In 1986, media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought 20th Century Fox and a host of TV stations, including what would become Fox Broadcasting’s flagship station, WNYW in New York, N.Y. Among the programs he planned to produce for WNYW was a nightly news show modeled after CBS’s 60 Minutes. Murdoch cherry-picked most of the show’s staff from his various print holdings, including The Sun in London, the supermarket tabloid Star magazine and the New York Post. The reporters were hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, scoop-hungry veterans of newspapers. None had television experience. To fill that void, he hired John Tomlin ’74, then a 32-year-old independent producer who had won two Emmys as a cameraman for a New York news show. Having heard from a friend at WNYW that Murdoch needed a producer right away, Tomlin found himself in the right place at the right time.

“Rupert’s vision was to make it like 60 Minutes five days a week, only he hired a bunch of guys who worked at Star magazine and the New York Post,” Tomlin says. “And I’m talking about ‘Headless Body Found in Topless Bar’ New York Post. It was going to be a little different than 60 Minutes.” They called the show A Current Affair.

Tomlin was a fast editor with a sharp eye and ear for a good story. It helped, of course, that he could operate a camera well. He wasn’t quite 29 when he won his first Emmy in 1979 shooting for 7:30 Magazine, a news show produced by CBS’s New York affiliate. He won his second Emmy in 1980, filming crop dusters in upstate New York for the show. In the most dangerous shot—another cameraman died trying to copy it a year later—Tomlin lay on his back, camera pointing skyward. The plane, engine roaring, swooped over him, practically grazing the camera. The feat was typical Tomlin. Among the anchors on that show was a young, up-and-coming Bill O’Reilly, now host of the wildly popular The O’Reilly Factor on cable network Fox News. “I remember Tomlin in a helicopter, with just his seat belt on,” O’Reilly says, recounting a story Tomlin shot about wild burros wreaking havoc in the Grand Canyon. “Tomlin’s leaning out of the helicopter shooting these things on the side of the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t believe it. But the guy would do anything to get the shot. He was fearless.”

A year later, in 1981, with a young wife and a 6-month-old daughter at home, Tomlin quit his cameraman job at the CBS affiliate. He wanted to be the one calling the shots, not just a silent grunt behind the camera, responding to events. He demonstrated again what is known in show business as timing. MTV and Nickelodeon both were born in 1981. Video killed the radio star, and cable television was ascendant. As a producer, he created shows during the next four years for Disney, TBS and companies that syndicated TV programs. He shot and edited segments for a celebrity gossip show about soap opera stars. He enjoyed working on TBS’s American Professionals most, though. The show was a day-in-the-life look at ordinary Americans and their jobs: an oil-rig worker on the Gulf of Mexico, an NBA referee. He relished the opportunity to travel the country and take his camera into people’s kitchens.
“What I learned is that every family in America has the same condiments on their table,” he says of American Professionals. “They all go to church every week; it’s a big part of their lives. We forget that here.” By “here” Tomlin means New York City, which he still feels is a little too self-obsessed. Shooting American Professionals reminded him of his roots in Concord. The lifeblood of the area was the Cannon textile mills in nearby Kannapolis where Tomlin, a doctor’s son, worked for a summer in high school. He majored in communication at NC State, and for two years after graduating, he was a jack-of-all-trades at Elizabethtown radio station WBLA-AM: news anchor, news director, reporter, ad salesman and engineer. He then turned to TV, going north to Boston University for a master’s degree in broadcast journalism.
“There was something about that medium that you can’t do with radio,” says Tomlin, who speaks without a trace of a Southern accent. “You can talk about something all you want, but you can’t show a picture of it.”

Tomlin went to New York City and stayed because opportunity is aplenty in the media capital of the world. Though he has worked there the past 26 years, he has lived in the suburbs to the north.

Now 53, he has a healthy paunch and a ruddy face that’s offset by a small dimple in his chin and pale blue eyes. These days, he spends most of his time at the offices of his production company, Hurricane Entertainment Corp., which he launched about 10 years ago with his co-producer from A Current Affair, Bob Young, a brash Englishman and Murdoch veteran who was yin to Tomlin’s yang. Though Hurricane Entertainment’s offices are in a small building overlooking the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y., a half-hour drive from midtown Manhattan, Tomlin is focused on the city with his latest project. After more than 25 years producing TV shows, he’s trying to bring TV to the Web. In April he launched Vidocity, a Web site that streams short video reviews of restaurants, bars, shops and events around New York City packaged as a show that looks like it would be at home on VH1 or MTV.
Tomlin’s idea is simple: He wants to let audiences view television-quality programs whenever they want. “The TV set-top box is dumb,” he says. “It doesn’t know what you want. It doesn’t filter. At this point the network programming is incomplete. You can’t watch Desperate Housewives whenever you want. Why should you watch it only when some guy in Hollywood wants you to watch it?” Tomlin sees the limits of TiVo, which allows people to record shows onto a hard drive, because it only works if a show is on TV. YouTube and other online video clearinghouses are amazing distribution networks, but the quality of video is often poor. In essence, he wants to create a Web-based show that gets enough viewers to drive advertising and establish the Internet, not television stations, as the distribution channel for original content.

It seems like a tall order given the number of Web ventures that crash and burn. Then again, A Current Affair would have crashed and burned, too, had its reporters and producers not found a distinct style that resonated with viewers.

When Young and Tomlin joined forces to produce A Current Affair, they made an improbable team. Young, who is 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds, speaks a mile a minute in his British accent. Tomlin has the build of the offensive lineman he was in high school. And he isn’t a talker. Young recalls a coast-to-coast trip taken in near-total silence. “The stewardess would ask if he wanted a drink and he’d say, ‘Jack Daniels on the rocks.’ Later, he’d say, ‘I’ll take the beef.’ The next time he’d say something we’d be at the Hertz counter, and he’d say, ‘My name’s Tomlin. You got a car for me.’ And that would be it for the whole trip.”

A Current Affair debuted in July 1986 in the 11:30 p.m. slot opposite ABC’s Nightline. Serious journalism quickly fell by the wayside. “Rupert thought we were too outrageous, and he made us do serious stuff, but the ratings went right down,” Young says. “So he handed the insane asylum back to the inmates.” On Nightline, Ted Koppel would interview the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. On A Current Affair, Maury Povich, the show’s deep-voiced, cigar-smoking anchor with the swept-back hair, would do a story about the New York home of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines known for her shoe collection. The house was filled with disco lights and gaudy furniture, the show reported. It was noisy also, in no small part because Marcos loved to sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

The inane detail seems like the kind of fodder that gossip Web sites obsess over today. But 20 years ago, TV journalism was, above all else, sober. “We came up with some wacky stuff because the reporters didn’t know what the rules in television were,” Tomlin says. “By 1986, TV news was 30 years old, and people were set in their ways. We didn’t have that.” The producers had a newspaper reporter’s desire to break news and come up with original, if imaginative, programming. And they had newspaper reporters on staff to do the legwork. “One of the big differences between TV and newspapers was that in newspapers you need to get the story [and] in TV you read the paper to get the story,” Young says. “John was the exception; he understood we needed to get the story.”

The upstart show’s demanding daily schedule made for a frenetic, often frantic, work life. Tomlin would rise around 5:30 a.m. He was often the first to arrive at work, though it wasn’t unusual to find one of the reporters passed out in the office after a night of heavy drinking. While reporters were knocking back gin and tonics at 2 p.m. at the Racing Club, a bar across from the WNYW studios, Tomlin was editing and writing scripts. Among the staff of A Current Affair, Tomlin was the stoic, hardworking parent. Those who worked with him describe him as a stubborn perfectionist. Only after wrapping up would he enjoy a Bass beer or two before heading home.

A Current Affair wedded the worlds of information and entertainment, introducing lights, camera and action to stories once confined to the colorful pages of tabloid newspapers. Producers staged re-enactments, much to the chagrin of traditional TV journalists who believed that re-creating the past was dubious and misleading. Anchors like Povich replaced the solemn and omniscient tones of the evening news anchor with irreverent skepticism, a presage of today’s cable-news anchors. Aggressive reporters dug up chilling videotapes and tell-all confessionals that boosted ratings. The show, which also covered its share of manmade and natural disasters, soon was bumped to an earlier 7:30 p.m. slot and was aired in more cities.

A review in The New York Times published three weeks after the show debuted called it “tabloid journalism at its best. It is zippy and knowledgeable, and when it falls on its face, at least it’s in there trying.”

In Aug. 26, 1986, six days after the Times review, a murder shook New York City. The body of 18- year-old Jennifer Levin was found under a tree in Central Park. The story made headlines. The main suspect, 19-year-old Robert Chambers, was a socially striving, smartly dressed prep school kid. The tabloids dubbed him “The Preppy Killer.” A Current Affair followed the story closely for a year and a half. Tomlin helped change the TV landscape in the process and, with it, his career. Before a jury could return a verdict, Chambers pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in mid-April 1988 and began a 15-year sentence. A Current Affair stayed with the story. A month later, Tomlin and Young invited a few newspaper reporters to the show’s Manhattan studio. The lights were dimmed, and they put a videocassette into a VCR. The homemade video was grainy, hardly television quality, but clear enough. It showed Chambers, surrounded by teenage girls in bras and panties, holding a doll. The time stamp was December 1987, just weeks before his trial had begun. In a falsetto pitch, he says, “My name is . . . ,” and pops the head off the doll. Then his voice trails off as he says, “Oops, I think I’ve killed it.”

“We showed [the reporters] the video, and their eyes popped out of their bloody heads,” Young recalls. The next day almost every paper in the city ran a story about the footage. A Current Affair aired the video that night, and in New York City, where the murder was front-page news for months, one in three people with a television watched the show. A few days later the Times ran an article headlined “A New Age of Television Tastelessness.” The crisis of the day centered not just on the airing of an amateur video—today’s TV viewers might wonder what the big deal is—but how that video was obtained. A Current Affair had paid an acquaintance of Chambers $10,000 for it. Tomlin encouraged the hunt for the video, found by a reporter, and he and others were eager to do what they needed to air it. The transaction is considered to be the first time a news show paid for amateur footage.

The impact of the show’s coverage of the preppy murder was not lost on the family of Jennifer Levin, whose parents had stumbled upon an episode of A Current Affair shortly after their daughter’s murder. The show staged a re-enactment of the crime based on Chambers’ confession that his “rough sex” with Levin in Central Park had led to her death. “I watched, horrified, as two actors pawed at each other,” Ellen Levin, Jennifer’s mother, told a congressional committee in 1998. “The male suggested that they go into the park. Losing all sense of sanity, I ran to my terrace on the 29th floor screaming for Jen not to go with him. It was the closest I ever came to suicide. I stopped watching television, disconnected my cable, and became a recluse for many months.”

Despite the family’s trauma, the controversy of the show and the tape in particular boosted ratings. Jim Dauphinee, the man responsible for producing The Oprah Winfrey Show, took notice. “Along comes this take-no-prisoners type of show,” he says. “They were a bunch of cowboys out there, doing stuff no one was doing, and they were doing it very well. It was an eye-opener. It caught our attention, and we saw the ratings and the demographics and we said, boy, this thing is finding an audience.”
Then the preppy murder tape aired. Dauphinee took a keen interest in the man responsible for producing the hit program. “That’s the show that put John Tomlin on the map,” he says. Within a few weeks of the video’s airing, Dauphinee, who worked for King World Productions, hired Tomlin and Young away from A Current Affair to start another tabloid TV show: Inside Edition. They hired British news anchor David Frost to lend the show gravitas and distinguish it from its competitor. As his backup, they brought in Bill O’Reilly, who eventually became lead anchor.

The launch of Inside Edition, which included more investigative consumer-oriented segments, set off a wave of competing tabloid TV programs: Hard Copy, the Tomlin-produced American Journal, Now It Can Be Told, The Reporters (composed of reporters from the original A Current Affair) and others. A ratings war ensued. Competition for stories was fierce. The price of a good interview skyrocketed. Joey Buttafuoco cost A Current Affair about $400,000. Tonya Harding on Inside Edition? At least $100,000, Tomlin says. Critics gave the act of paying for interviews a derisive name: checkbook journalism. But the practice was necessary for the shows’ survival, says O’Reilly. “The only way to get the big stories was to do payment,” he says. “Because why would you go on a syndicated program like Inside Edition when you could go on The Today Show?”

Soon, the storytelling techniques Tomlin and others pioneered migrated to other TV forms just as non fiction TV mutated into other styles. Re-enactments can be seen on America’s Most Wanted. Prying into the unfortunate circumstances of people’s lives is pay dirt for shows like COPS. Amateur video is easily accessible on the Web. Viewers hardly raise an eyebrow. CNN, cable news and the 24-hour news cycle made it almost impossible for half-hour daily tabloid shows to cover a story in any meaningful way.
One by one the tabloids left the air. A Current Affair was struggling by 1995, and Tomlin was rehired away from Inside Edition as a producer to help revive its ratings. The show had become, as he says, “a caricature.” Competition drove it to air stories that were increasingly tasteless, and its credibility had tanked along with its ratings. In 1992, before Tomlin returned to the show, A Current Affair aired a story—with video—about a man caught having sex with a woman who was not his wife. Seventeen million people watched that show. Not long after, the man killed himself with a shotgun blast to the chest. Tomlin declared the era of checkbook journalism over when he returned. “We want this practice to stop,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s gotten out of hand.” But it was too late. Fox canceled A Current Affair a year after Tomlin returned, though its methods live on.

Today, Inside Edition is the only tabloid show still on the air. “The network magazines now do what Inside Edition did 15 years ago,” O’Reilly says. “They do the emotional stories, they do checkbook journalism. They might not give somebody a check, but they’ll hire somebody’s uncle as a consultant.”

Current Affair’s cancellation came almost as a relief to Tomlin. He was burned out after nearly 10 years in daily tabloid TV. He enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with his children. His success earned him enough money to buy a boat and sail it to the Bahamas; he vacationed in Cape Hatteras with his siblings and parents. He shed in Alaska with his son. These days, he can be found tailgating before his son’s football games at Union College. His daughter, Abigail, 25, develops programming for the cable channel Horse TV in Los Angeles, Calif.

Tomlin and Young set up Hurricane Entertainment in 1998 and produced a number of reality TV shows. The Judge Mills Lane Show helped revive small-claims court TV shows. Tomlin and Pamela Hadden, who was his assistant on Inside Edition, reunited in 2001 to work on a show Tomlin eventually sold to Sony called Shipmates—a dating game set on a cruise ship. He created Style Court and filmed 130 episodes that are still in circulation today. The shows that didn’t make it—Yachties, Celebrity Sous Chef—provided, at the very least, a good reason for a trip on a mega-yacht to the Caribbean or a night on the town. Tomlin, who divorced for the second time in 2001, and Hadden eventually began dating. They married last year. Young has since retired to Connecticut. Tomlin, meanwhile, works on Vidocity with a handful of aspiring TV hosts who’ve grown up on MTV and Nickelodeon and, of course, Inside Edition and A Current Affair. As of mid-June Tomlin has sunk “several hundred thousand dollars” of his business’s capital into Vidocity. His move to the Web is driven in large part by changes in the television market.
“In the early ’90s there were 40 distributors I could sell a show to in syndication,” he says. “Today there are only six real players.”
At the same time, the proliferation of cable channels spells shorter shelf life and thinner pro t margins for most shows that make it to the air.

His instincts have thus far proven correct—broadband’s availability has ushered in a new era of Web-based original programming. Other players include Nerve.com, a subscriber-supported sex and relationship site that has launched three new shows. In lieu of advertising, the company hopes viewers will translate into more subscribers. Cubefabulous.com has broadcasted its eponymous reality show about workspace makeovers since mid-May, and Honda has signed on as its main sponsor. Even if he has not yet generated enough viewers to sell advertising, Tomlin is con dent of the potential. “I will keep this going as long as I can because I believe in it,” he says.
If Vidocity fails, Tomlin will move to the next project, whatever that is. He doesn’t have a television show in production, but he’s still developing and pitching ideas. He’s not one to look back or to regret. He says he sees himself as both a journalist and a businessman, though it’s difficult to be both simultaneously, especially if no one is handing you a paycheck.

“I worked on projects that I found interesting,” he says. “I still love news, but I don’t adhere to the priesthood mentality of so-called establishment journalists. I wouldn’t call television news highbrow given O.J. Simpson coverage or Bill and Monica coverage.” About a year ago, before the launch of Vidocity, Tomlin got another call from Fox. Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son, wanted to revive A Current Affair and asked if Tomlin would like to produce it for a third time. Tomlin said yes. The price the network was willing to pay him was right. Tomlin produced some episodes that were hosted by Tim Green, an ex-NFL player, mystery writer and lawyer. But within five months, Lachlan quit Fox. The network pulled the plug on A Current Affair, just as it had in 1996. But that’s not unusual in an industry that cancels 95 percent of all shows after one season, Tomlin says. Tomlin pauses. Then he poses a question whose answer will depend on the success of Vidocity and the unpredictable desire to go where opportunity calls. “Do you think I’ll go back if they ask me?”

Jeremy Smerd, a journalist based in New York, N.Y., has written for publications including The New York Times, The New York Sun and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

NC State Magazine

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