Michael King, 67; builder of a TV empire . NEW YORK - Michael King, who
with his brother transformed King World Productions, a modest company
they inherited from their father, into a syndicator of television
megahits like "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "Jeopardy! and "Wheel of
Fortune," died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 67. The cause was a
lingering infection, said Robert V. Madden, a friend and former King
family lawyer. The King brothers seized an opening for independently
produced and syndicated game shows and talk shows in the 1970s, when
federal regulations limited how much programming the three major
networks could own. Their eye for talent and salesmanship to local
station managers helped make stars of Alex Trebek, Dr. Phil McGraw,
Rachael Ray, and Roseanne Barr, and transformed Winfrey into the
nation's top-rated daytime talk show host. By the mid-1990s, the
proliferation of cable television, satellite networks, and home video
led the government to relax ownership restrictions on network
television, allowing the Kings to sell their company to CBS in 1999 for
$2.5 billion in CBS stock. At the time, Michael King was King World's
vice chairman and Roger King was chairman. Roger King, an imposing
6-foot-4, 250-pound salesman, became chief executive of CBS Television
Distribution. Michael King became a consultant to CBS. More than a
decade ago he was a part owner of the New Jersey Devils hockey
franchise. At his death he owned King Sports Worldwide, a boxing
promotion company in Los Angeles. King World was started by Charles
King in 1964 with syndication rights to radio programs and the classic
1930s Hal Roach "Our Gang" comedy shorts, which had been renamed "The
Little Rascals" for television. His children inherited the company on
his death in 1972, and they built it into the television industry's
dominant distributor of game and talk shows. For a time they were the
richest family in the industry. By 1982 they had persuaded Merv Griffin
to let them distribute his "Wheel of Fortune" game show, and two years
later they took their company public. By 1988, "Wheel of Fortune" was
said to be earning $125 million a year in advertising revenue and
syndication fees, while costing $6 million to produce and $20 million
to sell and distribute. The resulting profits of $100 million or so,
before taxes, were split between the producer, Columbia Pictures
Entertainment, and King World. On a typical day in the late 1980s, 90
million people watched at least one of the company's three biggest
shows - "Wheel of Fortune," "Jeopardy! and "The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Michael Gordon King, a son of Charles and Lucille King, was born in
Rahway, N.J., on March 8, 1948. He assumed the title of president of
King World, at a salary of $150 a week, soon after graduating from
Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1975, he joined his brother Roger in
Fort Lauderdale at WKID-TV, where they cohosted an all-night talk show
and sold advertising to, among others, mobster Meyer Lansky, who was
promoting his dinner theater. "I said, 'Meyer, every time I come down
here, I come down with 10 fingers,' " Michael King recalled. " 'If I go
back with 10 fingers, I feel like I done good.' Michael, who was four
years younger and considered less mercurial than Roger, returned to
King World with his brother two years later. Roger King died in 2007.
Michael King leaves his wife, Jena; their three children, Theodore,
Audrey and Jesse; and a daughter, Alexandra, from a previous marriage.
Michael King once said that he had wanted to be a rock star. (He
settled for hiring ex-Doobie Brother Michael McDonald to play at his
40th birthday party.) But he also relished his vicarious role in the
entertainment industry. At one point he bought the rights to a library
of vintage movies. "I love owning Sherlock Holmes," he once told an
interviewer. "If anybody wants to run Sherlock Holmes, anywhere in the
world, they have to call Roger and me. Isn't that wild? Mr. King
considered himself a champion of film and television, as the studio
moguls of yesteryear were. "'I measure myself against - and this is
going to sound egotistical - Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner,
David O. Selznick, Mike Todd," he said in an interview with The New
York Times Magazine. "Those people created this industry, and
unfortunately our industry is run by a lot of people who aren't
passionate about it. Not only are they not passionate about it, they're
not filmmakers, they're not television people. They're lawyers and
accountants, and businessmen. "We have a passion for this company and
this industry," he continued. "We made Pat Sajak and Vanna White major
stars. We did it like the old studio system.
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