Few in Hollywood Stir Up as Much Rancor as Lieberthal

Taking credit for Columbia’s strategy is Gary Lieberthal, 44, a hyperactive, jauntily self-confident executive who has survived several management regimes at Columbia, which was once owned by Coca-Cola Co. and now by Sony Corp. In love with the glamour of show business, he has all 116 episodes of “Silver Spoons” and 120 episodes of “Who’s the Boss” bound in leather in the living room of his Holmby Hills home.

Perhaps no other television executive stirs up as much rancor as Lieberthal. Acknowledged as an exceptional salesman and one of the savviest marketers in the hustle-a-minute syndication business, colleagues nonetheless were surprised when Coca-Cola put him in charge of Columbia’s entire TV division despite having no experience on the “creative side.”

Coca-Cola executives had even been set to fire Lieberthal shortly after they took over Embassy Communications, where he then headed the syndication sales division. But in a daylong meeting with Coca-Cola President Donald R. Keough, according to former executives, Lieberthal changed his bosses’ minds and persuaded them that he was indispensable to Embassy’s profit machine.

Shortly thereafter, Lieberthal ordered that all Embassy corporate logos include the phrase “a Coca-Cola company.” During a 1986 convention of broadcasters and syndicators in New Orleans, Lieberthal had thousands of cans of Coke sent to all the hotel rooms.

“He knew who the new owners were,” says Charles Larson, president of distribution at Republic Pictures and part of the tight clique of syndication executives prominent in that obscure corner of the TV business. “It was a brilliant corporate promotion. He’s very astute politically.”

Lieberthal has made a small fortune in a relatively short time. In a business known for its generous paychecks, Lieberthal’s is one of the biggest, earning him well over $1 million annually. He earned about $7 million from stock options and stock grants after Sony bought Columbia, and his bonus for selling “Who’s the Boss” exceeded $10 million.

But Lieberthal’s habit of spending money raised eyebrows among his former bosses at Coca-Cola. One executive remembers getting a phone call from the head of facilities at the Columbia lot in Burbank, saying that Lieberthal had just bought his third $35,000 desk--the furniture store had called and complained that he hadn’t returned the other two. The cost was deducted from his paycheck.

(Lieberthal denies the desk story and says he has “only had two desks in my career.” His present one “is a fake. If it cost $2,500, I’d be surprised.”)

“There are tough negotiators,” says Kim LeMasters, former president of CBS Entertainment and now an independent producer. “Then there are night-of-the-living-dead negotiators. Gary falls into the latter category.”

LeMasters and other CBS executives still have bitter memories of Columbia’s renewal negotiations on the daytime soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” The series was costing CBS $350,000 a week, and ABC had offered to more than double the amount to $800,000. Usually the matter is routinely handled by business affairs executives for the network and studio, and left at that.

But Columbia, thinking that it had the upper hand because of the ABC bid, hired an outside negotiator, Ken Ziffren, one of the premier entertainment lawyers in Hollywood with a blue chip client list. CBS felt that it had no choice but to renew on Columbia’s terms.

“It marked a dramatic change in the way they did business and caused a considerable amount of nastiness,” recalls Jay Kriegel, senior vice president at CBS Inc.

Lieberthal says the decision to hire Ziffren was Victor Kaufman’s, then president of Columbia Pictures, who left the company after Sony bought it. Lieberthal says he was just following orders. But CBS executives remember dealing only with Lieberthal and saw him as an uncompromising negotiator, someone who refused to leave anything on the table.

Says William Morris’ Jerry Katzman: “He will push you to the wall, but if you push him back, you can maybe deal with him.”

Lieberthal acknowledges that he can rile his competitors and colleagues but doesn’t apologize. “People say of me I may be difficult to deal with. I’m a very tough negotiator. But I think what’s at stake in this business is substantial.”