Guy Evans > Quotes

“There’s some great early stories of him in his sales days. When American Express, for example, wouldn’t buy advertising on TBS because they were ‘too downscale’…and ‘too this, too that’…Ted pulls out an American Express card, slides it across the table and says, ‘I use your product, but you don’t use mine. I have a real problem with that’. “They were saying our audience was downscale, and he’s like, ‘I watch TBS, and I’m worth half a billion dollars, pal!’ He rejected people’s snobbery of ‘it’s gotta be this fancy programming’. He was like ‘look, I’m doing a ‘3’ rating at 6:05, so screw you’.”
― Guy Evans, Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW

“Without the underlying emotion accompanying a match, Bischoff ruminated, the result was something much less inspiring - two guys in their underwear fighting for ambiguous reasons. “They were basically telling me that I had to abandon the very formula that had not only worked for us, but that our competition had adapted,” he says. “I was then told to have my scripts approved a month in advance.”
― Guy Evans, Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW

“Another misnomer concerned the relationship between audience size and advertising rates. One common interpretation propounded that programs with higher ratings produced higher revenues - a logical fallacy insofar as it flagrantly disregarded crucial influencing factors (notably, content and demographics). In 1994, to cite one illustrative example, Seinfeld commanded $390,000 for a 30-second spot - $40,000 more than Home Improvement - despite attracting fewer overall viewers. Its ability to draw more young viewers (often defined as the ‘highly desirable’ 18-49 demographic) instead made all the difference. In sum, as industry experts realized, advertisers bought ‘demos’ before they did households.”
― Guy Evans, Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW

“If Russo was managing the local Pizza Hut,” writer R.D. Reynolds memorably observed, “you’d order a pizza and they’d deliver a newspaper.”
― Guy Evans, Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW

“The time period covered in NITRO - 1995 to 2001 - represents a number of themes that transcend its subject matter; notably, the rise of early Internet culture, the still-active notion of 'mainstream', the limits of creative expression, ‘edgy’ entertainment that pushed the envelope, television and its cultural power (including, as a corollary, the decline of the televised communal experience), and the relative tranquility of America’s cultural, economic and political affairs.

...it was in this context that the explosion in wrestling’s popularity occurred.”
― Guy Evans, NITRO: Expanded Edition - The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW

“If Russo was managing the local Pizza Hut,” writer R.D. Reynolds memorably observed, “you’d order a pizza and they’d deliver a newspaper. Sure, it was a surprise, but it didn’t make much sense, nor did you want to order from them again. But it sure fooled you, didn’t it?”
― Guy Evans, Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW