Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [87]
The idea was that comedians would no longer be confined by the time limits and arbitrary standards set by network broadcasters. Working for a privately owned, subscription-based company, they could do a full, uncensored set, just as they would in a nightclub. “This is mature,” marveled Klein. “We’re grown up. We can say anything. . . . Shit! How do you like that?”
Three years after Carlin debuted “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” Klein still hadn’t listened closely to Carlin’s records, not wanting to absorb his material or be daunted by his success. (“I remember I was scared, almost, to listen to FM & AM,” he says.) The FCC’s jurisdiction over the new cable network, HBO, was unresolved, and Klein, not an especially dirty comic—a few years later he recorded a routine called “Six Clean Words You Can Say Anywhere”—gladly took advantage of the opportunity. In a bit about an NFL broadcast on Thanksgiving, he joked about the inadvertent dialogue picked up by engineers and their “soundcatchers” at field level: After a tackle, he said, he distinctly heard a player holler, “I’ll get you, Taylor, you cocksucker!”
“My mother dropped the turkey,” Klein said with an impish grin.
Television was about to undergo a radical transformation. Cable programming would bring explicit content into homes across the country for the first time, and HBO was leading the way. Originally known as the Green Channel, the newly renamed Home Box Office went into operation in the test town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in early November 1972. In rough weather, a technician held the microwave receiving dish in place as the network transmitted its first offering to subscribers, the Paul Newman and Henry Fonda film Sometimes a Great Notion. “It is said that every successful business needs a dreamer, a businessman, and a son of a bitch,” wrote one early chronicler of the network. Company founder Chuck Dolan, ousted just months into HBO’s first year of service, was the dreamer; Jerry Levin, a former divinity school student and antitrust lawyer, was the businessman; and Michael Fuchs, who rose from director of special programming to president and then chairman of the HBO board, was considered by some to be the SOB.
Though the three major broadcast networks and American institutions such as movie theater owners and Major League Baseball all fought hard to block the incoming cable providers—abetted by the FCC, which envisioned itself protecting the Big Three from the interlopers—HBO got a major break when the networks declined to oppose its request to transmit via satellite. Meanwhile, the cable network challenged the FCC’s claim to regulation by filing a lawsuit, scoring a significant victory when the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled in its favor. During calendar year 1976 HBO presented a potluck of programming, including an exclusive Bette Midler concert, quirky sporting events such as roller derbies and a rodeo held in New Jersey, and fourteen repeats of Gone With the Wind, in addition to its monthly On Location series.
Although the comedy show was new, the same wasn’t necessarily true of all its talent. Fresh young comedians Steve Martin and Freddie Prinze followed Klein with On Location specials of their own, but so did known quantities Pat Cooper, Phyllis Diller, and language mangler Norm Crosby, as well as old revolutionaries such as Sahl and Berman. The series had already been on about a year and a half by the time Carlin taped his own HBO debut in the summer of 1977 at the University of Southern California.
The front office at HBO was well aware that Carlin could be counted on to make the most of this chance to