You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [87]
Begelman and McNall folded Sherwood and replaced it in 1984 with Gladden Entertainment, which had better luck with Weekend at Bernie’s and The Fabulous Baker Boys. Unfortunately, McNall proved to be as unscrupulous as Begelman and forced the company into bankruptcy in 1994 after defaulting on $4.1 million in residuals owed to the various talent guilds. In 1995, McNall was found guilty of receiving bank loans using fraudulent collateral. By this point, Begelman had had enough. On August 7, 1995, he took his own life at the Century Plaza Hotel Towers, leaving no note. His show-biz legacy was forever tarnished by his psychological compulsion to cheat.
The story never went away and Robertson never stopped talking about it. In 1984, he said, “Hollywoodgate is something that has changed the whole industry; it showed that you could confront high-level corruption and still exist. For many years there was an unwritten rule in this town, `Thou shalt not confront top moguls on corruption or thou shalt not work.’ Fifty years from now it won’t be my Oscar or anything else I might win that I will be remembered for, but probably this…I think there are a few people who wish Hollywoodgate would blow away, just as there are those who wish Watergate will blow away. Neither will.”
Begelman’s scandalized life remains entombed in McClintick’s book, which is still in print. A film version continues to be developed in Hollywood despite speculation it’d never be made since no one wants the spotlight shined on a town built on shady dealings.
Columbia’s mishandling of the affair was analyzed in Steven Fink’s Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable.
Robertson went on to resume his active career, as seen in his role as Uncle Ben in 2002’s smash success Spider-Man.
You Switched Over to What?
If you were not watching the game when this happened, you missed one of life’s great frustrations.
NEW YORK/OAKLAND NFL GAME, 1968
Brian M. Thomsen
By the fall of 1968 network executives were aware that television was changing at a dramatic pace, and that the old way of doing things was evolving in a way that required a different sort of decision making on a programming level.
Nowhere was this more evident than at NBC, which had become fearful that one of its long-standing family franchises, essentially “must-see TV” before the sell line was the glimmer of a cliché in some ad exec’s mind, might be in jeopardy.
“Walt Disney Presents the Wonderful World of Color,” which NBC had taken over from ABC several years earlier in order to lock down family viewership on Sunday nights, was no longer considered a long-term sure thing. The death of host and creative godfather Walt Disney the year before had raised several questions about the ongoing viability of what was essentially an anthology slot of different series programs all aimed at the same audience and developed by the same producer without the essential week-to-week cast consistency that seemed to be driving other shows. The former powerhouses of the anthology genre, such as Playhouse 90 and The Twilight Zone, had all fallen by the wayside and the Disney show without Walt Disney himself might become a problem. As a result, NBC decided to hedge its bets slightly by producing other family entertainment events for the Disney slot in the event that “the Wonderful World of Color” lost its viability. These events would fall under the category of “Specials” and in no way violated their programming agreement with Disney, and would be heavily promoted across the NBC schedule to