Merv Griffin's America

Back in the early part of this decade, I was pitching shows with a talented writing/producing partner who had a connection at Merv Griffin's production company, which was located in a lower level of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Since Merv was still in the game show business, that's what we pitched, but in the meeting we learned that there were literally thousands of hours of Merv Griffin talk show archives from the late 1960's through the mid 1980's that had never been repackaged in any form. So we took our shot.

How to choose, how to present? TV specials, sure. DVD sets, sure. But what's organizing principle to be?

While growing up, it was Merv and Mike Douglas with dueling firstrun syndicated afternoon talk shows. Very similar guys on the surface, but completely different in business terms. What I didn't know until much later was that Merv was a brilliant businessman with long-term staying power, while Mike didn't make much of a dent after his on-air run. Merv and his wife (he always gave her credit) created and produced Jeopardy. He created and produced Wheel of Fortune. He bought and sold hotels and casinos. He owned rights to his own shows.

What made his own talk show so interesting was that at one time or another everyone went on it. Orson Welles, John Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Denzel Washington, Jack Benny, Richard Pryor, Jerry Seinfeld, Bobby Kennedy, Cassius Clay, Dr. Martin Luther King. Even Richard Nixon.

So our pitch became: Merv Griffin's America.

He was there...when America changed the most. He had them on first, the performers and figures who had touched us in the past and those that were blazing our trail into the future. Merv: At the center of it all.

We sent it in and got back from some very nice people that it was a great pitch, but countless producers had been through Merv's door before with an idea what to do with the material, some getting very far along indeed, so ours was a nice try that wasn't going anywhere. The door stayed open, but any chance for the project closed.

Imagine our surprise when, two days later, we get called in to pitch to Merv himself.

Evidently there was an in-house process where, for legal reasons alone, any submission rejections were cc'ed to a few different company members, including Merv. I'm assuming it was the title of our submission email that struck a chord: we had appealed to Merv's feeling for his own patriotism, one that was open enough to embrace change, while sincerely grateful for the opportunities he had built on, only in America.

This was before Merv sold the hotel (in 2003) and as we walked in we just said, "We're here to see Merv." Although we had been to the suite of offices, located down a lower level, in back, very Bond-like, it wasn't easy to find after having just been in once. As we walked through doors like airlocks down wood-paneled corridors, the kind you used to see on Night Gallery maybe, we were passing large mounted photographs of Merv interviewing guests, first in black & white, then in color, the most famous celebrities of my youth with Merv maybe serious, maybe laughing. Then we went into the boardroom.

We were greeted warmly by Merv, at that time in his late 70's, dressed casually in shorts and a hanging shirt, heavier and older but bursting with his special secularly positive energy. Behind him the development people were all smiles, from the contact who had guided us in, to a few we had not met before. Then we sat down.

I'd expect anyone who's pitched anything from an elementary school fund drive to a car to a television show to have something of the same lack of total recall about a pitch. It's essentially a very intense performance, no matter how relaxed you might deliver it. Every sense is on end for advantage -- where you're feeling it from the person or persons you're pitching to, where you're trying to push for it with something you're saying without pushing that little too far. This is why it is always best to pitch in teams, so that when you get out of the room you can turn to your partner and actually cobble together "what just happened?"

So while I can't (blessedly) take you through every moment of the pitch from start to finish, I can give you some highlights that will hopefully convey how awesome it was to meet Merv, in preparation for which I had actually read his salutary and informative autobiography.

Merv was the center of attention, a live wire, funny in an old Hollywood way without being unhip. He bummed a couple cigarettes off an employee, chatted about all the great folks he'd had on, about interview and game show theory, and took particular pride in two business deals where he'd kept an edge by retaining certain rights.

One was Jeopardy -- I brought up the sale of that and Wheel, his game show company, to Sony Pictures Television several years early, the two biggest game shows in the history of the planet (one more plebe, the other the intelligent anomaly). He was quick to point out that he'd retained the rights to the theme song, which the obits are saying brought him another $70-80 million. Having started my career in music for television, I had enough sense of what the repayment rights were worth that I let on how impressed I was -- I had never even known he wrote the tune.

That led him to what seemed to be his greatest triumph, something about selling a hotel to the Trump organization (as I recall) but when the deal was closing for however many millions of dollars, the negotiators on the other side realized that the actual beach the hotel was on had not been included in the deal. They howled about it, but in the end had to pay Merv a whole 'nother batch of millions for that property.

At one point when the advantage felt it might be sagging away from us, I brought up Richard Nixon, for whom Merv had never hid his personal dislike. (Contrast his enduring friendship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan.) Merv roared how he hated Nixon, had a put-down anecdote, warmed back up to us. By the time we left I had asked my quota of questions, my top-line curious about his past, we were invigorated by his life force and his favor, and he was telling his staff to draw up the papers.

Suffice to say, the deal didn't happen. But as we were told after we finally got clarification, after that long twilight zone that those who have pitched in Hollywood and died of encouragement can only know, we "got further than most."

So it saddens me that Merv has left us. He may not have made our show, but he brightened that pitch month. His talk show skills weren't phony, and his interview with us was quite interactive. He's an odd sort of legend, on the interesting end of middlebrow, completely of Hollywood yet distinctly Middle American. He came from nothing with a combination of performance and organization, and the vision to take the bet: on himself, as always, and more often than not coming up a winner.

It's a sunnier place in Merv Griffin's America, and somehow even his death, at age 82, doesn't diminish that shine.