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    Nickolas Davatzes, Force Behind A&E and the History Channel, Dies at 79

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    He led the cable giant, whose eclectic mix of shows would include collaborations with the BBC and documentary-style series like “Hoarders.”Nickolas Davatzes, who was instrumental in creating the cable television networks A&E and the History Channel, which now reach into 335 million households around the world, died on Aug. 21 at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 79.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son George said.Mr. Davatzes (pronounced dah-VAT-sis) was president and chief executive of A&E, originally the Arts & Entertainment Network, which he ran from 1983 to 2005 as a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and the Disney-ABC Television Group. He introduced the History Channel in 1995 and remained an aggressive advocate, both within the industry and as a spokesman before Congress, for educational and public affairs programming.By the mid-1980s, A&E had emerged — mostly through buying programming and building a bankable viewer audience by negotiating distribution rights with local cable systems — as the sole surviving advertiser-supported cultural cable service.“After 60 days here, I told my wife I didn’t think this thing had a 20 percent chance, because every time I turned around there was another obstacle,” Mr. Davatzes told The New York Times in 1989. “I used to say that we were like a bumblebee — we weren’t supposed to fly.”But they did. A&E became profitable within three years by offering an eclectic menu of daily programming that, as The Times put it, “might include a biographical portrait of Herbert Hoover, a program about the embattled buffalo, a dramatization of an Ann Beattie short story and a turn from the stand-up comic Buzz Belmondo.”“We don’t want to duplicate ‘The A-Team’ or ‘Laverne & Shirley,’” Mr. Davatzes told The Times in 1985. “There is a younger generation that has never seen any thought-provoking entertainment on television. They’ve seen a rock star destroying a guitar every 16 minutes, but they’ve never seen classical music.“By network standards,” he continued, “our viewership will always be limited. But that is the function of cable — to present enough alternatives so that individuals can be their own programmers.”Under the A&E umbrella, the network encompassed a broad mix of entertainment and nonfiction programming. It created a singular identity with scripted shows (“100 Centre Street,” “A Nero Wolfe Mystery”) and collaborations like its wildly popular co-production with the BBC of “Pride and Prejudice,” a mini-series based on the Jane Austen novel starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in the mini-series “Pride and Prejudice,” a co-production of A&E and the BBC.Joss Barratt/A&EThe network continued to expand its scope to include documentary series like “Biography”; “Hoarders,” which might be classified as an anthropological study of compulsive stockpiling; and the History Channel’s encyclopedic scrutiny of Adolf Hitler.Mr. Davatzes was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2006. The French government made him a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1989. He was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 1999.After his death, Frank A. Bennack Jr., the executive vice chairman of Hearst, called him “the father of the History Channel.”Nickolas Davatzes was born on March 14, 1942, in Manhattan to George Davatzes, a Greek immigrant, and Alexandra (Kordes) Davatzes, whose parents were from Greece. Both his parents worked in the fur trade.After graduating from Bryant High School in Astoria, Queens, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1962 and a master’s in sociology in 1964, both from St. John’s University, where he met his future wife, Dorothea Hayes.In addition to his son George, he is survived by his wife; another son, Dr. Nicholas Davatzes; a sister, Carol Davatzes Ferrandino; and four grandchildren. Another son, Christopher, died before him.After serving in the Marines, Mr. Davatzes joined the Xerox Corporation in 1965 and shifted to information technology at Intext Communications Systems in 1978. A friend introduced him to an executive at the fledgling Warner Amex cable company, who recruited him over lunch and had him sign a contract drawn on a restaurant napkin. He went to work there in 1980, alongside cable television pioneers like Richard Aurelio and Larry Wangberg.The Arts & Entertainment Network took shape in 1983, when he helped put the finishing touches on a merger between two struggling cable systems: the Entertainment Network, owned by RCA and the Rockefeller family, and the ARTS Network, owned by Hearst and ABC.His strategy in the beginning was twofold: to focus on making the network more available to viewers, and not to be diverted by producing original programs, instead focusing on acquiring existing ones.“If you’re in programming, we know that 85 percent of every new show that goes on the air usually fails,” said in a 2001 interview with The Cable Center, an educational arm of the cable industry.“Our overall approach is to create a sane economic model,” Mr. Davatzes said in 1985. “I like to tell people working for us that we don’t eat at ‘21.’” More

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      Filmmaker’s Suit Says A&E Networks Suppressed ‘Watergate’ Series

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      The director, Charles Ferguson, said in a lawsuit that an executive was concerned about the “negative reaction it would provoke among Trump supporters and the Trump administration.”“Watergate,” a four-hour documentary examining the scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, had its world premiere in 2018 at the Telluride Film Festival, an event known to foretell future Oscar nominations. It went on to be shown at the New York Film Festival and several others, collecting positive reviews that highlighted allusions the series made to the Trump presidency.It aired on the History Channel over three days in early November, just before the 2018 midterm elections. To the filmmaker’s surprise, it was never broadcast on American television again.The writer and director of the documentary, the award-winning filmmaker Charles Ferguson, is now suing the company that owns the History Channel, A&E Networks, asserting it suppressed the dissemination of his mini-series because it was worried about potential backlash to allusions the documentary makes to the Trump White House.In the lawsuit filed Friday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Ferguson accuses the company of attempting to delay the documentary until after the 2018 midterm elections because a History Channel executive feared it would offend the White House and Trump supporters.“He was concerned about the impact of ‘Watergate’ upon ratings in ‘red states,’” the lawsuit said of the executive, Eli Lehrer, “as well as the negative reaction it would provoke among Trump supporters and the Trump administration.”Mr. Ferguson resisted that plan, and the mini-series ultimately aired shortly before Election Day. But the filmmaker contends the documentary was given short shrift, despite acclaim in the film industry and previous assurances that it would receive “extremely prominent treatment.”The lawsuit describes the treatment of the documentary as part of a “pattern and practice of censorship and suppression of documentary content” at A&E Networks, and cites several others that it says were subject to attempted manipulation for political or economic reasons.A&E called the lawsuit meritless and the assertion that the documentary was suppressed “absurd,” saying its decision to not rebroadcast it additional times was based on lower than expected ratings.In a statement, the company said it has routinely given a platform to storytellers “to present their unvarnished vision without regard for partisan politics.” It pointed to its partnership with former President Bill Clinton, formed during the Trump administration, to produce a documentary series about the American presidency and the fact that a subsidiary, Propagate, had produced the four-part docu-series “Hillary,” on the life of Hillary Clinton.“A&E invested millions of dollars in this project and promoted it extensively,” the company said of “Watergate” in its statement. “Among other efforts, we hired multiple outside PR agencies, provided advance screeners to the press, and submitted it to film festivals and for awards consideration.”Charles Ferguson, whose film “Inside Job” won an Oscar in 2011, says that A&E Networks did not fulfill a promise to fully promote his documentary on the Watergate scandal.Associated PressMr. Ferguson’s “Watergate” is a deep dive into events set off by the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the cover up by the Nixon administration. It includes interviews with people who were involved in the events — such as John Dean, President Nixon’s White House counsel — as well as reporters who covered them, including Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Lesley Stahl. The New York Times’s co-chief film critic, A.O. Scott, wrote that the documentary tells a story that is “part political thriller and part courtroom drama, with moments of Shakespearean grandeur and swerves into stumblebum comedy,” though other reviews panned the film’s re-creations by actors.Mr. Ferguson, who is best known for his Oscar-winning 2010 documentary “Inside Job,” said that when he started pitching the project in 2015, he imagined it as a straightforward “historical detective story.” But, the suit says, a drumbeat of events involving the Trump administration made him realize the documentary’s renewed political relevance. In 2017, he watched as Mr. Trump fired his F.B.I. director, as the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, and as the potential for impeachment loomed.The series — which Mr. Ferguson said cost about $4.5 million to produce — does not mention Mr. Trump’s name, but the documentary’s subtitle, “How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President,” was a nod toward his administration.The lawsuit hinges on a conversation between Mr. Ferguson and A&E executives in June 2018, before the film was released. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Lehrer, executive vice president and head of programming at the History Channel, said at that meeting that he would seek to delay the premiere of “Watergate” and “sharply lower” its publicity profile, expressing concern about its relevance to the politics of the moment and the reaction it would provoke from the Trump administration and Trump supporters.Mr. Ferguson has worked to collect pieces of evidence to support his contentions, among them an email he provided to The New York Times in which Mr. Lehrer acknowledged discussing the bipartisan nature of the network’s audience. In the email, Mr. Lehrer also denied the network was trying to suppress the documentary, writing that the rationale for exploring different airdates was to avoid the series getting swallowed up by heavy sports programming and election coverage.Mr. Ferguson’s contract did not specify how many times the network would show the documentary or whether it would receive theatrical distribution, though successful ones are typically broadcast multiple times.Nielsen ratings from the time show that “Watergate” earned only 529,000 viewers when it aired, including seven days of delayed viewing, compared to History Channel’s other multi-episode documentaries like “Grant” which bowed in May to 4.4 million viewers, or “Washington,” which drew an audience of 3.3 million in February 2020.Had the ratings been stronger, A&E says, it would have broadcast the series multiple times and it would have had a greater chance of securing additional licenses either with a streaming service or with international distributors.“The fact is that Watergate, which premiered in prime time on Mr. Ferguson’s desired date, drastically underachieved in the ratings, which was disappointing to all of us,” the company said in its statement.Mr. Ferguson’s documentary chronicles the aftermath of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, which started the downfall of the Nixon presidency.  Associated PressBut the lawsuit says A&E Networks damaged Mr. Ferguson financially by, among other things, failing to make any “meaningful” distribution deals or arrange for advertising outside of the network. It says Mr. Ferguson traded a lower-than-normal director’s fee in his contract for a higher cut of the royalties, believing that if the documentary was successful, the majority of the viewership revenue would stem from sales to streaming services, foreign cable channels and other customers.One of the A&E executives named as a defendant, Michael Stiller — the vice president of programming and development at the History Channel — had told Mr. Ferguson that there would be rebroadcasts and required him to make slightly shorter versions of the episodes for daytime slots, but those never occurred, according to the lawsuit.The company noted the documentary is available on several services, which include iTunes, Amazon Prime Video and Google Play, including its own video-on-demand platform, History Vault.Mr. Ferguson’s lawsuit argues that the company executives interfered with his contract, and defamed him by telling industry executives he was difficult to work with, thereby costing him work. In addition to Mr. Lehrer and Mr. Stiller, the other named defendants include Robert Sharenow, the network’s president of programming, and Molly Thompson, its former head of documentary films. Ms. Thompson declined to comment. Mr. Lehrer, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Sharenow did not respond to requests for comment.The lawsuit cites several examples where Mr. Ferguson said he learned about conflicts between A&E executives and documentary filmmakers, including a dispute concerning “Gretchen Carlson: Breaking the Silence,” a 2019 documentary on Lifetime about sexual harassment in working-class industries. The suit says A&E executives questioned including information about McDonald’s, an advertiser. The information was ultimately included after the producers fought for it, but the episode was only aired once, on a Saturday at 10 p.m., the lawsuit said. A spokeswoman for Ms. Carlson declined to comment.The lawsuit also says Mr. Ferguson learned about a dispute regarding a 2019 A&E documentary called “Biography: The Trump Dynasty” that examines Mr. Trump’s life and family history. According to the lawsuit, A&E executives wanted the production company behind the documentary, Left/Right Productions, to add in the voice of a “Trump apologist” who could “justify” aspects of Mr. Trump’s background, a request that the suit says generated “significant tensions” between the network executives and the production company executives.Left/Right, which works with The New York Times on some documentary productions, did not respond to requests for comment. The Times did not have a role in any of the programming cited in Mr. Ferguson’s suit.Jack Begg contributed research. More