TINKER CHANGES CHANNELS--AND HOPES YOU WILL TOO

There is no grudge involved, according to Grant Tinker. He is no Benedict Arnold.

When Tinker exited as NBC’s chairman of the board last summer, he left the network at the top of the Nielsens. He was a satisfied man. NBC was a satisfied network.

But six months later, Tinker has joined forces with the Gannett Co. to begin producing shows for CBS next year, and his avowed purpose is to “blow right by” NBC in the ratings.

“People thought that was strange that I didn’t go right back to NBC,” he said. “But NBC is doing so well that there just is not enough potential business to do there. There are not only a lot of shows that are working and, therefore, less failure and replacement need. I also know something about what they’ve got on the shelf, and they’ve got a lot of good stuff in development.”

Besides, he asks wryly, does General Electric (the new owner of NBC) really need the money?

“The CBS deal removes a whole potential distraction (in worrying about where to sell a show),” Tinker said. “They came to us very aggressively to say, ‘What are you going to do? Who are you going to sell to?’ And I said, ‘Anybody. Who wants to buy?’ ”

CBS did, as it turned out.

Tinker won’t say how much the network agreed to pay or what it’s getting for its money beyond a “multi-series deal” that involves both exclusive rights to some projects and first-refusal rights to others. He said that the new Grant Tinker/Gannett (GTG) Entertainment will probably produce about five shows--two or three sitcoms and one or two dramatic series.

The first episodes of the new programs, he said, will definitely be ready for the CBS airwaves by the fall season of 1988. “If everything came together on a comedy, we might have it ready by February of 1988, but I think that’s unlikely,” he said.

That the man who engineered NBC’s prime-time climb from third to first place should now be comfortable working with CBS is not as surprising as it may appear. Before taking the helm of NBC in 1981, he was president of MTM Enterprises, an independent production company that sold most of its shows (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant”) to CBS.

During his five-year NBC stint, Tinker flew to New York every Monday and flew back to Burbank every Thursday. He wore suits and ties and observed the “custom and ritual” of Manhattan board meetings.

“Actually, New York is OK if you just pass through it once in a while,” he says.

Back in Los Angeles, he has reverted to the standard entertainment industry uniform: loafers, slacks, open-collar dress shirt, sweater and shades. There’s always time for Diet Pepsi and tennis talk.

“One of my former wives used to talk about New York all the time, what a great place it is,” he said. “In fact, she did it so often she moved back to New York and lives there where all that electricity or, what do they call it? Energy. Where all that energy is.”

But Tinker is convinced that the energy is on the West Coast, not the East, and he’s hoping not only to tap into it but to generate some of his own.

Tinker has nearly everything ready to go for his new GTG venture: money ($40 million), a network commitment and a studio with 12 sound stages, a guard gate and a glitzy antebellum-style mansion out front.

While other executives have been predicting grim times ahead for production companies that depend on the networks for program development money, Tinker says he is not worried. All three networks depend as much on the production companies to fill their prime-time lineups as the production companies depend on the networks to fill their bank accounts.

“Cost cutting is mostly in the news divisions, and all the networks are getting around to that,” Tinker said. “But five or six years ago, when we were the odd man out at NBC and we were on the floor and really panting . . . gasping would be a better word . . . we still had to spend the same amount of money for shows as did CBS and ABC, which were doing very well.”

The production costs of some series do run too high--ABC’s “Moonlighting,” for example, has cost as much as $1.6 million for a single episode--but the majority of television programs cost roughly the same to produce regardless of which network buys them, Tinker said.

“The ‘Hill Streets’ and the ‘Remington Steeles,’ or whatever, on any network cost the same whether it’s succeeding or failing or whether the network is No. 1 or No. 3,” Tinker said. “It doesn’t make any difference.

“So the people at CBS . . . know that it’s going to cost them just as much as it costs (NBC Entertainment president) Brandon Tartikoff to program their seven nights a week.”

High production costs are “a fact of life” that can only be checked by networks and production companies working together to keep unions, guilds and independent contractors from hiking fees, Tinker said.

“These outrageous fees that creative people get they will tell you they deserve, and perhaps they do,” he said. “And there’s all of those guilds and unions that represent the various parts that go to make up the whole of a show. It’s just not going to be reversed. I don’t mean you can’t arrest it, and I think there is arrest in the air. But you’re not going to roll it back in my lifetime.”

To hear Tinker tell it, he’s going to run his new Culver City sitcom factory the same way Ronald Reagan runs the White House.

The former chief executive of NBC and the Chief Executive might not share much in common, but they do have the same delegation-management style.

“I heard him just a couple of days ago enunciating exactly the way I feel about it (management),” said Tinker. “A lot of people have said this long before Mr. Reagan or I were in office: You get good people and you let them do their work.”

The trick is getting the right people for the job.

Gannett has deferred everything to Tinker--a certified legend in the short, often bleak, history of television programming. While other executives take the blame for disasters like “Manimal,” “My Mother the Car” and “Captain Nice,” Tinker’s reputation from MTM as the godfather of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Hill Street Blues” assures him a place in the television Hall of Fame.

He has hired Jay Sandrich as his supervising director. Sandrich, who directed 130 of the 168 episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” is currently committed to “The Cosby Show” but he will reduce his “Cosby” presence to 10 episodes next year so he can concentrate on new GTG shows.

Stu Erwin Jr., another MTM graduate, is creative director. Jack Clements is production chief and an as-yet unannounced network executive will act as head of business affairs. In fact, Tinker has a whole GTG management team steeped in the Tinker tradition of management-by-delegation.

Now all they need are some writers to whom they can delegate things--things like creating television shows.

“We’ve hung out our shingle and announced our intention,” he said. “I don’t know how else to do it. Without them, the actors have nothing to say and the directors have nothing to direct.”

Tinker describes himself as a professional “appreciator”: one who recognizes talent and tries to get it as cheaply as he can, but who can’t write comedy or drama to save his own life.

He does have a reputation to uphold, though. He knows expectations are high. That’s part of the reason he bought a studio to house the staff of GTG Entertainment--currently 60 and expected to grow to five times that number. And in the finest Hollywood tradition, he’s doing it all with someone else’s money.

Gannett owns six television stations, 14 radio stations, 28 weekly or semi-weekly newspapers and more than 90 daily newspapers, including USA Today, but this is the company’s first venture into prime-time TV entertainment.

Gannett put up most of the $25 million to help Tinker buy the old Culver City Studios on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. The media conglomerate will spend an additional $15 million to renovate the 12 sound stages on the lot that first opened more than 70 years ago as the Thomas Ince Studios. Since then it has been the home of David O. Selznick, RKO, Pathe, Desilu and, most recently, Laird Productions.

Over the next two years, there’ll be some drastic changes at the studios where Orson Welles first mumbled “Rosebud” and Selznick burned Atlanta to the ground.

The two-story “mansion” on Washington Boulevard that Selznick used as an introductory logo at the beginning of the credits for his movies, is getting a new paint job. Besides housing several production offices, the building will serve another purpose, Tinker said.

Just as he used a mewing cat as MTM Enterprises’ symbol, the mansion will be featured in the background of the new GTG logo, Tinker said. It’s already part of the design for the new studio’s letterhead.

“The cat was an afterthought,” Tinker recalled. “Suddenly we had a show and thought, ‘My God! We have to put our name on it somehow.’ And that’s the way we chose to do it. So to sit around and think logos now instead of shows is going about it backwards.”

Though he and his management team are chiefly MTM graduates, Tinker says he has no intention of “raping and pillaging over there” for more GTG personnel.

“That’s no more a target area than anywhere else,” he said. “We’re just interested in good writers at the moment and we’ll take them from wherever they come if they want to come.”

Tinker sees program production itself as an “exact science.”

He knows precisely how it’s done because he’s done it all so many times before. He sees himself as a kind of TV version of University of Nevada at Las Vegas basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. He applies the same principles year after year to different teams and always seems to make it to the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. playoffs.

“You know he’ll always finish up in the final four,” said Tinker. “We always finish in the final four too.”

Tinker knows the equation so well he can recite the weekly formula for spitting out a situation comedy by rote:

--Read through with cast on Monday.

--Rewrite, rehearse and hone scenes on Tuesday and Wednesday.

--Block out sequences for the camera on Thursday.

--Shoot finished product on Friday night before a studio audience.

“Not only do you have the psychic income of that audience telling you that you did good work but you’ve also banked an episode,” Tinker said. “I mean, what’s better than that?”

Sounds terrific.

The one problem, said Tinker, is that there is a limited supply of good writers. Asked how many good comedy writers there are in Hollywood, Tinker deadpanned:

“Three.”

Of course there are more than that--but not many, he insisted.

“I’ve spent more time since we got here rebuffing people, and it’s hard to do sometimes,” Tinker said. “You get a little glib at it, but it’s not an easy thing to do anytime to reject somebody because he’s a B writer and you’re looking for A writers. And there’s a lot of B ‘s humming around.”

Tinker made an appearance on CBS News’ overnight news program “Nightwatch” two weeks ago and mentioned that he was looking for writers. The next day, Tinker’s secretary was on the phone all day screening would-be writers.

“We were thinking about changing the (telephone) number,” Tinker said. “And that show was on in the middle of the night! I didn’t think anybody was watching.”

Tinker predicts that the TV pendulum is about to swing back toward drama.

“Right now there’s just too much of it (comedy),” he said. “There will be some fallout over the next year or two, but right now there’s too much employment for comedy writers.

“So I would think a good half of our attention will be on other kinds of projects--dramatic shows of any kind that are reasonably affordable.”