The halls of the Speer Communications compound on Dickerson Pike seem as vast as an airplane hangar, but they are virtually empty. Control rooms gleam with high-tech equipment, but for much of the day they apparently remain unused. The studios are outfitted with robotic cameras, but there are few shows to film.
:For over a year now, the local film and video community has been swapping tales about the goings-on inside the gigantic building, which was formerly a Sam’s Club discount warehouse. There has been talk that the operation, the brainchild of Florida multimillionaire Roy M. Speer, cofounder of the phenomenally successful Home Shopping Network, would bring big-time TV and major studio production to Nashville. A company executive still boasts that the facility will transform Music City into “an international telecommunications gateway” to the rest of the world. If money could buy success, Speer Communications would have it made: The 150,000-square-foot facility, with its state-of-the-art equipment, is said to be valued at $65 million. It is also debt-free. When Speer and his family set up their complex, they paid cold, hard cash.
But there’s a major problem: In its first year of existence, Speer Communications has produced very little that has stayed on the air. And activities inside the facility have consciously been shrouded with secrecy. From the outset, Speer has demanded strict confidentiality from its employees, but that hasn’t stopped the buzz.
Early this fall, there were massive layoffs; according to some estimates, as many as 100 Speer employees were given pink slips. One former executive describes the place as a “ghost town.” But the company president responds that Speer has been going through an “aggressive building year.”
The truth may lie somewhere in between. But it’s hard to tell. The Speers are reluctant to give interviews, and the downsized employees are miffed. Still, the wannabe empire on Dickerson Pike may turn out to be an object lesson in the harsh realities of the high-tech revolution. After all is said and done, no matter how much money is spent, you can’t get the viewers if you don’t have the shows.
In the summer of 1995, a fence went up around the former Sam’s Club on Dickerson Pike, and Nashville’s film and video crowd started talking. As truckloads of computers, cameras, and consoles passed through the gates, the word got around: This might very well be it, the facility that would accelerate film and video production in Nashville. All the while, there wasn’t much talk coming from inside the painted metal fence.
:By the fall, this much was known: The Dickerson Pike compound was being bankrolled by the Speer family, led by Roy M. Speer, the merchandising visionary who had helped found the Home Shopping Network.
Given the Speers’ background in television and merchandising—and their virtually unlimited resources—rumors spread about the converted Sam’s Club. Some said it was going to be a movie studio; others said it was going to be the home base for a new HSN-style video-shopping channel. In truth, the mammoth facility houses at least nine different, albeit interrelated, companies and four large soundstages. It offers immense digital storage capabilities, a 400-foot microwave tower, a satellite field, and state-of-the-art digital remote trucks valued at $1.5 million apiece. It could very well be anything the Speers want it to be.
Speer Communications houses the first completely digital production facility and TV station in Nashville. It permits a staggering range of services, from international satellite transmission and fully computerized editing to cutting-edge computer graphics and image manipulation. For sheer scale, potential, and advanced technology, it dwarfs its local network-affiliate competitors.
And yet Speer Communications’ first year has been a roller coaster ride. It went on the air with a roster of live local programming that was a near-total failure. Its music shopping network, MOR Music, has suffered severe cutbacks, including the firing of all its on-air personalities. Since earlier this fall, rumors have run rampant that, if the right buyer could be found, the facility would be up for sale.
Nevertheless, Speer Communications has introduced something strange, new, and intimidating to Nashville’s television industry. According to Speer Communications president Steve Tello, it could create “an international gateway.” If Speer succeeds, it will become the nationwide production magnet that Nashville’s film and video community has prayed for. In the local film and video industry, nobody seems to want to consider the thought of it failing.
There’s no question that the Speer family has deep pockets. The Home Shopping Network originated in the 1970s at a radio station Speer owned in Clearwater, Fla. According to legend, inspiration struck when a station newscaster was instructed to hawk, on the air, a shipment of electric can openers that had been accepted as payment for a delinquent advertising bill. In 1982 Speer and cofounder Lowell “Bud” Paxson launched the TV version of the Home Shopping Club on a local cable system; by 1984 the club was racking up annual sales of $11 million. Ten years later, that figure had risen to $1.1 billion.
:The family had generated billions of dollars through HSN and a host of interlocking holdings, the most notable of which was Silver King Communications, a chain that includes 12 TV stations in eight of the nation’s largest media markets, as well as 27 lower-powered stations across the country. Speer sold his controlling interest in HSN in 1992 for a reported $184 million.
Speer’s tenure at the Home Shopping Network was controversial. In 1993, he resigned as HSN’s chairman amidst a barrage of investor lawsuits and investigations of financial improprieties in the network’s purchasing operations. A series of articles that year in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal detailed allegations that, among numerous other charges, HSN had paid more than $12 million since 1988 to a software company owned by Speer’s son, Richard—even though Speer’s personal accountant had testified that the order-taking software built by Richard’s company was incompatible with most of the computers HSN had been using since the mid-1980s. Despite the charges, Speer was widely regarded as a marketing genius and a tenacious businessman.
To establish a beachhead in Nashville, the Speers formed a new company, Speer Communications Ltd., that would shelter and link together a variety of entertainment concerns. According to published reports, 35-year-old Richard Speer, who got his start in television while purchasing merchandise for the Home Shopping Network, owns 60 percent of the company; his sister Lisa also owns stock in the family business. Richard Speer is CEO of Speer Communications. Both Roy and Richard Speer own houses here; Richard is said to have played a behind-the-scenes role in recent efforts to move the Nashville Zoo to Grassmere Park.
In coming to Nashville, the Speers’ goal was to transform the Dickerson Pike Sam’s Club into a command center for music, merchandising, and TV production on a nationwide scale. According to Speer Communications president Steve Tello, who formerly served for 10 years as senior producer of ABC’s World News Tonight With Peter Jennings, the company intended to build “a post-production facility of some size that could answer the needs of people outside of New York and perhaps Los Angeles.” Such a facility, Tello maintains, “would be a very attractive alternative. We can be a premier facility for not only production but storage of their product and distribution of their product.”
:While their operation was gearing up, Speer staffers talked a lot about “synergy”; they envisioned a network of subsidiary companies reinforcing and feeding off of one another’s services. If they needed a role model to emulate, they had only to look to The Walt Disney Co. Disney studios produce movies, which are released through Disney’s distribution company. Those movies are eventually issued on Disney home video and are broadcast on the Disney Channel. In turn, the movies themselves become strolling advertisements for the inevitable soundtrack albums, which are released on—you guessed it—a Disney record subsidiary. Each separate Disney company generates money for the umbrella company.
But here’s the catch: For such a system to work, it must be bolstered by a steady stream of high-quality, high-demand products, either in the form of movies, music, or TV shows.
In August 1995, Speer Communications purchased MOR Music TV, a Florida-based company that had followed HSN’s lead by hawking records and videos over the airwaves. The Speers relocated MOR Music’s operations to Nashville, where Richard Speer predicted it would rake in $1 billion a year in sales by the end of the decade. “If we don’t more than double the distribution during the next year, I am not doing my job,” he told Billboard.
Another Speer-owned company, Speer Productions, was set up to produce programming and to supply MOR Music with on-air talent and crew. At the same time, Roy Speer cofounded a music label, Magnatone Records, with former Judds producer Brent Maher on board as president. (Maher has since left the company.) Magnatone set up shop in the Dickerson Pike compound too, signing artists such as Kenny Rogers and the country group Great Plains.
Then came the crucial link to complete the chain—a broadcast facility that would gain Speer Communications a spot on the city’s airwaves. A mutual acquaintance introduced Hartsville, Tenn., businesswoman Ruth Carman to the Speers. Carman wanted to launch a new TV station in the Nashville market; by the spring of 1995, she and the Speers were planning to create a station at the Dickerson Road complex. With the Speers’ blessing, Carman imported several seasoned veterans from the Florida TV market, including a consultant, Larry Cazavan, who would become vice president of station operations, and a general manager, Vince Barressi.
The resulting UHF station, WNAB-TV, was scheduled to go on the air in November 1995 as Nashville’s local affiliate with the new Warner Bros. Network. For three nights a week, programming would include a lineup of new shows bolstered by movies and cartoons from the vast Warner Brothers library. At that point, estimates placed the Speers’ outlay of cash somewhere between $50 million and $65 million.
That month, in a rare local print interview, Richard Speer gave Tennessean readers a tantalizing glimpse of Speer Communications’ long-range vision. He described a futuristic complex outfitted with $65 million worth of high-tech razzle-dazzle, including immense satellite capability, robotic cameras, and facilities that could support as many as 10 music channels. By the end of 1996, Speer prophesied, the facility’s staff would swell from 50 employees to 250.
Significantly though, Richard Speer never mentioned anything about the programs, artists, or personalities who would attract viewers to WNAB or MOR Music. He admitted to The Tennessean that he maintained a high level of secrecy about his budding empire because he “wasn’t exactly sure how we were going to finally put it together.”
From the moment WNAB made its debut, at 3 p.m. on Nov. 29, 1995, the station was plagued by the usual snafus that come with the launching of a new TV station. Speer Communications’ robotic cameras, which are operated by joysticks and touch-activated computer screens in control rooms adjacent to each studio, were indeed advanced—so much so that few staffers had any idea how to operate them.
:The hurry to get the station on the air didn’t allow much time for practice runs. “I’ve never been involved with such a fiasco,” says a former Speer executive recalling WNAB’s first day. “Nobody knew how to run the equipment.”
Even that first day, however, there were signs that WNAB had some potential for attracting viewers. In an interview conducted last January, general manager Vince Barressi said that, in hopes of gaining visibility in an already crowded market, WNAB’s focus would be local programming. The first local show to premiere was a phone-in talk show, PrimeTalk. WNAB tapped an unlikely host: former Mayor Bill Boner, who was then making a comeback after his disastrous term of office.
Boner was no Larry King, but on his first night, with almost no advance publicity, on a TV station no one knew existed, Boner managed to attract several calls. “People always say Boner used us to get back in the public eye,” a former WNAB staffer says. “I always said that we used Boner.”
But in terms of local programming, PrimeTalk was not the station’s big success story. That honor fell to SportsTalk, WNAB’s second show, which made its debut in January. Hosted by Vandy play-by-play announcer George Plaster and Banner sportswriter Greg Pogue, SportsTalk was an unvarnished hour of hardcore sports commentary and call-in conversation. Every night the lines lit up with anywhere from 35 to 50 calls. When combined with telecasts of Vanderbilt, TSU, and MTSU sporting events, SportsTalk gave WNAB a solid foothold in local sports programming.
The station saved its most ambitious show for the spring. By far the most expensive local show on the WNAB schedule, Mornings was intended to nail down the station’s morning viewership. Its hosts, Julie Tello and Chuck Long, gave viewers a local alternative to Bryant and Katie or Regis and Kathie Lee. Every weekday morning, they paraded cooks, columnists, and visiting celebrities across their homey set. The extensive preproduction on the show required the largest staff of any WNAB program.
With Mornings at one end of the schedule and PrimeTalk and SportsTalk at the other, WNAB could boast a wide range of local programming. Six months after the station’s launch, the Speers bought WNAB from Ruth Carman.
From the outset, though, WNAB’s local shows faced a persistent struggle. The network shows being offered by Warner Brothers were drubbed by critics and were ranked constantly near the bottom of the Nielsen ratings—largely because of the fledgling network’s relatively small number of affiliates. The same troubles had faced the now thriving Fox network in its early years, but the Warner Bros. Network lacked a breakout show like The Simpsons or Married...with Children to lure viewers to WNAB. To make matters worse, the Warner Bros. lineup was simultaneously carried on Chicago superstation WGN, one of the best-known basic cable channels. WGN will continue to air Warner Bros. shows until 1998.
:There were other problems too. Former producers for MOR Music and WNAB say that, despite all the money the Speers sank into property and equipment, poor planning and organization led to daily headaches. Former employees recall control rooms that were rewired without notice, leaving staff members frantic as showtime approached. They remember producing live shows with newly hired camera operators, who were forced to train on the cameras during live filming.
Still, even as late as last August, WNAB was developing and greenlighting new local shows—despite the fact that, except for SportsTalk, few of the existing local programs were generating much advertising revenue. By that point, a former WNAB staffer says, the station was grasping at straws. “Ideas on the table would suddenly be scrapped,” he says. “Then, days later, you’d hear, ‘Why aren’t you working on this?’ The whole atmosphere was constantly combat warfare.”
By September, Speer’s upper management was faced with a grim challenge—what to do about a lineup of local shows that wasn’t attracting viewers or generating advertising dollars. Steve Tello says management came to the realization that “the broadcasts we were doing and the size of the staff just was not working.” A “reshaping” followed, Tello says. “It was clear that those programs, other than the sports program, were going to have to be cut. They were not advertiser-supported; the viewers clearly weren’t there. We decided that those broadcasts, at this time, in our first year of operation, had to be taken off.” The ax fell on Sept. 25.
Former Speer staffers—who refer to that day as “Black Wednesday”—say they had no idea what was in store when they showed up for work that September morning. By the end of the day, two of WNAB’s top executives, general manager Vince Barressi and vice president of station operations Larry Cazavan, were gone. Frank Seymour, president of corporate sales for Speer Communications, was gone too.
And the firings didn’t stop there. In groups of five or more, staffers from various Speer companies—among them WNAB-Channel 58, MOR Music, and Speer Productions—were escorted to a conference room that came to be nicknamed “the gas chamber.” There, a personnel director told them they were being given severance packages and were being dismissed.
Of WNAB’s eight locally produced shows, seven were immediately canceled. A daytime talk show, Tennessee Neighbors, was axed after only eight shows. Its host, local media coach Kip Kirby, says she simply received a call telling her not to report to work the next day. At least she had had some on-air exposure. Bob Deck, a Knoxville TV personality, had relocated to Nashville to host WNAB’s nighttime call-in show PrimeTalk. That Wednesday, while he was rehearsing for his debut the following week, PrimeTalk was canned.
Speer’s most ambitious announced project, a 24-hour news channel to be called Tennessee Now, was placed on indefinite hold. Another show, a teen music-and-issues program called Blast TV, was canceled just days before it was due to go on the air. Writers had worked for months with WNAB’s top brass to develop an innovative format based on the local teen newspaper Blast! On that fateful Wednesday afternoon, writer E. Heather Lose recalls, she was ushered into a room with “seven people I’d never met.” They were all terminated. The show’s partially completed set stood on an adjacent soundstage. Its credits had already been typed, ready to roll.
Subsequent rounds of layoffs slashed the staff of MOR Music down to two full-time employees. Since relocating to Nashville, the music-shopping network had taken advantage of Speer’s enormous capabilities, producing several hour-long programs devoted to musical genres such as rock and country. During these segments, on-air hosts sold merchandise, including records by Magnatone artists such as Shelby Lynne. In November, the show’s on-air jocks, including Katrina Owens and former Y-107 morning man Danny Wright, were let go. According to former MOR producers, the cutbacks were so stringent that an employee in the tape vault was tagged to operate cameras, and a receptionist was brought in to learn computer graphics.
Several former Speer staffers say that, without steady pitches from on-air talent, they don’t believe the network will survive the year. Tello, however, says the opposite is true, thanks to Speer’s “media pool,” an electronic library of digitally converted film and video information that can store and summon 15-minute “pods” of prerecorded programming, including artist profiles, performances, and videos. Those pods can then be shuffled and reshuffled in endless configurations to fill blocks of airtime. Tello says producing the pods has provided free-lance work for several former staffers. It has also streamlined costs of production—which was the point of the layoffs all along.
:“The layoffs weren’t about the quality of the work,” Tello says. Instead, he says management was proud of the work the employees had done. “The core group of people here now feel a sense of compassion for those who aren’t here, but they’ve worked hard to repackage MOR, repackage the television station.”
$t1>The layoffs caused understandably bitter feelings among the employees who were fired, many of whom had been working 14-hour days. (One former part-time WNAB technician claims that, just days before the layoffs, he agreed to work as a free-lance employee, which potentially could have brought him more money for the same work. When he was dismissed a few days later, he says, his free-lance status prevented him from collecting unemployment.)
The harsh feelings, however, are not directed toward Tello, whom former Speer staffers remember as a fair, dedicated boss. More than one terminated staffer cited the firing of Tello’s own daughter, Mornings cohost Julie Tello, as proof that the layoffs, though severe, showed no favoritism. Instead, most of the hostility is being directed toward the Speers, who in all probability had little contact with most of the staff.
“If you ever wanted to see a dysfunctional family,” says a former Speer executive, recalling heated meetings between father and son, “this is it. People are just a means to their end.” Nine months before “Black Wednesday,” Richard Speer had told the assembled employees of Speer Communications that his door would always be open. In the wake of the firings, former employees complained that his office—located in a hallway nicknamed “Mahogany Row” by one MOR Music staffer—could not be accessed by means of their employee security badges.
Steve Tello says that the Speers were troubled as much as anyone else by the tough decision. “It was certainly a difficult time for many people—including myself, including the Speers,” Tello says. “We’re very proud of the people who worked on those shows. We’re very proud of the product.” For example, Tello says, staff and management “worked really hard on the morning show.” Nevertheless, “it just was not going to be able to generate enough revenue and viewer interest. No one takes pride in going through a transition like that.”
As Steve Tello whisks a couple of visitors through the massive, futuristic Speer Communications facility, the mood seems different from the despairing atmosphere described by former staffers who recall the dark days of September.
:Approximately 150 full-time employees still work at the Dickerson Pike compound. And, even though the cavernous halls are largely empty, whenever Tello encounters employees, he greets them by name. He stops to propose a challenge to a staffer on cigarette break; Tello promises to give the employee a dollar for every day the employee doesn’t smoke.
Scattered among the gleaming editing rooms—many of which seem desolate—are encouraging signs of humanity. On the table beside a large computer, which is equipped with a cutting-edge rotoscoping and morphing program called “the Flame,” a banana sits next to a pair of game paddles and a pot of coffee.
For 1997, Tello says, WNAB will emphasize its local sports programming. The expanded 90-minute SportsTalk will be linked to a variety of local sporting events, including the upcoming Clinic Bowl, to be broadcast live via one of Speer’s remote trucks. The trucks, which can transmit live multicamera satellite feeds, were in constant demand during the waning days of the 1996 presidential election.
The trucks are a key element in what Tello calls Speer’s “hub and spoke” strategy. The Nashville facility will be the hub of the Speer Communications empire. The spokes will include Speer’s Professional Video Services facilities in Atlanta and Washington. PVS-Speer in Washington offers production facilities for 17 international broadcasters, including the BBC and Japan’s NHK. PVS-Speer in Atlanta is a training facility for the computerized AVID editing system.
Speer Productions has also entered into joint ventures to produce two shows, a science program and a pilot for an auto racing show. Speer has also produced 10 hours of Sound Station, an hour-long music program that has been broadcast on MOR Music. Speer’s soundstages were occupied for months recently with Lunker Lake, a $10 million Gaylord/TNN production featuring oatmeal spokesman Wilford Brimley and a flock of puppets.
On the other hand, during the early morning hours when it is carried on WNAB, MOR Music now consists mainly of infomercials. The infomercials are even less of an attention-grabber than some of WNAB’s former late-night programming was. One now-defunct segment was an hour-long talent show of “celebrity look-alikes” doing Foghorn Leghorn imitations.
Currently, WNAB operates under a “must-carry” rule, which forces local cable companies to carry any station that has a certain signal strength. Because of the “must-carry” rule, WNAB is approaching 65 percent cable penetration. The station’s ratings may also improve dramatically next June, when participating Nashville households will be outfitted with “meters” that supposedly will register station viewership more accurately than Nielsen journals do.
Steve Tello sounds confident. “This was our building year,” he says. “We took on a great amount of construction; we took on a great technical challenge to build this digital facility; we started a television station; we moved MOR Music from Florida to this facility; we built a production center and large studios; we integrated technologies that had not been merged before. It was all privately financed. It was a very aggressive building year.”
:But, when he’s asked how the Speers can expect to make back their $65 million investment in a city that reportedly generates only about $10 million in video production annually, Tello looks wounded. “It’s not about the local production,” he responds. “This facility was not just built for the Nashville market. This is an international telecommunications gateway, a media center that allows us to reach any part of the world.”
Perhaps, after all, Nashville wasn’t supposed to be so excited about the Speer complex, which, Tello says, “happens to be based in Nashville. This investment the Speers have made will not be amortized just in the Nashville market.” If their sights were no broader than Nashville, he says, the Speers “would never be able to achieve what their vision is and what they’ve invested. This is about using Nashville as an international gateway.”
Sitting at a conference table near the elegant lobby and the ever vigilant security checkpoint, Steve Tello sums up his still none-too-specific vision of the past and the future of Speer Communications. “We’re on the leading edge,” he says. “We’ve been on the bleeding edge.”
