Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [181]
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Semiao gets a lot of credit for it; I suspect he deserves most of the credit, but as with everything, it became a collaboration. Once the idea got to my level, I green-lit it immediately. It was an equity opportunity and a growth area. But it was very expensive—$12 million! I still remember the price tag. We had never done original programming like that before. And $12 million was a big commitment back then. That would’ve been a hockey contract.
RON SEMIAO:
We then somehow needed to identify the best athletes in these sports. I felt like Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen, when he was trying to sign up guys for a suicide mission. I got sucked in a few times, like when I saw a really cool fuckin’ picture in Details magazine of this guy kite skiing in Seattle. He wore special water skis and this special harness so he could do all these tricks as the wind blew him along. The article explained that his dad was an engineer on the original Boeing 707. I tracked him down and asked if he could get the ten best kite skiers in the world to compete. He was like, “Absolutely!”
What he didn’t tell me was that the only two people who really knew how to do it were him and his brother. But ten people showed up, and it looked like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. One guy got blown face-first into the rocks, and another guy didn’t know how to turn and the wind took him so far down the shore that he disappeared. He ended up making land and calling a taxi, where he put his kite ski in the trunk and rode back to the venue. We never put the event on the air.
My first idea of where to do the games was San Francisco. I thought that’d be a really cool place to do it because of its whole history of counterrevolution and incredible geography. But we couldn’t get past a pay phone at a 7-Eleven with the mayor’s office to have a meeting. Fortunately, through Red Sox Fantasy Camp, I was friends with a guy who was running the state of Rhode Island’s newly formed sports council, designed to bring in sporting events for economic development. The town council of Newport loved tourist dollars; they just didn’t like tourists. We couldn’t get a permit, and it kept on getting tabled for a vote. Finally, my buddy from the head of the sports council talked to a couple of guys from an organization with a long history of influence in Rhode Island politics and we got our permit by a four-to-three vote.
BILL FITTS:
Ron was always asking me, “Can I do this? Can I do that?” Most of the time I said yes, because that’s what we were all about then: making it happen. Sometimes we could tell pretty fast something wasn’t going to work, so we tried something else.
RICH FEINBERG, Vice President:
Getting from the words “sky surfing” on a piece of paper to actually trying to come up with a concept to broadcast it live was a challenge. How about people jumping out of an airplane and falling to earth at terminal velocity, 120 miles an hour? How are we going to put it on the air? Should we have an audience at the drop zone? What do they look at? What if we had a JumboTron? But what happens if the wind blows them off course and they don’t land in the drop zone? One of the cool things about motor sports is in-car cameras; let’s get the guy who does in-car cameras for NASCAR or Indy and see what he thinks about some of this stuff. Let’s talk to our guys who know a lot about RF transmission and see what they think about sky surfing. We went through that creative process on all the sports.
We built a broadcast center outdoors at Fort Adams, which was an eighteenth-century fort in Rhode Island, and we wanted to build a set looking back into the bay of Newport, so the best view we could find was on top of the walls of the fort. Well, we never really gave a whole lot of consideration to what it would mean to put 600-pound cameras and lighting grids on something that was built in the 1800s. At some point, we decided we’d better hire a structural engineer.
SUZY KOLBER:
There was no running water or bathroom at Fort Adams. I would allot myself