Frederick Ziv
Frederick William Ziv (August 17, 1905 – October 13, 2001, Cincinnati) was an American broadcasting producer and syndicator who is considered the father of television syndication and once operated the nation's largest independent television production company.
Early years
Ziv was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to William and Rose Ziv. His parents were Jewish immigrants; his father came to the United States in 1884 from Kaunas, Lithuania (at the time part of the Russian Empire), and his mother from Bessarabia in 1887. His father was a manufacturer of button holes for overalls. Ziv had one sister, Irma.[1]
Although he earned a law degree from the University of Michigan, Ziv chose not to practice law and opened an advertising agency. Cincinnati was an important center for radio in the 1920s; the nation's largest radio sponsor, Procter & Gamble, and one of its most powerful radio stations, WLW, were both based there. Ziv and writer John L. Sinn (who later became his son-in-law) founded the Frederick W. Ziv Company. They produced pre-recorded radio shows such as Boston Blackie and The Cisco Kid and occasionally bought old shows for new syndicated rerun broadcast. (The best known was the serial comedy Easy Aces in 1945).
Ziv Television
By 1949, the company had opened a television production subsidiary, Ziv Television Productions; it produced some of America's best-remembered shows, including television versions of The Cisco Kid (1949, soon to become the first American television program filmed in color) and Mr. District Attorney, and such original creations as Highway Patrol (perhaps the best-remembered Ziv production), I Led Three Lives (one of the few 1950s television crime dramas that addressed the real or alleged Communist menace as an overt subject), Bat Masterson (fictionalising the legendarily dapper marshal, gunfighter, and eventual sportswriter of the same name), and Sea Hunt.
Ziv Television Productions trademarks included odd (for the times) twists on the genres of his shows, twists like a crime-fighting underwater explorer (Lloyd Bridges as Sea Hunt protagonist Mike Nelson) and Highway Patrol itself, perhaps the first crime drama to show large urban regions weren't the only places where criminals liked to roam. The company's closing logo---the name Ziv in large, Romanesque lettering, inside the frame of a television screen---was one of the most familiar sign-off logos of its time.
The company's fortunes shifted almost overnight in the mid-1950s. In 1955, they were America's leading and largest independent producer (with a reported two thousand employees at one point), and Ziv was able to buy his own television production studio, after years of leasing from the Hollywood studios. A year later, the networks realized how successful they could be syndicating reruns of their previous hits, a move that cut deeply into the first-run syndication market. Ziv himself began producing series for the networks, beginning with The West Point Story for CBS in the fall of 1956.
Network Takeover
By 1959, the networks began taking control of what went on the air from sponsors (a major result of the quiz show scandals that exploded the same year), and Ziv was very unhappy about it. "They demanded script approval and cast approval," he was quoted as saying. "You were just doing whatever the networks asked you to do - and that was not my type of operation. I didn’t care to become an employee of the networks."
Ziv sold 80 percent of his overall company to a group of investors that year and sold his television production subsidiary to United Artists, leaving the board of directors when United Artists decided to phase Ziv Television Productions out and re-organise as United Artists Television in 1962. He spent the next two decades lecturing on broadcasting and advertising at the University of Cincinnati, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in performing arts in 1985. He then settled into full-time retirement.
Ziv died in 2001 at the age of 96. He was survived by a son and a daughter. The University of Cincinnati presents a broadcasting achievement award in his name each year.
References
- ↑ 1920 census, Cincinnati, Hamilton Co.< Ohio, enumerator district 225, sheet 12A
- William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and its Critics (Urbana, Ill.: Illinois University Press, 1980).
- "Aces Up," Time, 8 September 1947.
- "A Homey Little Thing," Time, 19 December 1949.
- Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Network TV Shows--1946 to Present (First Edition).
External links
- Frederick Ziv at the Internet Movie Database
- Frederick Ziv interview video at the Archive of American Television