s no accident,” Tinker says. “Al had to drive to get it created, and that suggested to me that what Al began he finished, and that he did not do a little bit for a little while.”

The deal that was struck called for Tinker and Gannett to have equal 40% general partnership interests in GTG Entertainment and the other 20% in limited partnerships to be divided among senior GTG executives.

To avoid going hat in hand to the networks and pitching ideas for shows, Tinker entered into a five-year, 10-series deal with CBS that gave the struggling network a first crack at anything GTG produced.

On the surface it seemed like a good idea--”I would make shows rather than sell shows,” Tinker explains--but in practice it proved to be unworkable because CBS’ programming executives felt the deal was foisted on them from above by CBS Inc. Chief Executive Laurence A. Tisch, which indeed it was.

“USA Today on Television,” a news show that was the centerpiece of GTG Entertainment, would eventually become a sword of Damocles hanging over the company. Its highly publicized failure last year, Tinker says, “poisoned” the partnership. “After that, everybody who worked for Gannett or was a Gannett-connected person just wrote us off as something they wish they never heard of.”

But it was Al Neuharth’s retirement at Gannett that triggered the newspaper company to reverse itself overnight and pull out of GTG. Neuharth forged Gannett’s relationship with Tinker, and it was Neuharth to whom Tinker’s fate was tied.

GTG Entertainment was divided into two divisions, GTG East, which would develop so-called reality programming such as magazine and talk shows, and GTG West, which would produce prime-time entertainment shows in the MTM mold.

Tinker was convinced that Gannett was in for the long haul and felt reassured by a clause in the partnership agreement which, in effect, stated that it was Gannett’s desire to stay in the partnership for at least 10 years to realize “the full potential of the television business.”

But it was not until the 80-page contract was drawn up that lawyers inserted another clause that Gannett would dredge up nearly three years later to withdraw its support. The clause said that after Gannett had spent $40 million developing and producing prime-time shows, it could review the partnership agreement.

“USA Today on TV” started as an afterthought, a brief mention during a break in negotiations between Tinker and Gannett at Tinker’s Bel-Air home. Originally, Neuharth had sought out Tinker simply to put Gannett, a newspaper company with limited experience in programming outside of owning local TV stations, into the prime-time program business--a high-risk but potentially mega-rewarding business.

Neuharth asked Tinker what he thought about turning USA Today into a television show--Gannett had been approached by others about it--and Tinker replied it was probably doable. Although he didn’t know anything about that kind of thing, he certainly knew somebody who did: Steve Friedman, the executive producer of the “Today” show.

Friedman, a talented but high-strung producer who was known to pull off his boot and toss it through the control room monitor when he saw something he didn’t like, was growing bored at NBC, where he had led “Today” to the head of the pack in the morning network news race.

Tinker and Friedman, however, had never developed or produced a show for syndication, a nasty business where competitors routinely start rumors to scuttle competing programs. It is also a business where those who succeed tend to come from local television rather than the networks, which still operate at a more gentlemanly pace.

When the first three test programs were produced in the summer of 1988, some GTG staffers felt it was clear that Friedman, for all his talents, was not the executive for the project.

“We hired the wrong guy to run it,” concludes Neuharth. “It just was not his bag. Although Steve had a good reputation, he had inherited and improved ‘Today.’ He just wasn’t the person to create something from scratch.”

Friedman, who took the year off after leaving GTG, is philosophical. “It’s a business of trial and error, and the errors outnumber the hits.”

There were other things, too, Friedman says, like whether a new company could be launched during the writers’ strike, or whether a syndicated show without sleaze could be launched at a time when sleaze was a fashionable programing trend.

“It was a major distraction,” Tinker says today. “A continuing headache that I couldn’t cure.”

Neuharth, associates say, was outraged when the new Gannett managers canceled “USA Today on TV” in November.

According to sources, he wrote John Curley, Gannett’s new chairman, and said he disagreed with the decision. Then, when Gannett decided to pull out of GTG a couple of months later, Neuharth wrote again, this time using even stronger language and hinting that perhaps he made the wrong decision in picking Curley as Gannett’s new chairman.

“I told my successors I wouldn’t second-guess them. It was their show,” says Neuharth, who won’t comment about events that took place at Gannett after he retired.

Curley explains: “Grant told us that even if we spent another $200 million, there was no guarantee we’d turn the corner. That being the case, we decided it would be prudent to end now.”

That is roughly what Gannett spent on GTG during its two years of full operation, including buying the Culver Studios for $24 million and sinking another $25 million into refurbishing it. Although Gannett wound up losing money on the programming side, the studio itself has become profitable because it leases out the sound stages to other producers.

The first thing Tinker did when he started GTG in 1986 was hire some trusted hands who had worked with him at MTM, including Stuart Erwin, who would run the company on a day-to-day basis, and Jay Sandrich, the veteran director of comedies.

The three of them then signed up what they hoped would be the next wave of smart, young writers and producers, including Michael Kozoll, one of the creators of “Hill Street Blues,” Deborah Aal, who was in charge of television movies at NBC, and Donald Todd, who had come to Tinker’s attention as one of the young writers on NBC’s hit “Alf.”

Eventually, the core creative staff numbered 17 people, several of whom--including Jane Anderson, a talented playwright who was the creator of “Raising Miranda”--had never written previously for television.

But during Tinker’s five years at the helm of NBC, the economics of the television program production business changed dramatically. It changed so much that the business Tinker returned to in 1986 was virtually unrecognizable to the one he left in 1981.

Writers, especially comedy writers, had gone from making a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year to commanding fees of $1 million annually, even for novices. Heavies like Hugh Wilson, Ed. Weinberger, Steven Bochco, Gary David Goldberg and Jim Brooks--who had all made their names at MTM under Tinker--earn multiples of that, including a hefty chunk of a show’s rerun profits.

MTM under Tinker was a scriptwriter’s paradise, a kind of Institute for Advanced TV Writing presided over by a man who dueled with the networks while his proteges turned out high-quality yet commercially successful television shows. “It was truly a writer-driven company,” recalls Bochco, one of the creators of “Hill Street Blues.”

“Tinker highly regarded writers both professionally and personally, and he wasn’t at all threatened at an ego level at what they could do and he couldn’t do. He protected writers from interference without them even knowing about it.”

But, explains Aal, “the business, at the point Grant got back into it, had changed considerably.” Aal, who was the executive producer of GTG’s “Raising Miranda,” says there was “a competitive atmosphere, particularly in comedy, that no one could have anticipated. It definitely got in his way.”

Moreover, network program executives, many who are a generation and a half younger than Tinker, increasingly want to deal only with “proven” writers, those who have a long list of credits to their name. Karl Schaefer, a young writer who created “TV 101” for Tinker, says the CBS deal turned out to hurt GTG as well.

Kim LeMasters, then president of CBS Entertainment, “was under a great deal of pressure to take Grant’s shows, and there was a fair amount of animosity back and forth.”

Schaefer also says “Grant was bucking the system in several major ways by not packaging shows with the agencies, by not paying exorbitant fees. His bottom line always was: ‘What’s the writing?’ ”

Ironically, it is Tinker who created the very economic environment that ultimately helped to do him in.

“One of the foremost things Grant did while at NBC was make the writer-producer the top priority when looking at series proposals,” says NBC programming wizard Brandon Tartikoff.

“Everybody followed suit, and the price for writer-producers started to far exceed the stars of those shows. So when he leaves NBC five years later in 1986, because of his strong advocacy of the writer-producers, the prices are sky high.

“He had to start fresh and find the next Gary Goldberg at a time when everybody was giving the time periods and series away to the people he inspired. Grant authored the brave new world that GTG had to go out and compete against.”

“Family Ties” creator Gary David Goldberg agrees: “You’re in a medium where giant sums of money are being tossed. I don’t know how you come back as a small, quality company and compete. The people who benefited from Grant are all set on their way. He came back to a very different economy, and it’s hard to attract the kind of people he was used to dealing with.”

This is an assessment that even Tinker now reluctantly concedes is correct. “Instead of recruiting 17 really creative people, primarily writers, and trying to persuade the network program buyers these young people can make shows, I think concentrating the expense on a couple of established writers would have been the better way to go.”

That, says Tinker, “and not to have said to Al (Neuharth), when he asked, ‘Sure, why not,’ and let the ‘USA Today’ thing happen. We were miscast for that.”

Tinker stops talking, looks around his office at the mementos from NBC, MTM and even GTG neatly arranged on the walls, tables and shelves.

And then he picks up the thought:

“Because I literally never had a place not to go in the morning when I got up, I moved awfully quickly post-NBC to do this. And there was no need to do that. I should have been a little more deliberate.”