Book Review: ‘Tinderbox’ by James Andrew Miller

James Andrew Miller’s “Tinderbox,” HBO’s mountainous new oral history, has enough gossip of hostility, jealousy, accountability, and killing to fill an Elizabethan drama. The tone of the book is largely fond, though.

The people who created HBO did something they are proud of. They are happy to be there, to have had a piece of it in the early decades. Most know they will never be this good again.

HBO began broadcasting on November 8, 1972, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., broadcasting to several hundred homes. The first thing you saw on screen (cries from future Time Warner shareholders) was Jerry Levin sitting on a couch. He greeted the audience, then took him to a hockey game from Madison Square Garden, followed by Paul Newman’s “Sometimes a Great Notion.”

Levin was an ambitious young lawyer brought in by Sterling Communications, a cable company, to run HBO’s startup programs. “Tinderbox” explains how Sterling eventually wired all these buildings in Manhattan and elsewhere, sometimes illegally.

Levin, of course, would be the architect of the project. most malicious merger in media history. At the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, he sought to merge Time Warner, of which HBO was a subsidiary, with Steve Case’s already sinking AOL. In the devastating awakening, Levin looked like the famous hedgehog, getting off his hairbrush and muttering shyly, “We all make mistakes.”

If you’re going to read “Tinderbox,” prepare for a landslide in company history. Students of power will find much to interest them. HBO has had many stepparents over the years. These agreements are complex to follow, as is the lyrics to “There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.”

Miller describes how HBO—more or less fly in this scenario—was consumed in reverse order from 1972 to the present: “Warner Bros. Discovery rescued it from AT&T, which swept it away from Time Warner. Time Warner rescued it from AOL, somehow kidnapped it from Time Warner, shrewdly outstripped Time Inc., Time outstripped Sterling Communications long ago.”

Miller, who had previously compiled oral histories, “Live Saturday Night,” ESPN and Creative Artists Agencyexplores the intrigues and crushed egos behind these deals.

These men (mostly men) seemed to want to handcuff each other and throw the enemies in the back of a van. Miller quotes well: “The only way I’d ever get a table from Jerry was if I could jump over the table and grab him by the throat”; “It’s a dog, it chases whoever feeds it.”

HBO’s famous bumper – the static, heavenly chorus – didn’t hit the market until 1993. But the channel had an aura long before that. It started making its mark on popular culture in my teenage years, in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

My family didn’t have HBO, but a friend did. It was the place where you clicked to see George Carlin say seven words you couldn’t say on TV, watch movies with naked people in them, and laugh when you saw comedians (Robert Klein, Bette Midler, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams). Making materials that they could never get rid of Carson.

HBO was so sexy that people went to hotels to watch it. The channel had no advertisers and therefore no one to complain about brazen or steamy content.

Before HBO, television in the hands of the three major networks was a wasteland – “a great exercise of disdain” by, as Robert Hughes put it, “by highly intelligent people to millions of people who they think are far dumber than they really are.”

One notable early recruit was Sheila Nevins, who was hired from CBS to run HBO’s now multi-story documentary unit. A Barbra Streisand concert was an early hit. Boxing was vital to HBO’s early growth, as was Wimbledon’s midweek broadcasts. Channel started a million comedy club. If you were a comic without an HBO special, you weren’t on the map.

HBO is devoted to original movies that I’m happy to see some remember: “Gia” with Angelina Jolie; “Killers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story” with Ben Kingsley and “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” based on the Walter Mosley novel, by Laurence Fishburne et al.

“Tinderbox” is slowing down and deliberately lingering at the turn of the century when television’s so-called golden age begins to appear. With shows like “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and especially “The Sopranos,” HBO changed notions of what television could be and took the cultural conversation from film.

“The Sopranos” was not an immediate hit, but it was deeply loved. “We were starring a stout, hairy-backed man who beats up his wife,” says Jeff Bewkes, former CEO of Time Warner. “No one else would have done that.”

HBO had good luck with its first executives. These were guys who knew what bond was, but had a sense of programming and were knowledgeable enough to hire good people and leave them alone. HBO gave people room to run.

Often the only instruction given to directors and producers was: do nothing that you will see nowhere else. Winning awards was more important than ratings. Before HBO, elite actors didn’t come close to a television show.

HBO staff sometimes found it difficult to define what HBO was, but they knew what it wasn’t. A planned Howie Mandel custom was killed.

After “The Sopranos” left the series, HBO’s luck continued for a while. On the wings were Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and “Game of Thrones”. However, the market, the modern television world, was getting more and more crowded.

HBO was no longer the brash rebel. He appeared on TV shows like “Mad Men”, “House of Cards”, “Orange Is the New Black”, “Breaking Bad”, “The Crown” and they became major hits for Netflix and other cable and streaming services.

Oral history is a peculiar form. It gives a series of intermittent micro-impressions, as if you were looking through the compound eyes of a fly. George Plimpton, who helped edit the best-selling oral biography “Edie,” was a fan. He liked that “the reader rather than the editor is the jury”.

Elizabeth Hardwick hated form. He thought oral histories were full of irresponsible car shootings. As a result, “you’re what people will say about you,” he wrote.

I am a fan of more and more genres. I have a special fondness by Lizzy Goodman “Meet Me in the Toilet: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011” and Chez Panisse, Balthazar, Death and Company (bar), n+1, waiting for oral histories for Anna Wintour’s tenure at Vogue . , Monster Energy drinks, the making of “Dusty in Memphis” and the Stiller section of this newspaper.

Miller is a good interviewer, but a vulgar writer. Interstitial material is hijacked by phrases like “a pinch of ambition” and words like “huge.” These really bothered me at first. But this book is so vast that those cold traces of margarine hitting my face at the end were the only thing keeping me awake.

There are many winning moments on “Tinderbox”. But as I scrolled through almost a thousand pages, as if it was four in the morning on the third night of one of those endurance races, I often felt empty and exhausted and had to keep my hand on the truck.

HBO has retained most of its magic. “Succession”: what a beautiful thing. The sound of that bumper—static, chorus—remains Pavlovian in its promise. But our overjoyed eyeballs have more options, and Miller makes it clear that channel rivals are sharpening long blades.