Visionaries, for better or worse

Before the networks showcased Victoria’s Secret lingerie models in prime time, there was the “3-D Hawaiian Swimsuit Spectacular.” Before “Temptation Island,” there were explorations of bare flesh and nude beaches and bigamy. Before Anna Nicole Smith preened for TV cameras, there were segments featuring poster girl Angelyne -- all available six nights a week, on “Eye on L.A.”

Reeling in viewers with an intoxicating mix of sex, titillation, adventure and gaudy promotion (and did we mention sex?), the local magazine-style show filled the half-hour leading into prime time on KABC-TV through the 1980s -- thriving in the days when TV stations still cranked out local shows, before those time periods became home to nationally syndicated programs like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Oprah.”

Yet while “Eye” was shut more than a decade ago (KABC still uses the title on a more subdued half-hour program airing Saturdays), the show was the incubator for a generation of producers who have taken tricks they learned there and now ply them on a national stage.

“Almost every ‘reality’ show on the air, we did some version of on ‘Eye on L.A.,’ ” said alumnus Jeff Androsky, whose producing credits include Fox’s recent “Celebrity Daredevils” special and that network’s live stunt shows featuring motorcyclist Robbie Knievel.

In fact, the ratings-driven hucksterism the show shamelessly trafficked in years ago has permeated today’s airwaves -- with desperate times, or at least an increasingly crowded TV environment, demanding desperate measures.

“At KABC, you could get away with virtually anything, because it was the most rating-conscious place you would ever be in your life,” said fellow “Eye” graduate Mack Anderson, producer of the long-running Comedy Central series “BattleBots.” “If you want to get to the broader issues of what’s happening in reality television, the same thing is happening now -- the fact that there is intense ratings pressure, and suddenly networks are saying, ‘Just do something, as long as it works.’ ”

In that sense, “Eye” is gone but hardly forgotten. The show’s progeny now produce a wide array of today’s unscripted series, including E!’s “The Anna Nicole Show” and “The E! True Hollywood Story,” NBC’s “Meet My Folks” and a lengthy roster of Fox fare such as “American Idol,” “America’s Most Wanted,” “Boot Camp” and “Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska.”

What better way, then, to chart the rise (or, depending on one’s viewpoint, spread) of unscripted programming than to dig into its roots, with half a dozen of “Eye’s” senior producers -- Anderson, Androsky, Don Cambou, Michael J. Miller, Erik Nelson and Eric Schotz -- acting as tour guides and archeologists?

These producers, along with their fellow alumni, have become some of the most prolific dabblers in the so-called reality genre. Most are competitors now, vying for precious time periods on the networks that buy such programs, and like the bosses in “The Godfather,” they pressed for the meeting to take place on neutral turf.

After a bit of haggling, they agreed to gather at the old KABC lot on Prospect Avenue in Los Angeles where they assembled the show in the ‘80s. KABC has relocated, and the bungalow “Eye on L.A.” called home has been reduced to a dirt pile.

As metaphors go, the bungalow’s fate is a pretty good one for what happened to local television shows after the 1980s, as stations slashed in-house production. According to the producers, however, “Eye” lives on.

“You can find pieces of it everywhere,” said Schotz, whose company has been responsible for “Boot Camp,” “Bachelorettes in Alaska,” “Guinness World Records: Prime Time,” as well as “Behind Closed Doors With Joan Lunden.” “When we were on, MTV was just starting. We were doing music videos before MTV went on the air.”

Relegated to a sterile conference room a short distance from where the “Eye” offices stood, the session turns out to be part class reunion, part one-upmanship by seasoned salesmen -- a free-flowing discussion of the current state of their art, peppered liberally with obscure references to incidents only they remember and former colleagues whose mere mention elicits laughs or knowing grins.

The tone is nostalgic but far from maudlin. These are men, after all, who frequently earn their living by capturing life’s oddities, whether through hidden cameras or by persuading people to put themselves in bizarre situations for the entertainment of a vast audience at home. For apprehensive networks, they offer the promise of eye-catching fare that won’t cost an arm and a leg -- good food at reasonable prices.

The old days were easier, they agree -- the TV environment less stressful and uncertain, and more fun. People made money even in failure, and stations invested in local production -- providing a training ground for these producers as well as a bond with the community that dissipated as nationally produced and syndicated fare supplanted it.

Indeed, the idea that a locally produced show dominated the early-evening ratings might be hard to fathom for those who don’t remember the days before Alex Trebek met “Jeopardy!,” but such local programming was common. In fact, “Eye on L.A.” competed head to head with “2 on the Town,” a more stately magazine on KCBS-TV, and the competition was fierce.

During rating sweeps, the gloves -- and often other clothing -- came off, with segments like “Nude Beaches of the World” (creatively shot to obscure vital areas) and the “3-D Swimsuit Spectacular,” with viewers picking up the necessary glasses at 7-Eleven stores.

If the actual effect was iffy, viewership soared. KCBS countered with an in-depth report about the Philippines; few people watched. “2 on the Town” executive producer Michael Meadows said at the time, “We tried to do a meaningful show, and we got crushed by bodies.”

Keeping it real

THE subsequent success of the show’s alumni -- and the anything-goes nature of TV’s “reality” -- suggests that the lessons were taken to heart. In addition to the six participants, a partial list includes Teya Ryan, general manager of CNN, as well as producers Brian Gadinsky (“American Idol”), Jeff Shore (“Anna Nicole”), Michael Linder (“America’s Most Wanted”), and Rob Kirk and Rob Lihani, partners in the multimedia production company Digital Ranch.

Other “Eye” graduates are writer-producer Bryce Zabel, chairman of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; Paul Hall, producer of the recent feature “Shaft”; and commercial director David Kellogg, who also directed the movie “Inspector Gadget.” As for on-air talent, the show drew liberally from KABC’s newsroom, including Paul Moyer, Chuck Henry and Jann Carl.

At the time, almost all of the “Eye” staff was young and willing to work insane hours. “It was not unusual to work 24 or 36 hours straight, and then we would brag about it in some misguided, macho way,” said Anderson, a soft-spoken fellow who dryly notes that he always knew their would be an audience for fighting robots -- the conceit behind “BattleBots” -- in the 21st century.

The producers describe “Eye” as a graduate school, but it also operated as a sort-of fraternity. Schotz, for example, recalls having staff call “2 on the Town” anonymously trying to ferret out its sweeps scheduling and sending flowers to the executive who oversaw the show with a birthday wish from her boss, even though it wasn’t her birthday.

“ ‘Eye on L.A.’ was like a laboratory, and for a while, the inmates were allowed to run the asylum,” said Cambou, who the past five years has headed Hearst Corp.’s Actuality production unit, supervising installments of “Biography,” “Intimate Portraits” and “Modern Marvels,” among others.

Beyond the battle with “2 on the Town,” producers competed among themselves for “plums” -- from the most exotic trips to the best office and parking spot. Marathon production schedules made working on the show resemble a medical internship, as pieces were frequently completed hours before they went on the air.

“We were all 25 and worked to the edge of what we could do,” said Miller, who speaks in clipped bursts and still seems to possess a vast reservoir of energy, having worked with producer Bruce Nash on NBC’s “Meet My Folks” and “World’s Most Amazing Videos,” along with a host of specials.

“It was like being in a MASH unit in Korea,” he mused. “It really was. I didn’t go to graduate school, but this was it.”

Most of the producers were new to Los Angeles. For some, it was their first job in television. Androsky was working in Louisville, Ky., when he came out hoping to join the staff. “They sent me to do a story on the Raiderettes. I spent four days planning it. That day, I was told, ‘Forget the Raiderettes. There’s a stripper convention in Las Vegas. You’re leaving in an hour.’ I shot it that night, was back the next day, edited it, and as I was leaving they said, ‘Hey, you want the job?’ ”

As with many of the “reality” or alternative programs that followed, critics routinely pummeled the show -- dismissing its emphasis on beaches and bikinis as “Eye on T&A.;” KABC officials brushed them off, saying those initials must stand for “travel and adventure.”

The show’s promotion matched the cheekiness of its content. Ghosts conveniently turned up at L.A.’s purported haunted spots -- but only during sweeps and only if you watched the segments. An episode in which Liberace gave viewers a tour of his clothing collection was billed as “Inside Liberace’s Closet -- Tonight at 7:30!” “Everybody watched it, and it was about dry cleaning!” said Miller.

“It sort of functioned like a 1950s exploitive studio, where they would come up with the poster first, and then Roger Corman would crank out the movie second,” said Nelson, the producer of such hidden-camera shows as UPN’s “Redhanded” and MTV’s “Celebrity Undercover,” along with the specials “World’s Most Dangerous Animals” and “When Chefs Attack.” “The show taught you to think in log lines and full-page ads, which isn’t a bad skill to take into the hurly-burly of television.”

Added Anderson: “It was one of the loudest TV shows that has ever been produced -- by loud, I mean from a promotional point of view, from a catch-your-attention point of view.... Frankly, now, whenever you go in to pitch a show, you really do have to convince whoever the buyer is that what you’re going to do is going to have an impact, and the way to make an impact in a really crowded television market is by being loud.”

How loud? A production log from 1984 reveals such topics as “Nude Art Models,” “Stripper Convention,” “Voodoo” and “Bigamy” -- and that’s just during a two-week stretch in the February rating sweeps.

“This show was about creating events,” Schotz said. “That is the one thing that I took away when you walk in and try to sell something to a network. Whether it was doing ‘Nude Beaches of the World’ or ‘3-D Swimsuits’ or ‘Around the World in Eight Days,’ we were able to sit there and say, ‘How do you sell this as an event?’ ‘... You’d walk away and figure out how to take something simple and blow it up and make it huge.”

Given that contestants on some of today’s unscripted programs sign 50-page waivers, “Eye on L.A.” also operated with remarkable freedom, seldom worrying about the legal clearances corporate attorneys presently demand.

“Clearances? Yeah, right. Like we were going to [legally] clear somebody,” Schotz said. “It didn’t have all the weight that you have today.”

“One of the things we learned at ‘Eye on L.A.,’ which is an important component in creating modern reality television, is that ordinary people will do anything to be on television,” Nelson said.

Local shows fade from view

ANOTHER modern shift is that few TV stations devote significant resources to local production anymore; instead, media conglomerates own ever larger station groups, buying programs that play across the country.

“There’s no local television anymore,” Miller said. “There was a 25-year era of local TV, where stations believed they needed to have local programming to serve the public, and it ended pretty much when this show ended. Now they just put on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ reruns, and one fat guy downstairs pushes a ‘start’ button on a tape machine.”

At its peak, “Eye on L.A.” produced 130 to 140 episodes a year, running six nights a week. Miller contrasted that with today, when networks order six episodes of a new series and producers always feel as if they’re on the verge of being canceled. “Because of that, we could afford to take enormous risks,” he said.

Although the show was extremely popular, its death warrant was essentially signed in 1986, when buttoned-up Capital Cities acquired ABC. At the time, KABC produced an original magazine show in the afternoon (“330”), three hours of local news, “Eye on L.A.,” “Hollywood Close-Up” and “Eye on Hollywood” -- essentially a repackaged version of “Eye on L.A.” segments that ran late at night on the network.

Gradually, those programs began to disappear. “Eye” was outsourced and eventually replaced by syndicated programming. “When Capital Cities took over, there were 135 employees here in the local programming department,” Anderson recalled. “Within a year, there were six. Literally, they didn’t want people on the payroll.”

“Now the whole country has turned into one major television market,” Nelson said.

“It’s like AM radio,” Miller added. “It used to be every city had their own station and personality. Now you can drive coast to coast and it’s the same show.”

Today, economic forces combined with the appetite for something new to stand apart from the crowd has led to alternative programs occupying large swaths of prime-time real estate. Still, the producers agree that the TV business was easier back in their formative years -- or at least, it seems that way in hindsight.

“When I was at ‘Eye on L.A.,’ I naively thought talent was easy, and I think it was because everyone around me was talented,” Cambou said. “Now that I have to find talent, it’s hard. There’s not that much of it out there.”

“Especially not for this kind of stuff, where you have to really get it at some level and have no shame,” Nelson said.

There is a consensus among them, too, that there was something refreshingly unpretentious about KABC in those years -- a station that didn’t aspire to high art or spend much time defending its excesses.

In that respect, “Eye on L.A.” was a harbinger of things to come -- a show that unabashedly exemplified the “Just win” attitude programmers have come to adopt. Parlaying skin and celebrity into ratings, the show was not only a microcosm of L.A. in the 1980s but also a petri dish for the various strains of “reality” that have followed.

The producers who cut their teeth in that since-leveled bungalow, meanwhile, seemingly learned to laugh at the business’ absurdities and not take themselves too seriously. Sure, they provide programs that critics often deride and networks sometimes seem to treat like unwanted stepchildren, but faced with the din of competition and criticism, they know how to make noise.

“KABC gave people what they really wanted to watch, not what people thought they wanted to watch,” Nelson said. “The audience knew there was a P. T. Barnum aspect to it. It was done with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Everyone was in on the joke.

“ ‘Eye on L.A.’ was many things, but it was not overthought,” he said. “Los Angeles got the show it deserved.”