Through the Wire
by Linda Moss and Linda Haugsted -- Multichannel News, 2/3/2008 7:00:00 PM
Cars, Bikes, Beers Go Together
TV producer Thom Beers, whose testosterone-driven hits have included Discovery Channel’s Monster Garage and Biker Build-Off, is a gearhead who owns a none-too-shabby collection of cars and motorcycles, with a hot-air balloon thrown in for good measure.
Beers’s auto assortment includes: a rare carnival red ’69 GTO “Judge” convertible, which he calls one of only eight in the world; a ’96 Chevy Impala Super Sport; a 1961 Cadillac convertible; a “Legend” racecar; and a belly tank racer, which is a hot rod based on a jet fighter’s lightweight fuel tanks that’s used to race across dry lake beds.
As for bikes, Beers is the proud owner of a 2005 Harley Springer Softail, a ’48 Harley Knucklehead and a West Coast Chopper Rigid.
And Beers doesn’t just keep his “gear” in a garage. At his Burbank office, Beers uses an actual airplane wing as his desk (see photo, page 13). He bought it from a company, MotoArt, that creates furniture out of aviation-related items like wings, propellers, wheels and engines.
Beers was doing a show about MotoArt — Wing Nuts for Discovery — and then found out the company was in a financial pinch. He said he bought the desk to try to help MotoArt out, but Wing Nuts had to be grounded anyway when one of the show’s participants died.
For more on Beers, see Linda Moss’s profile in Monitor, page 12.
Noisy NATPE, Even In Lobby
Folks focused on TV trials and tribulations at the annual National Association of Television Programming Executives Convention in Las Vegas found they couldn’t escape their business even as they passed from the Mandalay Bay Events Center to their rooms in the hotel.
This Wire correspondent was stopped short by a new slot machine based on HBO’s The Sopranos and made by Aristocrat Technologies.
The game was introduced at a gaming trade show last November. HBO.com has video of James Gandolfini (“Tony Soprano”) and Steve Schirripa (“Bobby Baccala”) cutting a ribbon at the gaming convention, in which Schirripa declares: “Visit the new Sopranos slot machine. We swear you won’t get whacked!”
Seems natural Tony and the boys would grace some of the sin palaces they patronized in their show. But somehow we can’t picture the crew playing this machine: it’s a penny slot. Not enough to really whack even a Wire correspondent’s pocketbook.
Hey, doesn’t Tony rate at least a buck?
Spike Learns 'Ways to Die’
A man accidentally locks himself in an industrial dryer and cooks to death in 4½ minutes. Another creates a “merman” suit so he can swim better, but he dies onshore, never completing the unfortunately-too-long walk to the water.
A reptile and arachnid aficionado gets bit by his pet black widow, but doesn’t go to the doctor. As he lies dying, he opens the cages for his snakes so after he dies they can survive by feeding on his body.
“He could have gone to the hospital: A cautionary tale, we can call that one,” says a tongue-in-cheek Sharon Levy, Spike TV’s senior vice president of original series.
These seemingly grim real-life demises are part of SpikeTV’s pilot 1,000 Ways to Die from docudrama producer Thom Beers. But Levy insists the show isn’t morbid — rather, it’s informative.
“It is not a sad show, it is a scientific show,” she said. “But there’s a wink and there’s a tone that I think only Thom could deliver…a wink when people have offed themselves perhaps not making the wisest decisions.”
Stay tuned.
No related content found.
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
