Free Tick... Tick... Tick... by David Blum Page B

didn’t compete with hit prime-time shows on other networks, it suffered from its position following professional football on most Sundays in the fall—meaning frequent last-minute preemptions of the broadcast and an erosion of an audience it had worked so hard to find.
    In any case, a regular Sunday night slot meant doubling the number of pieces, doubling the workload—and doubling the potential for loud, angry conflict. Within one year of Safer’s arrival, the atmosphere at 60 Minutes had transformed from the leisurely pace of a biweekly production to the frenzy of a weekly circus. The intense rivalry emerging between Safer and Wallace cost the 60 Minutes crew much of the collegiality that marked the show’s earliest days. They were working harder than ever on a broadcast that still hadn’t found its footing, and the result was a toxic and exhausting environment—mitigated somewhat by the exhilaration of creating something that existed nowhere else on television. Most weeks, the producers and correspondents worked late on Saturday night to get their stories ready for a Sunday broadcast; in a few rare instances, the show went on live. As hard as it became, no one minded the long hours and many seemed to thrive on the constant battles. The yelling had begun in earnest. This was Mr. Hewitt’s War.
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    The cacophony at 60 Minutes stemmed from Hewitt’s own long-standing love of loudness. He had long been notorious for barking orders, shouting at underlings and intimidating colleagues with his famously foul language. While it seemed fitting for a nightly news show with the attendant deadlines and tensions, its constant presence on the set of a weekly newsmagazine seemed less a matter of necessity than of habit; it was simply how Hewitt communicated and always had. And sometimes it merely reflected his unbridled and unmatched enthusiasms.
    â€œCome here and fucking look at this!” he would scream after screening a piece for the first time, walking the halls to gather every producer, secretary, and correspondent he could find to get them to see what was so amazing. It remained a relatively small staff, and it didn’t take much to cram everyone into the screening room to see the latest cut of a piece. In spite of the bluster, Hewitt’s democratic quality endeared him to his staff; he was always reaching out to anyone for an opinion or at least a sign of approval.
    But he could also scream louder and longer than anyone on the floor and was viewed less as a mediator than a catalyst for conflict among the correspondents and producers. Everybody loved to pepper their conversations with obscenities, and the words “Fuck you!” could often be heard in the hallways. Just as often, Wallace or Hewitt would walk out of a conversation or screening as a way of making a point to the other. Hewitt, in particular, was also known as a man capable of apology, but it could take a while to arrive.
    The yelling was only a small component in a system of story development and production that was unique in television. While most other news shows followed the top-down edicts of an executive producer, 60 Minutes content came from the reporters and correspondents. Each producer’s responsibility was to develop ideas appropriate to his own correspondent, then make a case for the story, first to the correspondent and then to Hewitt via the Blue Sheet, the term for a written proposal. Once the Blue Sheet was approved, that would give the correspondent the exclusive right to the story.
    Of course, this prompted producers to “Blue Sheet” story ideas that seemed far-fetched at the time—producers liked to cite “An Interview With God” as the classic wishful Blue Sheet—but nevertheless would lock in the assignment. At that point, the two correspondents might find themselves in Hewitt’s office, yelling obscenities at each other over rights to the story. Eventually,