Brandwynne Proving She’s Good News for KTLA Ratings

When Marcia Brandwynne took the reins of “The KTLA Morning News” as executive producer last January, the show’s ratings had slipped and morale was low among an anchor team known for its cheeky camaraderie. The staff had been through a rocky few months with an interim steward following the departure of longtime executive producer Joel Tator in October 1998.

“I thought I could bring a lively sensibility to it, and I thought that my job would be figuring out what their sensibility was,” says Brandwynne, a Los Angeles TV news veteran on both sides of the camera. “I saw it as a grand challenge.”

For sure, the job description tapped into Brandwynne’s various wells of experience, from her years in news to the comedy skills developed while working as Carol Burnett’s producing partner to the gift for mentoring that she honed while teaching journalism courses at USC in the mid-1980s.

Ten months into her tenure, the Nielsen numbers are moving up and Brandwynne is settling into the highly competitive world of television’s morning news shows. She’s credited with bringing renewed energy and focus to the show that has become a local a.m. fixture, in addition to spawning dozens of imitators nationwide. Notably, the “Morning News” ratings growth during the last year has come as viewership of local 7-9 a.m. rival “Good Day, L.A.” on Fox’s KTTV has also surged.

“She understands television,” KTLA news director Jeff Wald says of Brandwynne. “She just gets it.”

The reinvigoration of “Morning News” has been a rebirth for Brandwynne in the TV news business. She was a top anchor and producer in the 1980s, but after a seven-year detour into Hollywood as head of Burnett’s Kalola Productions, Brandwynne found it hard to break back in to the much-changed mainstream TV news arena.

“It’s hard to get back on the elevator once you’ve gotten off,” Brandwynne says. “I really was in a pickle.”

She produced a series of interview and on-the-road specials for Home and Garden Television, and she did a three-month stint as a fill-in host of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” among other odd jobs.

But she was still job hunting last year when KTLA’s Wald called to ask for a favor. The two had never worked together, but they knew of each other. Wald asked Brandwynne to give him a detailed critique of the “Morning News.” Shortly after she delivered her assessment, he offered her the job.

“I knew as a performer that they were off track,” Brandwynne says. “When you’re on TV, you need a producer who is a good mirror--someone you can trust to not let you look bad.”

Earning that trust, she says knowingly, takes hard work. Brandwynne lives five minutes away from the KTLA lot in Hollywood, and her 12-hour workdays usually begin at home about 5:30 a.m. Within an hour, she’ll be sitting in the back of a dimly lit control room, skimming through a stack of newspapers with a marking pen in hand.

“Live TV shows eat up material like a voracious dragon,” she says. “The remote control is a tough master.”

Indeed, veteran “Morning News” staffers say Brandwynne’s biggest contribution to the show has been raising the bar for producers, pushing them to stay ahead of the curve in covering newsmakers and trends. She’s tried to bring a little more weight to the show’s feature reports--such as a 20-part series on public education during the past May sweeps--but without curtailing any of the “Morning News” trademark goofiness.

During a recent broadcast, Brandwynne becomes a sideline cheerleader whisper-shouting “Yes!” and “Good job” when anchors Barbara Beck and Carlos Amezcua manage to cut through the prepared talking points in an eight-minute interview with presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain. But at the post-show wrap-up meeting, she’s just as effusive over how well a series of “Lone Ranger” trivia segments played out, and how the anchors brought out the humor with ad-libs and their own memories of the masked man.

“The most interesting thing on TV is to see people thinking--not mouthing--but to see people listening, talking and reacting without affect,” Brandwynne says. “These anchors just need to let go and have a conversation. My job is to find interesting stuff for them to talk about.”

Brandwynne’s on-air experience has been an invaluable asset in helping to find the right groove with the “Morning News”’ on-air crew, most of whom have been working together since the show debuted in 1991. Yet the TV news landscape has changed dramatically since Brandwynne, a Brooklyn native who grew up in Tucson, got her start in the early 1970s after graduating from San Francisco State.

“The rhythm of a newscast is so much quicker today. It is produced much more for the ear,” she says. “There’s so much information coming at people. They just want someone to tell them the world’s not ending.”

Early in her career, Brandwynne recalls being told by a TV station manager that women would never be on the air as news anchors “because they didn’t have authority in their voices.”

But times changed and she did land on-air slots with several San Francisco outlets, making a name for herself there before heading south in 1980 to KCBS-TV Channel 2 (then KNXT-TV). Brandwynne and another local rising star, Connie Chung, eventually made headlines as the nation’s first all-female news anchor team.

As a free agent in 1984, Brandwynne opted to take over the news operation at then-independent KTTV-TV as managing editor and principal anchor. She was out of a job two years later, however, when Rupert Murdoch bought the station to form the backbone of the Fox network.

But having a regular presence on TV has its advantages. Carol Burnett had long been a fan, and she called out of the blue in 1987 to offer Brandwynne a job as head of her production company.

Together, the pair produced a handful of TV pilots, specials and short-lived series. Brandwynne also wrote and produced the 1993 Ted Danson/Whoopi Goldberg film, “Made in America.”

‘Some of it was good, some of it wasn’t,” Brandwynne says of her track record as a comedy producer. “But I couldn’t buy those years now. I became much more attuned to what is good comedy. When I see it here, I just know when it’s going to pop.”

Her entry into the world of movie and TV production came just as unexpectedly as the offer from KTLA’s Wald to run the “Morning News.”

“I’ve had a funny path. Everything I’ve done professionally has been sink-or-swim, including this job,” Brandwynne says. “For me, it’s always been a case of, ‘Use whatever you got.’ ”