Nickolas Davatzes, Force Behind A&E and the History Channel, Dies at 79
Nickolas Davatzes, who was instrumental in making the cable tv networks A&E and the Record Channel, which now achieve into 335 million homes about the globe, died on Aug. 21 at his property in Wilton, Conn. He was 79.
The lead to was problems of Parkinson’s disease, his son George stated.
Mr. Davatzes (pronounced dah-VAT-sis) was president and chief government of A&E, originally the Arts & Leisure Community, which he ran from 1983 to 2005 as a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and the Disney-ABC Tv Team. He launched the History Channel in 1995 and remained a forceful advocate for educational and public affairs programming, promoting it inside the business and in appearances prior to Congress.
By the mid-1980s A&E had emerged as the sole surviving advertiser-supported cultural cable company, mainly by buying programming and building a bankable viewers by negotiating distribution legal rights with regional cable systems.
“After 60 days in this article, I informed my wife I did not believe this thing had a 20 % prospect, simply because each and every time I turned all-around there was an additional obstacle,” Mr. Davatzes advised The New York Moments in 1989. “I employed to say that we had been like a bumblebee — we weren’t supposed to fly.”
But they did. A&E became worthwhile in just 3 years by presenting an eclectic menu of daily programming that, as The Moments put it, “might include things like a biographical portrait of Herbert Hoover, a program about the embattled buffalo, a dramatization of an Ann Beattie brief tale and a change from the stand-up comic Excitement Belmondo.”
“We do not want to replicate ‘The A-Team’ or ‘Laverne & Shirley,’” Mr. Davatzes explained to The Instances in 1985. “There is a youthful generation that has never ever seen any imagined-provoking leisure on tv. They’ve found a rock star destroying a guitar each and every 16 minutes, but they’ve hardly ever found classical songs.
“By network standards,” he continued, “our viewership will always be confined. But that is the purpose of cable — to current enough possibilities so that people can be their have programmers.”
Below the A&E umbrella, the community encompassed a wide blend of enjoyment and nonfiction programming. It developed a singular identification with scripted displays (“100 Centre Avenue,” “A Nero Wolfe Thriller”) and collaborations, like its wildly well-liked co-creation with the BBC of “Pride and Prejudice,” a mini-sequence based on the Jane Austen novel starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.
The community continued to extend its scope to include documentary sequence like “Biography” “Hoarders,” which could possibly be categorised as an anthropological analyze of compulsive stockpiling and the Background Channel’s encyclopedic scrutiny of Adolf Hitler.
Mr. Davatzes was awarded the Countrywide Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2006. The French governing administration built him a chevalier of the Buy of Arts and Letters in 1989. He was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 1999.
Just after his loss of life, 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 moms and dads have been from Greece. Equally his mom and dad worked in the fur trade.
After graduating from Bryant High School in Astoria, Queens, he acquired a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1962 and a master’s in sociology in 1964, both from St. John’s College, wherever he satisfied his long run wife, Dorothea Hayes.
In addition to his son George, he is survived by his spouse yet another son, Dr. Nicholas Davatzes a sister, Carol Davatzes Ferrandino and four grandchildren. A different son, Christopher, died before him.
Right after serving in the Marines, Mr. Davatzes joined the Xerox Corporation in 1965 and shifted to information technology at Intext Communications Units in 1978. A mate introduced him to an executive at the fledgling Warner Amex cable enterprise, who recruited him about lunch and had him indication a agreement drawn on a restaurant napkin. He went to perform there in 1980, along with cable television pioneers like Richard Aurelio and Larry Wangberg.
The Arts & Leisure Network took form in 1983, when Mr. Davatzes served put the finishing touches on a merger concerning two having difficulties cable techniques: the Entertainment Network, owned by RCA and the Rockefeller household, and the ARTS Network, owned by Hearst and ABC.
His technique in the beginning was twofold: to focus on building the community far more obtainable to viewers, and not to be diverted by producing unique applications, as a substitute concentrating on attaining present kinds.
“If you’re in programming, we know that 85 p.c of each new exhibit that goes on the air commonly fails,” Mr. Davatzes explained in a 2001 job interview with The Cable Centre, an instructional arm of the cable market.
“Our over-all technique is to generate a sane economic design,” he said in 1985. “I like to notify folks working for us that we really don’t consume at ‘21.’”
