Imagine experiencing all of TV’s many changes over the years while working under the same bosses (albeit at different companies), and managing to hold on to your sense of humor? Len Grossi can more than imagine it.
Leonard (Len) J. Grossi is a true Hollywood insider. Throughout his lengthy career, he worked at three of the six major Hollywood studios, astonishingly, managing to stay under the same bosses for almost the entire time, and keeping his sense of humor.
He started at Paramount, moved on to 20th Century Fox, returned to Paramount, and then finally went to Columbia Tri Star TV. The corporate world was more dynamic during those years, and executives rotated around more often. Some of the legendary U.S. studio executives that Grossi routinely found in his path included Barry Diller, Jonathan Dolgen, Jim Gianopoulos, Mel Harris, and Lucie Salhany.
Grossi can also claim to have gone through every phase of the TV era, starting with U.S. syndication, then moving on to international TV growth, cable TV, the mergers and acquisitions craze of the 1980s and 1990s, home video, the HBO wake-up call, Spanish-language TV rising to prominence in the U.S., and the digital transition. He left the business in 2002 just before the evolution of streaming. In the midst of all that, Grossi went through what author John Malone, in his book, Born to be Wired, called, “the massive technology shift in the early ’90s.”
But let’s proceed in chronological order, starting in 1975, when Grossi, then 29 years old, went to work at Metromedia Television in New York City as business manager of its National Ad Sales division.
Metromedia was formed in 1957 as Metropolitan Broadcasting under Washington, D.C.- based German investor John Kluge (1914-2010). Its name was changed to Metromedia in 1961.
Today, from his Los Angeles base, Grossi recalled: “I was unemployed and my wife worked for Hughes Television Network and Hughes Sports Network. A sales executive there was a friend of the president of Metromedia Television Sales who was looking for a business manager. He told my wife I would be perfect for the role. Anyway, they set up an interview for me [with the president] and we really hit it off. He offered me the job, but I turned it down. My wife was very upset. I told her that they did not offer me enough money (remember I was unemployed) and [the president] hired someone else whom (I was told) he hated, and so he called me back a month later and offered me what I was asking for. This was on a Friday and he said ‘When can you start?’ I said ‘Monday morning.’ He then realized I had some negotiating skills beyond the financial background and really liked that about me too.”
That might have been the beginning of his Hollywood career, but the show business seed had actually been planted years before. Here’s how Grossi joked about it: “Frank Sinatra was a fire captain who lived near my parents’ house in Hoboken, N. J., where my mother ran a store. Frank would often come to the store to flirt with my mother. When I became an executive at Paramount, I was involved in producing one of his concerts in the Dominican Republic. Before I sent him a check with lots of zeros, I photocopied it and sent it to my mother with the note, ‘This is for one day’s work, and to think it could have been my father!’ Strangely enough, my mother didn’t appreciate the joke!”
At Metromedia, Grossi commuted to New York City from his home in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, and that was when he decided to add “John” as a middle name. In his view, a middle name made him “look and sound more sophisticated.”
Grossi moved to Paramount Television in New York City as director of Operations for Domestic Television Distribution in 1978, soon becoming a VP of the division. Subsequently, when relocated to the west coast of the U.S., he became VP of Production Finance. His oversight included the syndicated music TV series Solid Gold (which ran from 1980 to 1988) and Entertainment Tonight, which debuted in 1981 and still airs today.
This is how Grossi explained his first move to Paramount: “Mel Harris [1943-2008], who from Metromedia had joined Rich Frank, headed up Paramount’s TV business, in 1977. Harris suggested to Randy Reiss, who headed up Paramount’s Domestic TV Distribution, to hire [Grossi] in administration, which he did.”
At Paramount, Grossi had his desk at the G&W building in New York City, which was famous for swinging during windy days: “Our offices were on the 24th floor,” he recalled, “and I had a wall of windows in my room where I could look out over the Hudson River and watch the post on the windows move from one side of a chimney to the other, and I knew that the chimney wasn’t moving.”
What Grossi credits for his entry into the entertainment business was his financial knowledge and experience acquired at previous jobs, first working on the construction of Newark Airport, and later, at various banks after receiving a degree on the Vietnam Veterans’ GI bill. Curiously, Grossi wasn’t the only banker who entered the U.S. entertainment business. At about the same time, Colin Davis, a British banker, joined MCA, and later became president of its International TV Distribution division (now NBCUniversal).
Describing his various challenges, Grossi recalled that his first problem at Metromedia was created by “being a business-financial guy among mostly ad sales people,” and later, by “the acquisition [of Metromedia] by Fox, which [for Grossi] was a big surprise.” However, despite an energy crisis and stagflation in the U.S., the 1970s were considered the golden age of TV advertising.
At Paramount the challenges were different: “[Local TV] stations were competing with each other for [our] domestic syndication rights,” he said. “I also spent many hours researching the relationship between stations’ revenue and our selling prices for the content.”
Grossi also explained that “the weekly strips [audio-video feeds] were delivered via satellite [a new technology] and we had an enormous challenge in getting all the [affiliated] stations being able to receive the programs.”
In that period, up until 1983, the U.S. recorded the rise of cable TV channels, and Paramount experienced a growth period. “During that time,” Grossi reported, “the home video market also exploded, creating an additional window for our feature films. We created what I called ‘sequential distribution pattern windows’ to allow for new methods of distribution to be slotted in order to maximize revenue: theatrical, pay-TV, network, home video, back to pay-TV, cable, and free TV syndication.”
Grossi’s stint at Paramount in New York City lasted three years before he was relocated to Los Angeles. By that time, after their first son was born, his wife Germaine had retired from Hughes TV. In 1983, while in Los Angeles, Grossi returned to Metromedia, but only for a brief period since the following year it was acquired by 20th Century Fox for $3.5 billion (of which $2 billion was for Metromedia’ six local TV stations, while $1.5 billion was for Metromedia Producers, the division where Grossi served as CEO). The acquisition allowed Fox to develop its national TV network. Currently the FOX TV network owns 10 local TV stations and has affiliation agreements with 227 other local TV stations.
With Fox’s acquisition of Metromedia, Grossi became senior VP and then, in 1991, executive VP of Television Operation for Fox’s Domestic and International TV and Home Video distribution businesses, Network Television Prime Time programming, and had worldwide responsibility for licensing and merchandising for film and TV.
At Fox, Grossi worked initially under Jonathan Dolgen (1945-2023) and subsequently under Lucie Salhany, who had joined Fox in 1991 and became chairwoman in 1993. At Fox, Salhany replaced Dolgen in 1991 when he left for Columbia Pictures. At Fox, Grossi also worked with Jim Gianopoulos. “Actually, I recommended him to Lucie Salhany for the job to head up International TV Distribution,” said Grossi. Later, Gianopoulos, who came from Columbia Pictures, became chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox and, in 2017, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures up until 2021.
The early ’90s were characterized by economic growth in the U.S., but when some of the local TV stations that were independent became affiliated with the fourth TV network created by FOX, they took away primetime periods from the studios’ syndicated programs, so first-run scripted programming moved to cable.
That job at Fox lasted 10 years, and in 1994 Grossi returned to Paramount’s United Paramount Network (UPN) as senior executive VP, functioning as its COO. At UPN, Grossi rejoined Salhany, who was then UPN’s president.
UPN was formed in 1994 jointly by Chris- Craft’s United Television and Paramount (by then owned by Viacom, which at the time was run by Dolgen) and operated up until 2006 as a network in 200 U.S. TV markets first on two nights with two hours of primetime programming, and later on five nights a week, but without owning any local TV stations. In 2006, UPN merged with Warner Bros.’ The WB to form The CW. (At that time UPN was under CBS, then part of Paramount. Today, The CW is owned by Nexstar Media, a local TV station group).
“At UPN,” recalled Grossi, “the biggest challenge was [to create] the fifth TV network from scratch. UPN was a network like FOX and The WB, not syndication. I lived with the birth of FOX too, but [UPN] was hands on, from scratch.” Grossi also explained that “the TV audience became so fragmented that reach and frequency studies (the method by which one determines how many times an ad must run to reach its number in the desired demographic) went from six times to over 25 times.”
In 1999, Mel Harris, who had left Paramount in 1991 to join Sony Pictures, hired Grossi as president of its Columbia Tri-Star Television, overseeing the Network Television Group, Game Show Network, Spanish-language U.S. TV network Telemundo (now, since 2001, owned by NBCUniversal), Sony Pictures Animation Group, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and daytime soap operas Days of Our Lives and Young and the Restless, plus worldwide responsibility for licensing and merchandising for film and TV. Grossi took on some of the responsibilities of Andrew Kaplan, who had left Sony to become chief executive of the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
Harris had left Sony in 1995 amid a power struggle among the studio’s senior executives, but he returned to the Culver City studio in 1999 as Sony’s co-president and COO, overseeing studio operations under chairman-CEO John Calley (1930-2011).
If at UPN Grossi was challenged by TV audience fragmentation, he had joined Sony Pictures during what was called “peak TV,” a period with a historical record number of TV programs. But he recalled that his bigger beef was that “corporate wanted to get rid of Telemundo, against my better judgment and advice.” Grossi sold Telemundo to NBC, and half of Sony’s Game Show cable TV network to John Malone’s Liberty Media. Telemundo, was founded in 1954 in Puerto Rico.
However, what became Grossi’s “biggest regret ever in my career was when I brought [the TV series] CSI to Sony and corporate didn’t let me make that deal. I loved the pilot, but reluctantly passed. It became a huge success [for CBS, now part of Paramount] domestically and internationally, and had multiple spinoffs.”
Harris retired from Sony in 2002 together with Grossi. Later, Grossi formed his own consulting company, Baseline Media, working for Vin Di Bona Productions and other U.S. domestic and international content companies. He continues to offer his consultancy services today.
(By Dom Serafini)
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