Backstage 'Mayhem'

Sports aficionados who attended Turner Network Television's Jan. 8 screening of the highly touted original movie Monday Night Mayhem
at New York's Museum of Television and Radio were treated to more than the typical opening remarks and 90-minute movie presentation.

Once the evening screening ended, attendees were urged to stay another 20 minutes for a TNT-hosted panel session discussing the project, billed as "the inside story" of ABC's Monday Night Football .
Sticking around was hard on the attendees, who had not yet had anything to eat, thanks to a snafu that KO'd a pre-screening reception.

To keep people from walking out after the screening, Turner officials whisked the panelists — including Mayhem
star John Turturro, NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol and sports commentator Keith Olbermann — onto the stage for a lively discussion about the movie, including Turturro's uncanny portrayal of legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell.

A Special Op, in Virginia

Overseeing a 9,000-mile rebuild is a tough job — especially in an affluent community with a demanding and vocal customer base. But is it tough enough to call in Army intelligence?

The answer is apparently yes in Fairfax County, Va.

Cox Communications Inc. brought in company — and U.S. Army — veteran Gary McCollum to serve as vice president and general manager of Cox Communications Inc.'s Northern Virginia system. He's a veteran of four rebuilds, according to the company, and now charged with bringing the 20-year-old system into the 21st century.

McCollum has a military background that joking execs said will help to hold him in good stead. During recent testimony before the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Cox Eastern division senior vice president of operations Claus Kroeger said the fact that McCollum's experience as an Army Ranger intelligence operator "didn't hurt" the company's decision-making process.

That's because McCollum was used to jumping out of airplanes and into dangerous situations, he said.

Don't Call It a Catfight

"I don't know if it's a dispute," said AMC Networks president Kate McEnroe. Nonetheless, she took issue last week with Oxygen's claim — made in the network's "baby fist" spot that plugged its December launch on Time Warner Cable's New York system — that it's the "fastest-growing women's network."

McEnroe said Nielsen Media Research data indicates that WE: Women's Entertainment — one year after the former Romance Classics's revamping — is not only the fastest-growing women's network, but the fastest-growing entertainment network on cable.

In the Nielsen data released this month, WE's growth rate was outpaced only by Fox News Channel. Both added more than 19.7 million homes since last year, and WE has hit 42 million households, McEnroe said.

Defending Oxygen's claim, vice president of communications Laura Nelson said her network used Kagan World Media data on viewing subscribers through last November. Kagan put WE and Oxygen in a "virtual dead heat" at 27 million viewing-subscribers through November.

Oxygen also bases its boast on its meteoric rise from launch two years ago through 2001, when it went "from zero to 30 million," including various Time Warner Cable system additions in December, said Nelson.

AMC's McEnroe noted that Kagan's numbers are "self-reported" and provided by the programmers themselves.

Manhattan Site-Seeing

You won't see it in those post-Sept. 11 "I Love New York" tourism commercials but On Location Tours'"Sex and the City
Tour" — which focuses on Manhattan sites featured on that Home Box Office series —got a major plug in USA Today.

A nearly page-long article on Jan. 4 — two days before the racy series resumed on HBO — mentioned locales ranging from the Jimmy Choo shoe store to Magnolia Bakery to the Tao restaurant and bar.

Georgette Blau, who created that tour, also does a similar one featuring New Jersey locales popularized by another HBO series hit, The Sopranos.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn

That new National Geographic Channel public-service announcement — reported two weeks ago in The Wire as one that promotes tolerance toward Arabs and Muslims — was directed by Edgeworx creative director Kief Davidson, who pointed out that he chose to film the PSA's real-people vignettes in his ethnically diverse Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood.

Relief in San Jose

Society of Cable Television Engineers executives were pleased with attendance at last week's Emerging Technologies convention in San Jose, Calif., which stood to lose some ground to the simultaneous and suddenly cable-chic Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

SCTE pegged pre-registration at 90 percent of last year's total. Not bad, considering the economy, consolidation and Sept. 11. And the three-day affair got strong marks from the mid- and upper-level engineers who may not have gotten budget approval to travel to CES, anyway.

"We're a niche show, focused on our constituents," said SCTE president John Clark, who was breathing a sigh of relief after surveying session attendance. Few of the engineers in evidence were seen to be pining for futuristic gadget talk when they had immediate, real-world issues to tackle.