Simon & Schuster
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Television, film and media executive Barry Diller spent 10 years at ABC and helped popularize TV’s “The Movie of the Week.” In his new memoir, “Who Did Know” (published by Simon & Schuster on May 20th), Diller writes about his career.
Read the excerpt below, and don’t miss out on Tracy Smith’s interview with Barry Diller on May 11th on “CBS Sunday Morning”!
“Who knew” by Barry Diller
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The early title was good
The chain lady was one of my favorites. It was a scary movie, but what a promotional title.
The screams were pretty bad either Peggy.
Sometimes staff will ask, “Is it a commercial?” And I will make them brutal. Because, rather than using their instincts, they were trying to predict the appetite of the masses. Neither uses research to aid in decision making. The amount of research on ideas is not worth the paper (or computer screen) on which it is printed. Data can tell you what happened, not what happened or what happened. Data is often harmful to instincts, and I think this applies to making not only creative decisions, but also many business decisions. PowerPoint can become enemies. Structured information often narrows the sieve when it is necessary to spread out into the space between information and actual understanding. Overcoming the brain with data alone does not provide any benefits, and if it is the only decision-making component, it can be a deterrent. It is often an issue with MBA students armed with all business tools and case studies, but armed with simple human instincts. I don’t think using instincts rather than deep, hard numerical or fact-based data to aid in decision-making is a lazy process. Too much information can overload, complex, and ambiguous what lies in the essence of any proposal. Is that a good idea, does it have a general meaning?
It’s rare to get the perfect project or the perfect script. In all my experiences, I probably have never read ten scripts out of a thousand people that are very fully realized. But one of them was the day in 1970 when Leonard Goldberg was recently moving from ABC to run a large television production company. It was a Brian song, a story of the deep bond between black and white professional football players, called The People Who Die from Cancer. I cried after reading it. I called him and said, “You can only ruin it from here – it was perfect. Often called it one of the best TV movies ever made, one of the best sports films, it was nominated for nine Emmy Awards, and won five. A few more times, Dan Curtis, the leading producer of ABC Daytime, sent me a manuscript of a novel called Colchaku Paper, which hasn’t been released yet. I read it in a few hours – it was a modern story of a Las Vegas vampire – and then I told Dan, “This is as good a story as I’ve ever read.” And what a great idea: Las Vegas, the city that lives most at night – the perfect place for vampires to live.
Of that novel, we made the night stalker. “Yes, it’s a great movie, but this week’s film and it’s where it belongs,” and I fought it. We aired the film in early January 1972, becoming ABC’s highest rated film of the week, with around 50 million people. Night Stalker produced a sequel (The Night Stalker) and a TV series (Kolchaku: The Night Stalker), followed by two more TV films and a remake of the series that followed. It’s all from a good idea!
From Barry Diller’s “Who Knows.” Copyright©2025 by Barry Diller. Simon & Schuster, Inc. Excerpted with permission from Simon & Schuster, a division of the company.
Get the book here:
“Who knew” by Barry Diller
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For more information:
Hardcover, e-book, audio format, “Who Knows” by Barry Diller (Simon & Schuster) available on May 20th
