Nickolas Davatzes, Force Behind A&E and the History Channel, Dies at 79
Nickolas Davatzes, who was instrumental in building the cable television networks A&E and the Record Channel, which now arrive at into 335 million households all-around the earth, died on Aug. 21 at his dwelling in Wilton, Conn. He was 79.
The induce was difficulties of Parkinson’s ailment, his son George stated.
Mr. Davatzes (pronounced dah-VAT-sis) was president and chief executive of A&E, originally the Arts & Amusement Community, which he ran from 1983 to 2005 as a joint enterprise of the Hearst Company and the Disney-ABC Television Group. He released the Heritage Channel in 1995 and remained a forceful advocate for academic and general public affairs programming, advertising and marketing it inside of the industry and in appearances prior to Congress.
By the mid-1980s A&E experienced emerged as the sole surviving advertiser-supported cultural cable services, largely by shopping for programming and building a bankable viewers by negotiating distribution rights with neighborhood cable programs.
“After 60 times listed here, I advised my wife I did not assume this factor had a 20 percent probability, since every time I turned all around there was a further impediment,” Mr. Davatzes instructed The New York Situations in 1989. “I applied to say that we ended up like a bumblebee — we weren’t supposed to fly.”
But they did. A&E grew to become successful in 3 decades by presenting an eclectic menu of every day programming that, as The Periods put it, “might include a biographical portrait of Herbert Hoover, a application about the embattled buffalo, a dramatization of an Ann Beattie shorter story and a flip from the stand-up comic Buzz Belmondo.”
“We really don’t want to replicate ‘The A-Team’ or ‘Laverne & Shirley,’” Mr. Davatzes informed The Occasions in 1985. “There is a younger era that has never noticed any assumed-provoking leisure on tv. They’ve noticed a rock star destroying a guitar every single 16 minutes, but they’ve by no means noticed classical music.
“By community expectations,” he ongoing, “our viewership will always be limited. But that is the perform of cable — to existing adequate alternate options so that folks can be their possess programmers.”
Beneath the A&E umbrella, the network encompassed a wide blend of entertainment and nonfiction programming. It made a singular identity with scripted reveals (“100 Centre Avenue,” “A Nero Wolfe Mystery”) and collaborations, like its wildly preferred co-output with the BBC of “Pride and Prejudice,” a mini-collection primarily based on the Jane Austen novel starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.
The community continued to extend its scope to contain documentary sequence like “Biography” “Hoarders,” which may be categorised as an anthropological analyze of compulsive stockpiling and the History Channel’s encyclopedic scrutiny of Adolf Hitler.
Mr. Davatzes was awarded the Nationwide Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2006. The French government manufactured him a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1989. He was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Corridor of Fame in 1999.
Just after his demise, Frank A. Bennack Jr., the government vice chairman of Hearst, referred to as him “the father of the Record Channel.”
Nickolas Davatzes was born on March 14, 1942, in Manhattan to George Davatzes, a Greek immigrant, and Alexandra (Kordes) Davatzes, whose dad and mom have been from Greece. Both equally his mother and father labored in the fur trade.
Right after graduating from Bryant Substantial University in Astoria, Queens, he acquired a bachelor’s diploma in economics in 1962 and a master’s in sociology in 1964, both from St. John’s College, wherever he met his foreseeable future spouse, Dorothea Hayes.
In addition to his son George, he is survived by his wife an additional son, Dr. Nicholas Davatzes a sister, Carol Davatzes Ferrandino and four grandchildren. A different son, Christopher, died ahead of him.
After serving in the Marines, Mr. Davatzes joined the Xerox Corporation in 1965 and shifted to info technology at Intext Communications Methods in 1978. A close friend introduced him to an govt at the fledgling Warner Amex cable enterprise, who recruited him around lunch and experienced him indicator a contract drawn on a restaurant serviette. He went to perform there in 1980, along with cable television pioneers like Richard Aurelio and Larry Wangberg.
The Arts & Enjoyment Community took form in 1983, when Mr. Davatzes helped place the ending touches on a merger concerning two having difficulties cable systems: the Amusement Community, owned by RCA and the Rockefeller family members, and the ARTS Network, owned by Hearst and ABC.
His technique in the beginning was twofold: to emphasis on producing the community much more accessible to viewers, and not to be diverted by generating initial applications, in its place focusing on attaining existing ones.
“If you are in programming, we know that 85 percent of each and every new display that goes on the air generally fails,” Mr. Davatzes said in a 2001 job interview with The Cable Middle, an educational arm of the cable business.
“Our overall strategy is to produce a sane financial model,” he explained in 1985. “I like to convey to people performing for us that we don’t try to eat at ‘21.’”
