Ted Turner died Tuesday at 87, and with him goes the last of Hollywood's genuine revolutionaries—the kind who didn't just succeed in the entertainment business but fundamentally rewrote its rules.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything—except Ted Turner, apparently, knew everything. He knew that people would watch news 24 hours a day when everyone said they wouldn't. He knew that colorizing classic films would drive purists insane (it did) but make money anyway (it did). He knew that owning a baseball team, multiple cable networks, and eventually most of Turner Broadcasting wasn't enough—he wanted to own MGM's entire film library too.
The man launched CNN in 1980 with $25 million and a dream that seemed preposterous: continuous news coverage, all day, every day. The broadcast networks laughed. Turner had the last laugh for decades, watching as those same networks scrambled to create their own 24-hour news operations. MSNBC, Fox News, every streaming news service that exists today—they're all Turner's children, whether they want to admit it or not.
But CNN was just one piece of the empire. Turner created TBS, turned the Atlanta Braves into America's team through superstation distribution, launched TNT and Turner Classic Movies, and pioneered the cable revolution that destroyed the broadcast oligopoly. When Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996, he was playing catch-up to Turner's vision.
He was also spectacularly, refreshingly unhinged by today's corporate standards. Turner called his competitors "weasels," dressed as a soldier for publicity stunts, and married in what might have been the most unexpected power couple of the 1990s. He donated a billion dollars to the . He once challenged to a televised fistfight.
