David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…$16 million dollars of her own money. This isn't the Oprah we know today that has over $2½ billion dollars. This is Oprah that for the very first time last year made $30 million, but she just knows the trajectory that she's on. She's like you know what, let's put it all back in. Let's buy this thing, let's own this thing, and let's build this thing. This is when they found Harpo Media. Harpo, of course, is both Oprah backward and the husband of Sofia's character in The Color Purple. They found Harpo Media. Oprah owns 80% of it, Jacob owns 10%, and King World gets an equity stake of 10% as well as part of this negotiation. In doing so, Oprah becomes the first black woman and only the third woman ever to own a production studio. Remember, this is the power broker club of the media industry. The first two women before her were Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball, but both of them, of course, owned their studios with their husbands, Lucy and Ricky. Oprah is the first woman that's solely independently doing this; first black woman. There's no board, Oprah controls everything. Again, they start pumping out other content. The first other project besides The Oprah Winfrey Show it's called The Women of Brewster Place. It's a made-for-TV movie. They know their audience, right? Kind of just like Dennis, back in the day, the original having inkling that this is going to work, they have an inkling that a made-for-TV movie targeted at women is going to work. They pitch it to the networks, the networks don't want it. They want to air this in primetime on the big broadcast networks. The networks don't want it. Oprah basically forces ABC because she has this relationship with ABC and Cap Cities. I think Bob Iger might have been running ABC entertainment at this point, so basically forces Bob, if he was, to take it. They run it kind of like all right we're doing this to appease Oprah. It becomes the second highest-rated TV movie ever. It turns out, a made-for-TV movie. I don't know how many people watch the Hallmark Channel, it's a good idea, or OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network). Or Lifetime.…

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