Through the Wire
By Kent Gibbons and Linda Haugsted -- Multichannel News, 11/12/2006 7:00:00 PM
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Items:
Britt & Co. Plan a West Side Story Adrienne Shelly TV Pilot Lives On, Via Ziddio Cognac Serves Warrants Along With Food TV Fare Laybourne’s New Gig: Predicting Baby Birth |
Items:
Britt & Co. Plan a West Side Story
Adrienne Shelly TV Pilot Lives On, Via Ziddio
Cognac Serves Warrants Along With Food TV Fare
Laybourne’s New Gig: Predicting Baby Birth
Britt & Co. Plan a West Side Story
Goodbye, Stamford, Conn., hello Time Warner Center.
Some Time Warner Cable officials, including chairman and CEO Glenn Britt, will soon be sharing a Columbus Circle office address with Dick Parsons and other Time Warner Inc. brass.
Actually, most of the “few dozen” affected Time Warner Cable employees will retain offices on the Stamford water front after they move to New York’s West Side, according to director of corporate communications Maureen Huff, who said the move would occur within a few months. Stamford will remain company headquarters and the workplace for the vast majority of employees, Huff said, declining to say how many people work there.
Britt and some of his direct reports will be moving, as will such departments as investor relations and corporate communications, Huff said.
The move, rumored for weeks, will lengthen the commute for people who live near Stamford. Some affected employees in Connecticut had hoped the New York City space, when chosen, would at least be close to Grand Central Terminal on East 42nd Street, but the company-owned crosstown location won out.
Perhaps proximity to Whole Foods Market, in the building’s shopping mall, will ease the pain a bit — or dinner at pricey Per Se.
Why the shift? Huff would say only that it made sense for certain job functions, such as investor relations, to be located closer to Wall Street. No comment on whether the relocation was tied to the cable company’s prospective initial public offering of stock, but that seems likely.
Adrienne Shelly TV Pilot Lives On, Via Ziddio
One of the prominent videos on Comcast’s new Ziddio.com site, amid the homemade entries to a Cinemax “Join the Jedi Order” contest, stands out eerily because of a recent tragic event.
It’s a 22-minute talk show about independent film, shot as a television pilot and starring, as co-hosts, indie-film producer Gill Holland and actress/director Adrienne Shelly. Shelly was found dead in a Manhattan apartment she used as an office on Nov. 1, her death staged to look like a suicide, according to New York City police.
Police said Diego Pillco, a 19-year-old contractor employee, apparently got into an argument with Shelly over construction noise, struck her and then tried to cover up the crime by hanging her body from a shower-curtain rod in the apartment. He was arrested on Nov. 6, charged with second-degree murder, The New York Times reported.
Shelly, 40, who had recently completed a film she wrote and directed, Waitress, was married with a 3-year-old daughter.
Ziddio got the video from the Independent Television Festival (ITVF), long before Shelly’s death, under an arrangement Comcast made as a sponsor of the festival in Los Angeles in July, officials said. After it was brought to the cable company’s attention by a reporter, Comcast contacted festival organizers about whether the video should remain on the site.
A.J. Tesler, the festival’s executive director, said the video should stay on the site as a tribute to Shelly, who made an indelible indie-film impression in director Hal Hartley’s first two films, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust.
“The more that we can express her work and showcase her and her accomplishments, the more of a memorial it can serve as,” Tesler said in an interview. The show was never picked up as a pilot, but the producer is still trying to sell the concept, Tesler said.
As of last Thursday, a text message reading “In Memory of Adrienne Shelly” preceded the video’s display on the site.
Cognac Serves Warrants Along With Food TV Fare
He might be the latest potential star on Food Network, but that doesn’t mean that Chris Cognac, star of The Hungry Detective, is giving up his full-time day job.
He’s still a detective with the Hawthorne, Calif., police department, investigating possible fraud related to the federal Section 8 housing-assistance program and rooting out other crimes in public housing, as part of the crime-free multiple housing unit. “I just served a narcotics warrant 20 minutes ago,” he said in an interview last week. “Tomorrow, I’ll be on a plane to Boston” for a Food shoot.
Things are getting so hectic, he figures he’s working 100 hours a week, making arrests by day and doing scripts and voiceovers at night and on weekends. “There’s not a lot of time off,” he pointed out, as the multitasking has cut into time with his wife and two children.
His fellow officers are enjoying his success, though. They catch his show in the watchroom on Wednesday mornings and offer critiques. “I’ve worked with ’em for 15 years — they can be a real honest bunch,” he joked.
Some of the restaurants featured on his new series come from brother and sister officers. Cognac became friends with one Chicago cop over the phone and Internet when they teamed to put a child pornographer in jail. Out of that friendship came restaurant tips for when the show when was on location in the Windy City.
One casualty to the busy schedule was a food column Cognac wrote for a local daily newspaper. That’s been farmed out to a buddy.
Laybourne’s New Gig: Predicting Baby Birth
Oxygen Network CEO Gerry Laybourne had been patiently awaiting the arrival of her second grandbaby.
But then, on Nov. 3, “I just decided that would be the day” for the baby’s arrival into the world, Laybourne related. So she boarded a flight to Los Angeles from New York, even though the child wasn’t due for two weeks.
On arrival, she telephoned her daughter and discovered that she had gone into labor.
The family welcomed Rex at 9 pounds, 7 ounces, even though he was two weeks early. Proud grandma joked the hearty new family addition will someday play linebacker for the University of Notre Dame.
Of her prescient travel decision, Laybourne said: “It was one of life’s lovely lessons: Go with your gut.”
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