Discovery Communications' John Hendricks: From Huntsville to ...

"Why can't this be on TV? That was in Huntsville at UAH. That was a lingering question that was on the road to the Discovery Channel."

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - John Hendricks was a history student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the 1970s when he had an idea that would change television. Today, Hendricks is the founder and chairman of Discovery Communications, a worldwide empire with more than 100 channels and 1.5 billion viewers. Then, he was a work-study student helping his professors find documentaries to screen in their classes.

"As I was looking through all this volume of catalogs for documentary films that were available, I just had this question," Hendricks said in an interview this month. "Why can't this be on TV? That was in Huntsville at UAH. That was a lingering question that was on the road to the Discovery Channel."

Hendricks looks back at building Discovery and growing up in Alabama during the space race and the Civil Rights Era in the new memoir "A Curious Discovery: An Entrepreneur's Story" being published June 25 by HarperCollins. The book tells the stories behind some of the Discovery networks' most popular shows, including "Trading Spaces," "The Crocodile Hunter" and "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo," and it's a how-to manual for would-be entrepreneurs.

In the book, Hendricks writes about his bad business moves as well as his good ones, including the day Discovery faced bankruptcy because his sole source for a new round of funding said "no" at the last moment. "All that counted was the Chronicle investment was dead," he writes, "and stupidly, I now realized, I had failed to use the intervening months to solicit any other investor prospects."

"For something to be useful, people need to know the whole story," Hendricks said this month. "If you're going to have three or four successes in your life, you've probably had five to 10 significant failures."

The book contains enough detail about Hendricks' path to be studied at business schools, but a man who has worked with everyone from Walter Cronkite and "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin to Oprah Winfrey also has stories to tell. Among others, he recounts the terrible day he learned Irwin had died from stingray barb, and he takes readers inside his long, close relationship with Walter Cronkite.

Some of Hendricks' best stories involve expanding Discovery's portfolio from documentaries aimed at 25 percent of the viewing public - his original audience - to reality programs like "Trading Spaces," and, eventually, shows like "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo." Now, Discovery is now a major source, under its different network banners, of programs not too far from ones Hendricks once dismissed as "Tattoo TV."

Part of the reason for the stretch was economic, and again Hendricks is direct. "For us to be a global force in programming and to have the resources that we can continue to undertake very expensive productions like 'North America, which is now running on Discovery," he said in the interview, "we have to break beyond that 25 percent and reach over and develop a portfolio of networks that also work within (the) amusement and entertainment platforms."

But Hendricks has come to appreciate reality TV in all of its dimensions, and he said that happened in stages. First, Hendricks said he realized that shows about people like Cake Boss Buddy Valastro and Georgetown Cupcake founders Katherine Berman and Sophie LaMontagne were not only incredibly popular, but inspirational. They tell the stories of legitimate American entrepreneurs whose paths aren't that different from Hendricks' own. Later, Hendricks said he came to see shows about different, even exotic lifestyles - whether Amish teenagers or Honey Boo Boo - as legitimate ways to satisfy legitimate viewer curiosity about their world.

Hendricks was careful to put a fence around the original Discovery brand and spin off new networks to showcase new programming. He cites a big-time model for that, too.

"You can think of it this way," Hendricks said in the interview. "Disney Corp. has a wonderful legacy of that all-family brand of Disney, but at one point to be able to survive and grow and prosper, Disney had to be able in their motion picture business to offer R-rated films. So, they did that through a number of separate divisions and studios that they owned that didn't carry the Disney brand. For years, they owned Miramax and Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures."

Today, Hendricks stays busy with Discovery Communications and its ongoing challenges in a changing media world. When he's not in the corporate offices outside Washington, he's involved in developing Gateway Canyons, a Colorado resort designed to offer guests "curiosity adventures" on land protected from development. He travels for work and to satisfy his own curiosity - a recent trip to Tanzania included time spent with the last hunter-gather tribe in Africa - and visits Huntsville to see his brother-in-law Jim Sisson, lead engineer for the Apollo program's lunar rover, and his nephews Martin and Alan. Hendricks' sister, Linda, died some years ago.

Hendricks life in Huntsville echoes through the book, and longtime residents will enjoy his memories of Budd's and Bill's Men's Wear, clothing stores where he worked; the day Huntsville schools integrated in 1963; and his parents' pleasure at seeing his picture in The Huntsville Times for winning a local insurance agents' essay contest on "The Free Enterprise System."

"It's funny how the tiniest event can change the trajectory of one's life," Hendricks writes in his book. "Writing that essay was one of those moments, and I've often thought about how deeply it influenced everything that came after. Putting those few hundred words on paper forced me to really think about what motivates people to accomplish something in life, to invent or adapt new products, and to create experiences that did not exist before."

Hendricks says growing up in Huntsville was key to what he has accomplished.

"If you look through the book," he said in the interview, "there's a kind of continuing thread. I'm going to name-drop here, and I'm so sorry to do it, but Oprah had read the book and called me. And she said, 'John what you've done is a kind of business memoir, but what you've done is capture a thread: What was the thread that led to Discovery?'

"I have to say that Huntsville was just a big part of that thread," Hendricks said. "It was such an inspiring place to grow up."

Source: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2013/06/discovery_channels_john_hendri.html

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