He’s Got the TV Touch and Emmis Is Among Many Who Know It

When Greg Nathanson was named president of programming and development for Fox Television’s two dozen stations two years ago, he insisted that the last line of the news release point out his credentials as “a long-standing member of the Price Club and Fedco.”

Bragging whimsically about shopping at discount houses would seem to be heresy in Hollywood, where it’s more common to crow about membership in the Riviera or Bel-Air country clubs. But this press-shy renegade has never succumbed to Hollywood’s seduction.

In fact, Nathanson’s Midwestern honesty, contrarian style and thrift have given him something of a Midas touch as a television programmer in sync with viewers while making him a valued advisor to such media luminaries as Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch.

“Nobody has a better grasp of how people consume media than Greg,” said Jeffrey Smulyan, chairman and chief executive of Emmis Broadcasting Corp.

Smulyan, who was Nathanson’s roommate at USC in the 1960s and then later his boss, thinks so highly of his college chum that he has tapped him to spearhead the Indianapolis-based radio and publishing company’s $400-million push into television.

In two separate transactions revealed last week, Emmis, the nation’s ninth-largest radio company with 13 stations and the publisher of such august magazines as Texas Monthly, is buying six television stations--a CBS outlet and five Fox affiliates. Nathanson has agreed to stay on at Fox until fall, after which he will run Emmis’ TV group from Los Angeles rather than Indianapolis.

“I always said I would never get into television without Greg,” said Smulyan, whose radio group has remained independent in the face of a frenzied industry consolidation that he says has made prices in the radio market less attractive than those in TV. “These six stations are just a start. We would like to build a major television group.”

Nathanson, who just turned 51 and shares a birthday with Smulyan, says that with the major broadcast networks bumping up against regulatory limits restricting them to stations that reach no more than 35% of the nation’s households, there are plenty of buying opportunities in television.

He is particularly enamored of stations affiliated with Time Warner’s WB Network. “UPN scares me right now,” Nathanson said with his customary frankness. “But the WB has real upside. I would have told you differently two years ago, because UPN got off to a better start, but the WB has the edge right now.”

Though Nathanson has kept a low profile during his 25-year television career, he’s an institution in the business. When Diller was building the Fox broadcast network for Murdoch in the early ‘90s, Nathanson ran the company’s seven TV stations.

When Murdoch wanted his daughter Elisabeth to learn the ropes of programming, he sent her to train under Nathanson. (She then bought and sold at a tidy profit a station in San Luis Obispo before returning to News Corp.’s British Sky Broadcasting as a programming executive.)

Nathanson has mentored a slew of other high-ranking executives. He hired current News Corp. President Peter Chernin at Showtime in the early ‘80s when he was in charge of programming at the cable channel. He also promoted Fox Television President Mitchell Stern to run the local Fox station, KTTV, when he had charge of the group.

“My whole life has been about television,” said Nathanson, who grew up in Chicago, the son of an advertising copywriter who put Dippity-Do hair gel on the map before buying TV stations and cable systems, including one in Bakersfield now owned by Time Warner. “My father would bring home the rating books, and when I was 15 or 16, I chose what shows from the four indies in L.A. would run at what hours in Bakersfield, which had room for only two signals.”

Nathanson’s older brother Marc, chairman and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Falcon Communications, the nation’s 12th-largest cable company, calls Greg “the king of counter-programming.” He served star turns as a prime-time scheduler at ABC in the ‘80s, as general manager of KTTV, and at Tribune Co.’s KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles, where he worked at three different points in his career.

Early on at KTLA, Nathanson made a name by buying movies no one else wanted, bringing huge ratings in prime-time with cheap kung fu titles before the craze caught on nationwide.

A news junkie, he thought covering local events reinforced KTLA’s birthright as the first station West of the Mississippi. When Pope John Paul II visited Los Angeles in 1987, KTLA followed his 48-hour tour. It covered the O.J. Simpson trial gavel to gavel, catapulting the station from last place to first in the daytime ratings.

Before leaving as general manager in 1996, Nathanson turned the station from an independent into a WB flagship.

“He’s first-rate on every level,” said Diller, chief executive of USA Networks, which is selling Emmis four Fox stations. “He’s original and contrarian and odd-funny in how he comes up with things.”

At Fox, Nathanson signed up “Jerry Springer” for the group’s stations well before the controversial talk show became the hottest ticket in daytime. Nathanson said one of his favorite programming plays was a 10-year deal for “I Love Lucy” at KTTV, where it still attracts a huge audience. “ ‘Lucy’ is an L.A. phenomenon, just as ‘The Honeymooners’ does better in New York than anyplace else and ‘Andy Griffith’ plays in the South,” he said.

Fiscal restraint is as important to him in business as in his personal life.

“I treat every penny like it’s my own,” said the executive, who has made millions from his own investments in Emmis and in Falcon. But he doesn’t consider himself rich by Hollywood standards. (Emmis’ stock has climbed about 13% already this year.) “Personally, I don’t have big needs. Before I was married, I gave 50% of my salary to charity.”

Nathanson and his wife, Teresa, have three sons, ages 12, 15 and 18.

Nathanson has never had an employment contract--unusual in a town where executives sign them to guarantee payouts if they are ousted. He fouled up the KTLA accounting system when he first worked there because he never cashed his paychecks. At ABC, he gave his salary over to a charity he formed, called On Your Feet, which helped needy families to secure apartments, giving shelter to 2,000 people in its first four years.

He once bought a Mercedes-Benz and traded it for a secretary’s Chevrolet so she could sell it to fulfill her dream of buying a house in Palm Springs, where she retired after a serious kidney operation.

When Tribune told Nathanson that a car of his choice came with his job at KTLA, he settled on a Honda Accord. And he never gave in to Diller’s prodding to buy a suit befitting a high-level Fox executive. “On many occasions I have told him a plumber dresses better,” says Diller.

The day Diller announced his resignation from Fox in an executive meeting with Murdoch, Nathanson, who customarily wears sweaters, showed up in a tuxedo.

“He still wears the same clothes from high school,” said brother Marc, who is the polar opposite. A serious art collector, Marc Nathanson has a signature white tuxedo for black-tie affairs and holds fancy Democratic fund-raisers at his Beverly Hills home. Greg says Marc wore suits as a kid and bought him the only one he owns today.

“He’s the antithesis of Hollywood,” Marc says. “He doesn’t seek out publicity, never uses his friendships to get things. He’s not interested in politics and says exactly what’s on his mind. Since he was born, he has moved to the beat of a different drummer.”

That’s one reason why people like Murdoch and Diller trust him.

“Greg once took me to lunch with Murdoch, who was looking for advice on how to merchandise Fox like Warner Bros. and Disney do with their stores,” Marc said. “It was so funny because Greg doesn’t know anything about that. But Murdoch likes to run ideas by him because he knows he’ll get an honest answer.”