Company Town : German Makes Waves by Courting Hollywood : Broadcasting: Helmut Thoma runs Europe’s most successful commercial television company, and bucks the rules.

As managing director of RTL, Germany’s leading commercial broadcast company, Helmut Thoma has always gone his own way. He’s a compatriot of Arnold Schwarzenegger and is the person responsible for introducing David Hasselhoff and the “Baywatch” phenomenon to Europe.

Now Thoma is bucking the tide again by wooing Hollywood in a major way, just as most of his European colleagues are piling up the sandbags in a bid to turn back the American cultural invasion.

As the European Union was revealing plans to change the Broadcasting Without Frontiers directive to further restrict U.S. programming in November, Thoma was building business ties in New York. He is unapologetic about his pursuit of Hollywood, saying: “RTL has always striven to emulate American strategy and structure in our own network. We have gotten where we are today by investing lots of money in American know-how and American partners.”

This approach is not popular in Europe. Current EU regulations say European broadcasters must carry a majority of European programming “where practicable.” That left a loophole for channels like RTL, which are dominated by U.S. programming. But the draft EU plan revealed in November removes the “where practicable” phrase and forces member countries to comply.

For U.S. television, the stakes in Germany are massive. United Germany now represents the strongest economic force in Europe and, as the former East German market develops, it will become an even stronger world media market with a population of some 80 million.

Like many new broadcasters in Europe, RTL was the first non-government channel in its territory when it started in 1984. In the last decade Germany has gone from two state broadcasters--ARD and ZDF--to 12 television stations, nine of which are commercial. RTL is now the most successful commercial broadcaster in Germany and, indeed, in Europe in terms of revenue, which last year hit $1.68 billion.

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When Thoma started RTL with 25 staffers working from the small country of Luxembourg, home of parent company CLT (Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Television), he produced cheap, attention-getting programming.

Nightly shows included “Lederhosen”--or “Love Letter From the Leatherpants,” a series of soft porn films from the 1970s--and “Tutti-Frutti,” a strip show that caused outrage across Europe and brought more than 4 million curious viewers to the channel.

As RTL became more established and took on shareholders like Bertelsmann, it expanded its programming budget to $650 million and developed genres that did not exist in Germany, such as daily soap operas and sitcoms. While close to $200 million of RTL’s budget is spent on finished U.S. programs, a large chunk of the $650 million is spent on importing talent from the United States, Australia and Holland to create German versions of their shows with varying success.

In one such deal with Columbia Television, RTL brought U.S. writers to its Cologne headquarters to make a German version of “Who’s the Boss?”

While the British remake of “Boss,” called the “The Upper Hand,” succeeded, Thoma concedes that “it looked like an American sitcom perfectly dubbed into German with not-so-good actors.”

Similarly, a version of “Married With Children” was “more or less a failure, too close to the American product,” according to Thoma. He says that a Germanic “Maude,” which has had some success in its French remake, is RTL’s next project.

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Thoma himself has a sense of humor that has helped him crack the world of German broadcasting. Being Austrian-born is an advantage in German television, he says, because “we do not take ourselves so seriously.” As his colleagues weave across the foyer of the Four Seasons hotel carrying their bounty from a Manhattan shopping expedition, Thoma chuckles: “You would think we came from an underdeveloped country. All they want to do is shop.”

Thoma’s colorful style has occasionally gotten him into trouble. For example, he once compared Leo Kirch, the media entrepreneur who holds German rights to many U.S. film libraries, to Hugenberg, the press lord whose newspapers did not oppose the Nazi SS coming to power in pre-World War II Germany.

Kirch took him to the German Trade Court over those remarks and won a case that said his comments were unfair, but Thoma is challenging the ruling in another court.

Kirch, who owns shares in German commercial broadcasters SAT 1, Pro 7, KabelKanal and Premiere, has a stranglehold on U.S. rights in the German-speaking market. But Thoma’s campaign on Hollywood is positioning RTL so it can scoop up Kirch’s U.S. deals when they run out over the coming decade.

Thoma said he stands by his comments about Kirch.

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Inside Hollywood

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