By Jen Clay
A&E Editor
Perhaps when Norm Macdonald was fired from “Saturday Night Live” you heard this man’s name. Maybe you’re into reading “the trades” and had read about him before the “Saturday Night Live” publicity. Then again, maybe you’re just a “Friends” hyper-fan. Anyway you look at it, he affected the television world television fans live in today. His name is Don Ohlmeyer. In the 1990s, he served for seven years as NBC’s West Coast president, and yes, that is his black Bentley often parked in front of the CCB.
In fact, that Bentley Arnage is more and more comfortable on Pepperdine turf these days – after a series of guest lectureships, Ohlmeyer is now a faculty member in the telecommunications department at Pepperdine. This semester he teaches a mentoring class that prepares a select number of students within the major for careers in the industry. At once articulate and refreshingly candid, Ohlmeyer shared with the Graphic how he ended up at Pepperdine as well as how he made it to the top of an industry that leaves most hopefuls crawling by the wayside.
In 1993, NBC was flailing, barely able to come up for air before another network or even one of its own shows would knock the broadcast company back beneath a sea of bad ratings. It is around this time that Ohlmeyer stepped up to the plate.
“When I got there, NBC was in third place, so I used to say there was the smell of death in the halls,” Ohlmeyer said.
With a background in production and a number of Emmys to his name at that time, Ohlmeyer set about developing programming that truly took the audience into account. Recognizing an unhealthy, yet symbiotic relationship between the press and the networks, Ohlmeyer quickly developed his own method to critique new NBC shows, a method that simply relied on reviewing the opinion of a Washington Post critic and that of a Los Angeles Times critic.
“Those (the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times) were the first two reviews I wanted to read when we premiered a show because if they liked it, I knew it was dead on arrival, and if they hated it, I knew it had a really good chance to succeed,” he explained.
Successful television shows like “Frasier,” “ER,” “Homocide: Life on the Streets,” “Will & Grace” and a little show called “Friends” came out of NBC’s Ohlmeyer years. Within 22 months of Ohlmeyer’s presidency, NBC was leading the network pack. While Ohlmeyer’s willingness to take risks may have factored in the success of NBC’s new programming, Ohlmeyer also cited reviews of the Neilsen ratings, a “finger on the pulse of pop culture,” and personal instincts as those tools that ultimately led to the resurgence of the network.
“We had a lot of success doing big mini-series about subjects people didn’t think would work like ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ (1996) and ‘The Odyssey’ (1997),” he said. “I did ‘The Odyssey’ because it was always my favorite piece of literature. I read it for the first time in the seventh grade.”
Not all of Ohlmeyer’s relations with NBC and its programming meant smooth sailing. One of Ohlmeyer’s most publicized NBC maneuvers centered around a network staple – “Saturday Night Live” and a certain cast member, “Weekend Update” anchor Norm MacDonald. When Ohlmeyer saw viewers tuning out during the show’s most popular segments, he said he had to do what was best for the show, and he fired MacDonald.
“You see, ‘Weekend Update’ was put at midnight so that no matter how bad the show was in the first half hour people would stay tuned, and that had been the history of it,” Ohlmeyer said. “Now they (viewers) were tuning out during Weekend Update – I couldn’t let that go on.”
Ohlmeyer received a lot of flak for the move, but he said MacDonald’s subsequent “Dirty Work” and failed television series only reinforced his once-controversial decision.
“Now, the fact that Norm’s movie was one of the lowest grossing movies ever made by a major studio, and since that time he’s done two series both of which have been bombs, doesn’t reinforce those who were saying, ‘How could you just get rid of Norm? He’s so funny,” Ohlmeyer said.
Any trials Ohlmeyer might have experienced in his career immediately cowered in the shadow of his successes. In addition to an Indianapolis 500 telecast, which utilized an unprecedented 52 cameras, and an Emmy-award winning documentary on the “massacre of Israeli athletes in the ’72 Olympic Games,” Ohlmeyer always enjoyed being involved in a certain football game held annually in late January.
“If you do a Super Bowl and know for three hours on a Sunday afternoon you provided kind of an emotional catharsis for a 100 million people, and during that period a good number of them had forgotten that they’re trying to figure out how to pay their mortgage that month, they hate their job, their kids are having trouble at school, but during that period of time they have relief from that, that’s good,” Ohlmeyer said. “That’s a hoot.”
Before his “Super” days, Ohlmeyer grew up in a small town in Louisiana and was a childhood fan of “Maverick,” starring James Garner. After his family moved north of Chicago, Ohlmeyer attended Notre Dame and graduated in 1967 with a degree in liberal arts. With a knack for storytelling, he obtained a production assistant position with ABC Sports. By the end of his 10 years with ABC, Ohlmeyer executive produced Monday Night Football and the Olympic Games. Ohlmeyer knows it was his work ethic that set him apart and allowed him to seemingly glide up the corporate ladder.
“I worked everybody else to death,” he explained of his ABC days. “I was the first one there and the last one to leave. If somebody wanted to get here at 6:30 in the morning, I got there at 6:15. If they wanted to get there at 6:15, I got there at 5:45.” He continued, “I happened to stumble into something I just loved doing.”
Ohlmeyer moved to NBC sports in 1977, and in 1982, he left the television business to start a full-service advertising agency with another company – Nabisco – and Nabisco’s current chairman Ross Johnson. In addition to courting the NFL, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League as clients, the Ohlmeyer Communications Company (OCC) was responsible for music videos from the likes of Cyndi Lauper as well as the creation of the Skins game, a highly successful made-for-television golf event. The opportunity to help front the company came Ohlmeyer’s way after he solved a number of media problems for the Nabisco chairman.
“While I was still at NBC (as executive producer of NBC sports), I became friendly with him (Johnson) and he had a number of media issues, where he could kind of go one way or the other and he asked my opinion, and on all four of them it just turned out I was right,” Ohlmeyer recalled. “So he thought I was some kind of guru.”
And of course, so did NBC, whose big-wigs appreciated Ohlmeyer’s experience with editing, writing and directing, and made the Louisiana native a big-wig himself in 1993. After retiring from the presidency and the business in 2000, a grateful Ohlmeyer desired to give something back to a business that has given him so much.
“I really felt this desire, need, whatever you want to call it to try to give something back because this business has been so good to me and my family,” Ohlmeyer said. “(It’s) allowed us to live so far beyond the dreams of a little kid from Louisiana.”
A relationship with Pepperdine – his son’s alma mater and a well-known university located in Ohlmeyer’s neck of the woods – proved a perfect fit for the former executive, who said his current station in life, which centers around teaching, painting and family, has proved just as fulfilling as his work with NBC. Next semester, Ohlmeyer will teach “Making the Connection,” a telecommunications class, and continue to dispense invaluable information to those students interested in the industry, like his theory on success.
“I’ve always believed, you do the best job you can do, and if you’re successful then that’s a job you should be doing and if you’re not successful, maybe you should open a shoe store,” Ohlmeyer laughed.
Around Don Ohlmeyer, shoe stores are a rarity.
Submitted March 25, 2004