Videoage International November 2021

18 V I D E O A G E November 2021 I t was a big mistake to ask John Franklin Scott Laing, the founding general ma- nager of the Los Angeles-based Rallie LLC, how he managed to speak five languages since he immediately embarked on a rollercoaster type of reply. “My mother was a constant traveler and lived in Italy, Spain, and Mexico. My father was a diplomat [the British Consul in New York and later at the U.N.]. The whole family was Francophone. When I was 12 I told my mother I wanted to learn German and she enrolled me in the [Goethe Institute], a German school outside Munich.” So it’s really no surprise that Laing would end up in the international TV business. He started out at Warner Bros. Television Distribution in 1983 at age 27, and later worked at Orion Pictures (in 1989), and at Rigel USA Inc. (in 1993). Now, he’s at Rallie, a company he founded in 2009. In a 1990 sidebar article about Orion in the trade magazine Channels , Laing, then the president of the newly created division, Orion Television International, was described as someone who “crossed the Atlantic 18 times in his first year.” The Orion story ended up being one of the last articles for the publication, which folded later that same year. Channels was founded by veteran industry journalist Les Brown in 1981, the same year that VideoAge was created. But contrary to VideoAge, Channels did not receive enough advertising support from the entertainment sector, and in 1985 was acquired by TV producer Norman Lear. Around 1990 Brown launched Television Business International, another trade publication with a name similar to VideoAge ’s subtitle: The Business Journal of Television. Brown died in 2013 at age 84. But that was not the only time that Laing’s name was associated with a publication linked to VideoAge. Around 1990, Paolo Glisenti, then the head of Italy’s RCS Video, a multi-million dollar company backed by FIAT’s Agnelli family, apparently decided to compete with VideAge by financing Moving Pictures , a small trade publication in theU.K.,which, after going through several ownership changes and relaunches, finally closed in 2012. More on Glisenti and Laing is coming up. The year 1990 was also when Orion signed a $175 million deal with Columbia Pictures for handling the international distribution for Orion’s film and TV projects. However, Laing explained that, “it was for film and video only. That’s when I launched a new, separate division — Orion TV International.” He would go on to commute between Orion’s offices in New York City and Century City in Los Angeles in order to run the division. It is still unclear what the roles of Edward K. Cooper (in 1986) and Ernst Goldschmidt (in 1987) were. They were listed by VideoAge as running Orion’s International TV Sales from New York City. But according to Laing they were involved with Orion’s movies before the Columbia deal. At Orion, Laing became acquainted with RoboCop , a 1987 movie later turned into a 1994 TV series. But let’s proceed chronologically. When Laing started at Warner Bros., his traveling was limited to the U.S. He’d moved to Warner Bros. from a job at the Book Club division of Germany’s Bertelsmann in Chicago. Before that he worked as a freelance photojournalist for The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal, and Playboy , living in New Haven, Connecticut. And before that, when he was just out of Yale University, where he studied French literature, he sold door-to-door personal-care products for Combe Chemical. The young Laing was quickly educated in the art of television at Warner’s offices in Chicago. There he learned how to read Nielsen and Arbitron ratings. After threemonths he was ready to hit the road and was dispatched to Green Bay, Wisconsin; Rockford, Illinois; and Davenport, Michigan to renew Warner’s shows at local TV stations. In his first outing, Laing, apologizing for his foreign (British) accent, managed to renew the shows and brought in $1.5 million. Before that, Warner’s TV sales in the Midwest were less than $950,000 a year. He now recalls that what helped himwas the fact that he really didn’t know the business well, and instead of negotiating an “ask and a take price,” as was the traditional practice, he only based the negotiations on the “take price,” which he got. After two years of eating hamburgers in small Midwestern cities where fast-food eateries reigned supreme, Laing was transferred to Warner Bros.’ headquarters in Burbank, California. It was 1985 when he first encountered “the man,” a.k.a. Charles D. McGregor, Warner Bros.’ top gun for worldwide TV distribution. But before we delve into that meeting, let’s digress. VideoAge began to publish the industry’s only Who’s Who of International TV Distributors in 1983, but McGregor refused to be listed until its 1986 edition, and in that edition he did not include Laing. He didn’t add Laing until the 1987 Who’s Who edition, and still Laing and other sales executives were never invited to the Villa that McGregor had Warner buy in Acapulco, Mexico, where he entertained content buyers. “But I took the Warner jet once to fly to NATPE in New Orleans,” Laing enthused. Now back to Laing’s first encounter with “the man.” It wasn’t an example of cordiality, with invectives such as “What makes you think you can sell?” thrown at himby the veteran. However, it helped that McGregor knew Laing’s brother- in-law, the late Joe Antelo, who was married to his sister, and who produced the At The Movies program for the Tribune Company. McGregor did not talk to or particularly like the press, even though he had a soft spot for this reporter’s former boss Sol Paul and for the September 1976 edition of Paul’s Television/Radio Age , he even gave an interview to Paul about international sales when he was the executive vice president of Worldwide Distribution at Warner Bros. Television. It was probably because of this aversion to the press that McGregor was not included in guides such as the International Television & Video Almanac and the revered Les Brown’s Encyclopedia of Television , which included other executives, such as the late Jim Marrinan when he was a VP at ITC TV distribution in Los Angeles. Unlike many other U.S. studio executives, McGregor never took a stand at MIP-TV, yet opportunistically took advantage of the cluster of buyers in Cannes by renting nearby hotel rooms to conduct business. But he rented a suite at the Loews Hotel, the venue for the Monte Carlo TV Market. However, he’d refuse to have Luciana Paluzzi, who at that time was working as an Acquisition consultant for Silvio Berlusconi’s TV networks, in meetings because the Italian- born former actress was married to Michael J. Solomon, who served as chairman of Telepictures first, then as president of Lorimar-Telepictures. Not an easy person to deal with, the diminutive McGregor had joined Warner Bros. in 1961, when he was 34 years old. Fifteen years later John Laing: Crisscrossing The World With A RoboCop Promo Under His Arm Int’l TV Distribution Hall of Fame By Dom Serafini John Laing with Sharon Stone at the 2007 Berlin Film Fest John Laing at the 1985 Monte Carlo TV Festival with other studios executives as they are welcomed by Prince Albert of Monaco. However, his first trade show was INTV (which focused on the domestic syndication market) in 1984 in San Francisco (Continued on Page 20)