I’ve seen Barry Diller four times in public. First at a restaurant in Sag Harbor, two more times at Manhattan restaurant Michael’s, and last at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
I knew who he was, he not me, but at Hoover I walked up and shook his hand to tell him what a big admirer I was of his many business achievements. To this day, I wish I’d asked why the longtime Democrat was at right-leaning Hoover, but this was Barry Diller. Everyone wants to talk to him.
Which in a sense explains this review of his excellent new memoir, Who Knew. There’s no need to lead with a description of who Diller is simply because readers already know who he is. That they know who Barry Diller is speaks to why readers should drink deeply of memoirs like those of Diller simply because in an entertainment industry sense, they’re arguably the last of their kind.
As Diller writes halfway through Who Knew, the five major film studios somehow “absorbed television, cassette recorders, compact discs, all forms of distribution; whatever disruption came their way, they bought or corralled.” That the movie studios were on top for so long very much helps to explain why we know Diller. He famously ran Paramount from 1974-1984, Fox from 1984 to 1992, and those two success stories alone make Diller an essential read. He prospered in Hollywood when Hollywood was great.
Fast forward to the present, can you the reader name or pick out of a crowd the studio heads of today? Tick tock, tick tock.
What’s fun is that Diller gets it. While he was certainly himself one of the truly compelling entertainment players from the days of old, hence my read of his book, he properly understands that the past is the past for a reason, and it’s because things are better now. Which means Diller doesn’t dwell on a seemingly grander past for Hollywood when everyone from outside Hollywood, New York and media knew who those in it were, but he does correctly sense that the “Industry” of old was a lot more interesting.
While he’s dismissive of economic nostalgists, of “old folks” who “yearn for the ‘old days,’” he adds that he doesn’t know “anyone today who’s having any fun” in this “new technologically-dominated ‘movie’ business.” It’s seemingly a way of saying what this reviewer believes, that while progress is brilliant, and MUCH better than the alternative, the new industry isn’t producing Barry Diller, Warren Beatty, Dino De Laurentis, and Robert Stigwood (the music impresario who would ship his Rolls Royce out to Los Angeles from London) types. They’re doing something else. What that is, it’s difficult to know.
In a reading and memoir sense, it’s too bad. Seriously, who among today’s Hollywood names will we really want to read the memoir of?
Which explains the admonition to readers about enjoying memoirs like those of Diller’s while they can, and doing so in recognition of the non-answer to the question of who is running the major studios anymore. Instead of the giants of old, the studios are but bits of the much bigger and more lucrative, and surely better known. While the studios evaded disruption in the 20th century, in the 21st Netflix, Amazon and Apple ended the “long period of total dominance” enjoyed by the studios.
It speaks in a very real sense not just to the genius of Diller, but also perhaps to a little bit of the luck that he enjoyed along the way; luck which is surely an effect of genius and endless effort. Diller doesn’t hide from the fact that once out of Fox (having asked Rupert Murdoch about ownership, he was told “this is a family business and you’re not a member”), his natural instinct was to get back to the industry he knew, albeit as an owner very much controlling his destiny in ways he hadn’t while working under Gulf + Western’s Charlie Bluhdorn (whom Diller thought a great deal of) and running Paramount, and Fox while working for Murdoch. About Murdoch, there’s more to be said in a bit. Diller writes of him in reverent fashion.
For now, it should be said that upon exit from Fox, Diller quite unexpectedly pivoted to a television-shopping unknown (at least to the New York – Los Angeles crowd) based on a tip from longtime girlfriend (and eventual wife) Diane von Furstenberg. The great Michael Ovitz, author himself of an excellent Hollywood memoir (review here) that, like Diller’s, I didn’t want to end, said to Diller about his interest in a company based in West Chester, PA that “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard – and you’ll never be heard from again.”
More realistically, it was a signal that Diller was morphing from rich and successful businessman to entrepreneur. There’s a huge difference as both Ovitz and Diller could attest, and it’s rooted in a contrarian state of mind (as opposed to choice) that how things are presently being done are wholly at odds with how they should be done. Entrepreneurs can’t not, which is why Ovitz, Ron Meyer and others started an agency when “everyone” knew William Morris would crush them, and it’s why Diller saw growth potential in television-based shopping where others traveling between New York and Los Angeles didn’t.
Yet he was still Diller. And Diller was media, which perhaps points to some of the luck that he wouldn’t wholly dismiss. While he realized the potential of QVC and the possibilities related to television screens “interacting with customers,” and while he quickly excelled in the medium via among other things von Furstenberg (she sold $1.3 million worth of merchandise in the first hour on QVC in the 1990s…), he couldn’t avert his gaze from the media that still mattered such that with QVC as his vehicle, he made oh-so-close runs at both Paramount and CBS.
Luckily neither succeeded, which is seemingly another instructive point about entrepreneurs. There’s lots of failure, or loss of face (particularly in media) on the way to grand achievements. That would be the case for Diller in spades. After the majority owners of QVC (the Roberts family – Comcast) took QVC back by blocking Diller and John Malone’s planned acquisition of CBS, Diller found himself trying to make sense of another somewhat forgotten television station property of Malone’s, Silver King.
As part of taking on Silver King for Malone whom Diller describes as “by far the smartest man in media,” he was adamant about gaining control of Home Shopping Network (HSN), which had even less of a reputation than QVC. By this time they, as in the giants of the media world that Diller had exited, really thought he was nuts. But once again, that’s the point. The good ideas are never obvious. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Diller grew up in Beverly Hills as part of a very well-to-do, but very distant and dysfunctional family that had members in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. They were residential real estate developers profiting in a big way from the boom born of strivers coming to California from all over the United States. So much immigration takes place within the United States, and California’s wealth reveals the genius of just that kind of migration better than any other U.S. state.
Family life for Diller was luxurious (he’s clear that right up into adulthood, when he was working in the mailroom at William Morris, he always had money such that he never had to think about it, or cash his William Morris paychecks), but also sad. He writes of how “my father never fathered me, and my brother never brothered me,” but that same brother did beat the hell out of his younger brother in routine fashion. Diller’s mother was beautiful, yet similarly distant. She too couldn’t really be bothered to mother him.
As for his life away from home, it was arguably even more luxurious. Diller was on a first name basis with the whole Danny Thomas (at the time, the biggest of big television stars) family, and called Mr. Thomas when he needed a way into William Morris. Diller was arrested in his teens for joy riding, albeit in the car of Lew Wasserman, the entertainment industry’s Michael Jordan for the longest time.
About his father, whom he became closer to later in life, Diller writes that “I don’t think he took pleasure in making money…He wasn’t particularly ambitious or charged up about life and its possibilities.” The bet here is that while his father was good at his work, he hated it. And in hating it, the misery stretched to family life. So many memoirs new and old feature troubled relationships with parents, and the speculation here is that future memoirs (fewer, if you believe this reviewer, from entertainment) will reference troubled family life much less, and the reason why is that thanks to the very automation that needlessly scares people, we humans are increasingly able to do for work what mirrors our unique skills and intelligence.
While Diller doesn’t write in lengthy fashion about his relationship with Diane von Furstenberg’s children, what he does write indicates a very happy relationship with both that occurred in stretches since his relationship with von Furstenberg had an interruption. What’s the difference, as in why the closeness between Diller and his adopted family, closeness that has him passing substantial amounts of his enormous fortune on to them? The speculation here is that unlike his own father, Diller’s in love with his work, in the day-to-day of it. As he writes about his early days at ABC, “All the pent-up ambition I never thought I possessed shot out of me like a cork from a champagne bottle.” While the wording is a little bit trite, it’s uplifting in the sense that Diller found his vocation, and in finding it, saw his own, previously suffocated genius up close. Which requires a look back again. Parents are happier and much more involved with their kids today. The view here is that the happiness, kindness and involvement is rooted in much greater happiness on the job.
While Diller’s vision and mind are much revered, he wasn’t a good student growing up. In his words, “I wasn’t able to get interested in school.” Much more useful for broad discussion, Diller recalls how he “hated then and still do the idea I had to study something I had no interest in.” Amen.
It’s not politically correct to say, but the education part of school is so pointless. The worth is in the going, in the friends met, sports played, practical skills learned. Worse, the education doesn’t even prepare kids for the future as evidenced by the incredible economic dynamism we see in the U.S. all the time, and that not infrequently is authored by brilliant college dropouts not following their majors, but inventing all new industries that there weren’t majors for. There’s little education in education, and that’s true even at the highest levels.
Diller as previously mentioned writes about how long it took for the Hollywood studios to be shrunk by Schumpeterian gales of destruction, but what about education? The “best” schools still teach the same things they’ve always taught, and most troubling of all, they’re lionized for it. Which is just a comment that realistically the only reasonably telling thing about education in a career sense isn’t what you learned, but the school you got into. See Diller’s comment yet again. Imagine an education system that never really changes, and that forces otherwise smart people into courses that make them appear dumb. How awful, and worse, how cruel. School should be interesting, but for all too many it’s not, and it’s not because the one-note nature of it makes it a daily embarrassment for otherwise smart people who lack interest in the very narrow and highly irrelevant subjects touched on in the classroom.
The happy news is that there’s relief on the way. As is written here repeatedly in other columns and reviews, progress is defined not by what we learn, but by what we no longer need to learn. With AI having taken so much of the drudgery (homework, tests, term papers) out of schoolwork (that is, unless teachers are ok with students having machines doing, solving and writing for them), teachers at public and private schools are perhaps finally being disrupted themselves such that they’ll have to find all new ways to teach, including hopefully ending mindless but time-consuming homework assignments.
What’s crucial is that Diller is a rejection of the popular narrative about school preparing people for the future. He writes that “the only thing that roused my curiosity was the entertainment industry,” but there’s realistically no way to teach the latter. Seriously, how to teach what is so human and instinctual and at times, cutthroat?
Diller is also a rejection of the popular conservative view that elite, invariably left-wing colleges and universities aren’t teaching the skills necessary for the working world. Nonsense. Humans adapt, or they don’t. And if they don’t, it’s not for lack of schooling. Diller never attended college (though I could swear reading in the past that somewhere along the way he briefly attended UCLA?), and he recalls that typing and shorthand were “the most productive formal” schooling that he had. Yes! It’s worth adding that his eventual #2 at ABC (Michael Eisner) attended Oberlin. Does anyone think that at Oberlin, the paragon of smug, excessive campus left-wingery, Eisner took business classes there that set him up to eventually turn Disney into the entertainment behemoth it became? In time, the truth about education’s practical worthlessness will be more openly acknowledged.
Back to Diller, it wasn’t just a lack of parenting and school that made him sad, he also had to carry with him knowledge of his own homosexuality at a time when it wasn’t ok to be homosexual. About his childhood and teen years, he recalls that mentions of homosexuality “were either a scathing insult, a disparaging joke, or a hushed reference.” He adds, “what an awfully cruel thing it is for anyone to be tortured for something that is in no way an elective choice.”
Please stop and think about Diller’s teen experience relative to what life is like today for young people. While homosexuality in Diller’s day was “like an incriminating document in the hands of a blackmailer,” nowadays young people are out to the extent that they choose to be, and to some degree mainstream?
About the question, no one is saying that the out and proud are best friends with the quarterback, but young people are public today about what they were formerly private about. And popular despite. While Diller even played football for a time at Beverly Hills High, nowadays kids can be who they are with a great deal less fear.
Diller “came out” to the public in Who Knew, but his sexual preferences were hardly a secret. What’s important from this reviewer’s perspective is that if Diller were a teen today, there would be no hiding, nor the certain agony associated with it. This requires a lot of attention mainly because parents with little sense of history presently find themselves under the spell of Jonathan Haidt, and his much less-than-insightful “insight” that the young people of today are the “anxious generation.” Total nonsense.
Seriously, parents would do well to read Diller’s book about his teen years alone to retrieve their good minds from the spell of Haidt, and his belief that technology of the iPhone variety has made harsh what used to be blissful. Except that it never was. Childhood has always been defined by the cruelty of popularity or not, and anxiety about it all. Diller’s Hollywood has produced too many movies and television shows to count that mirrored this truth. The big difference today relative to the past is that there’s documentation of everything, study of everything, and more. Childhood is hard, period. The bet here is that it’s much better today for precisely the reason that life was so difficult for Diller given his highly combustible secret.
As for Haidt’s impossibly trite observations about social media making kids depressed owing to them seeing glamorous, wholly unattainable lifestyles all day and every day, Diller has an answer. For him, it was television that everyone watched (My Three Sons, Father Knows Best, etc.) owing to the lack of options. He writes of these “perfect white families that had no complexity, no trauma or real trouble.” In his estimation, the portrayal of families on television “was as damaging an influence on children as Instagram-perfect pictures are for today’s teens.” The bet here is that neither so-called “problem” caused much damage, but that childhood is simply hard.
Taking the sexuality angle further, while at ABC Diller created the network’s Movie of the Week, to great success. Among others, Diller helmed the release of That Certain Summer in 1972, it was a serious movie of the week about a son of divorced parents dealing with the fact that his father had a live-in boyfriend in San Francisco. That it was a drama goes without saying, which hopefully helps readers see as the point: homosexuality no longer requires dramatic treatment simply because it’s no longer criminal in the eyes of the law, but much more importantly in the eyes of the public. Translated, the world is better, much better than it was. And childhood, while always difficult simply because it’s childhood, must be better than it was. Who knows, maybe phones and social media have helped mainstream what Diller formerly had to hide. If so, all the better.
Diller as mentioned started out in the William Morris mail room, which wasn’t so much a mail room in the literal sense as it was a low-cost way for the agents to observe in a work setting those who would, or would not measure up. Diller had no interest in agenting, but took great pleasure in reading endless files that equipped him with substantial knowledge of the entertainment industry’s history.
Eventually he caught on with ABC executive Leonard Goldberg. A well-timed firing resulted in Goldberg’s promotion to ABC programming head, which meant Diller was soon enough working in New York for an ascendant Goldberg at what Diller describes as an “also-ran network.” Translated, ABC was a somewhat distant #3, but this proved a blessing: with less to lose, there was great openness to risk taking at ABC, risk taking that included Diller’s Movie of the Week.
Goldberg thankfully wasn’t too hierarchical such that Diller, though nominally an assistant, was working like an executive. This included negotiating with titans like Lew Wasserman, who previously knew Diller as an aimless Beverly Hills rich kid. Wasserman quickly taught him how things worked when Diller pitched him a deal between ABC and Wasserman’s MCA. The would-be mogul wasn’t quite ready. On the way out, Wasserman told him “next time you try this, be fully prepared to call the whole deal off if you don’t get what you asked for.” There’s education, and then there’s education.
Arguably the greatest aspect of Diller’s real-world education was and were things that couldn’t be taught as is. In the ABC he came up at during the late 1960s and early 1970s, focus groups and market research were very much in vogue. Not to Diller. He just instinctually didn’t fall for backwards looking research. In his words, it “simply isn’t possible” to “predict the public’s appetite.” Yes!
Much more important, Diller writes that “Data can tell you what has happened, not what can or will happen.” This is so important, and a pithy reminder that brilliant as AI is and will be, it will never, ever replace humans in total. That’s because it’s a look back to what has happened, not a look ahead. Dynamism will still be found in obstreperous sorts like Diller, Jensen Huang and Jeff Bezos feeling wholly unsatisfied with how things are, and forcing change. AI’s roll will be in speeding this process along as opposite thinkers employ machinery informed by the present and past to do the basic and advanced work, while they do the visionary work. The future is bright!
The good news is that market realities confirmed Diller’s instinct that the future would have to be discovered, not focus grouped. He did this first with the Movie of the Week. Diller writes that it was #1 for 24 straight weeks. More important was that “it had been so improbable, so risky, so discounted, with everyone predicting failure, that I was the only one associated with it.”
Reading of Diller’s disdain for market research (“Why do you pay attention to these research people?”), it had me speculating that Diller must loathe economists. Talk about people who think they can forecast what can’t be. With Diller’s book, as is the case with so many interesting memoirs, I found myself wishing he’d commented a great deal more on so much more.
The main thing is that at ABC the former high school vampire (up all night, sleeping much of the day) with no real ambition or direction was soon enough head of programming himself at ABC, and living a bi-coastal life at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and the Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Funny about the Bel-Air and the status-focused ways of a hotel that does so much entertainment industry business, on a trip to Los Angeles the news broke that Diller had been unexpectedly hired by Bluhdorn to run Paramount. Diller took countless calls poolside at the Bel-Air, and upon completion of the endless conversations with well-wishers, found himself moved from his usual studio suite at the Bel-Air to the North Cottage.
Diller arrived to a Paramount that was grand in reputation and recent success, but with a bare cupboard. Worse, he arrived to a Godfather II that was five hours long, and “almost possible to follow.” Which on its own is an economic lesson: so many are so worried about stolen intellectual property and stolen business ideas. They needn’t worry. Most movies are awful until they’re occasionally fixed by those with the rarest of rare skills. There’s no stealing good ideas simply because so many of the best ideas only seem that way after the fact. Out of a disaster emerged a movie that is widely considered the best ever made, and even better than the first Godfather.
Diller admits he stumbled quite a bit in the early days at Paramount, but luckily Bluhdorn (if there’s not a book about him, there should be!) stuck by him long enough for the ship to be righted. Major hits included Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Airplane! The first two offer more lessons about how hard it is to be see ahead. At the premiere screening for Saturday Night Fever at Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre, a publicity person sidled up to Diller to tell him “Travolta’s the problem; he’s clearly a television person.” Whoops! Diller admits that “We thought Grease was going to be a disaster.” It turns out it just “wasn’t a screening room film.”
As for Airplane!, Diller writes that its making was “one of those rare instances where the dailies proved prophetic.” Except that even with this one, there was no way of knowing. Tim Matheson famously was offered the lead, but turned it down to make 1941, a Steven Spielberg film. Which means Matheson did the right thing, only for right to be wrong. The future in business is opaque. Always.
Which brings us to Fox, and the subsequent arrival of Rupert Murdoch. What’s great about Diller is that he’s not terribly political. This is important in consideration of how many left leaning readers will read Diller’s book hoping to find out what a bad guy Murdoch is. They’ll be disappointed. Diller writes that “the hot bath of Rupert Murdoch’s enthusiasm is something quite extraordinary.”
After that, the energy, the desire. They were going to build a fourth network when, in the words of Diller, “No one had tried to build a new network for thirty years, and that attempt had failed miserably.” Most heavily-in-debt owners (as Murdoch was) would have rejected Diller’s fourth network because of the costs, but Diller reports that Murdoch “didn’t flinch about the costs; he saw only the opportunities.” As Murdoch put it to Diller, “What a great adventure! We’re betting the company!” They were doing so despite a broad perception that Fox “would fail miserably.” Sure, but entrepreneurs once again can’t not.
It remarkably took the Fox network only 87 weeks to break even, but they were perilous weeks. Somehow Murdoch kept his wits about him despite banks calling in his various loans. Yet he persisted, only for Home Alone to save them and the studio from bankruptcy. Diller writes that “Rupert had been going around the world to bank after bank to persuade them to not call in huge loans he’d taken out over the years to finance his acquisitions.” Notable about what Murdoch was enduring, Diller adds that “he never complained or tried to lay off the blame.” Looking back on Murdoch, Diller adds that “Over the years my risk appetite has grown a lot, but I’ll never be in his league.”
At book’s end Diller laments inequality, says it must be reined in, and it read as a false note precisely because of his commentary about Murdoch. People become financially unequal not by making the world worse, but by improving it against brutal odds. Inequality is not a pejorative, rather it’s the surest sign of progress.
In addition to film hits like Home Alone, Fox the network could lay claim to shows like The Simpsons that Diller confirms “built Fox.” The unequal are progress personified, and frequently save us. The problem with Fox, however, was that Diller wanted to be an owner. Except that he wasn’t a family member as previously mentioned. Diller resigned.
All of which led to his time in the wilderness. Funny there is that at times Diller wasn’t in the wilderness, but didn’t know it. An in the wilderness with NeXT Steve Jobs asked Diller to be on the board of an unknown company called Pixar, but Diller couldn’t envision the genius of Toy Story. He turned Jobs down…And while Diller sensed an evolution of the proverbial screen into something much more, no less than John Malone told Diller that they should turn down Steve Case’s offer of 25 percent of AOL…To be clear here, Case’s offer preceded his company’s share price going to the moon! No one knows anything. Malone thought the company was “overpriced.”
It brings us closer to the present. The “obvious” moves like buying CBS and Paramount clearly were not in retrospect, while the bad ideas like joining the board of Pixar and taking 25% of a severely undervalued AOL turned out to be the good ones. What’s important from Diller’s perspective is that the obvious acquisitions luckily didn’t pan out, because if they had, “I’d never have become an internet entrepreneur.” Which is what Diller did become.
The irrelevancy (to the Hollywood crowd at least) that was HSN proved Diller’s entrepreneurial vehicle on the path to it becoming IAC, or InterActiveCorp. Over the years that’s amounted to 155 different transactions. There were some old media successes (USA Network, Sci Fi Channel), but more importantly, major leaps into the internet world. This included the intrepid purchase of Expedia from Paul Allen. Notable here is that the acquisition occurred right after 9/11, and at a time when IAC could have backed out but for a boisterous assertion from a IAC employee that “If there’s life, there’s travel.” Yes! It’s always darkest before dawn. The world and the U.S. recovered from tragedy, and continues to recover from all manner of body blows.
Diller has prospered in this world. While he became “rich” in the bicoastal sense via ABC, Paramount and Fox, he became multi-billionaire rich in the internet space as he morphed from a businessman to his true self, an entrepreneur. Which may explain where the bigger than life types from Hollywood migrated to? Certainly Ovitz did as Diller has in taking his talents to northern over southern California, but where did the personalities go? Diller doesn’t say, and it would be interesting to ask him.
What he does say in a wonderful book full of insights is that “I always thought conventional wisdom was…well, conventional, and therefore uninteresting.” Amen. Over and over again. That’s why people like Diller are the personification of progress. It’s not that they don’t go with the lame, same flow, it’s that they can’t do what’s accepted wisdom. They’re the “criminals” in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and in modern times they’re the kind of people who make a great world better and better.
