Eventually, loyal viewers of Courtroom Television Network, one of the nation's newest cable offerings, are rewarded with the surprising testimony of highway patrolwoman Melanie Singer, who claims that she and her partner had already subdued King. They were ready to handcuff him when they were waved off by L.A. policemen, who then gave King the furious beating that all America has seen so often on video.
Details like that, which don't make it into News at 11 soundbites on mainstream TV, are the stock-in-trade of Court TV's gavel-to-gavel coverage. The purpose of the new channel, says its founder, Steve Brill, 41, is to "show the workings of the third branch of government [and] make what lawyers do understandable to the public."
But that understanding doesn't come easy. For hours at a time, the TV screen may show little more than a lawyer's back, and some lawsuits drag on for months. "You practically have to be a shut-in to follow a case to the end," admits Brill. The wonder is that he has the patience to watch. And if keeping an eye on his office TV weren't part of his job, he probably wouldn't. With his investment bankerly suspenders, tough-guy cigar and wary expression, Brill is a doer not a watcher, a man who has already made waves as journalist (New York magazine and Esquire), author (The Teamsters, a 1978 best-seller) and media mogul (cofounder, editor and publisher of The American Lawyer and 10 regional legal newspapers). Now Brill is hoping that the public's taste for legal drama will carry over from Perry Mason and L.A. Law to the slower-paced dramatics of real court.
So far he hasn't been disappointed. Since Court TV made its debut last summer, it has had high daytime ratings, helped along by such hotly publicized proceedings as the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and the Jeffrey Dahmer insanity hearing. Coming up this month: the parole hearing of Charles Manson.
The idea that became Court TV struck Brill in the spring of 1989, when he was listening to radio coverage of the Manhattan murder trial of Joel Steinberg, who was eventually convicted of killing his 6-year-old adopted daughter, Lisa. "Why not do this all day?" Brill wondered. "It's obviously good drama." Brill immediately telephoned Steve Ross, then chief of Warner Communications Inc. (and now co-CEO of Time Warner Inc., which also owns PEOPLE). "I sold him on the idea that the new network would be a cross between C-Span and soap opera," says Brill. Within months Warner had bought Brill's company, American Lawyer Media, for an estimated $30 million, and agreed to back Court TV. (Most states now have laws that allow TV cameras into courtrooms.)
In early 1990, Brill recruited Fred Graham, former legal correspondent for CBS News, to anchor and help breathe life into the new network. The format they devised is more like golf coverage than a brisk episode of Law & Order. Graham and his three co-anchors, all law-school grads, provide constant explanations that clarify the twisted plots and legal lingo. In addition, outspoken color commentators—often courtroom celebrities like F. Lee Bailey—pick apart prosecution and defense strategies.
To some, turning serious judicial matters into entertainment seems, well, unseemly. But Brill insists cases are chosen not for sensationalism but because they concern an important legal principle or controversy. "We never would have broadcast Zsa Zsa Gabor's trial [for slapping a policeman] solely to get ratings," he says.
Of course, the presence of TV cameras may subtly affect behavior in the courtroom. Brill has been careful, though, to minimize TV's intrusion into the lives of crime victims. When the Amish survivors of a collision between their horse-drawn buggy and a drunk driver asked not to be photographed (for religious reasons), Court TV showed only their hands.
Brill is not always as sensitive in dealing with his own staff. Sitting in his large messy office, decorated with drawings by his children, he suddenly jabs his phone as though it were a missile launcher and curtly complains about something he hears during a Court TV preview of upcoming cases. "Why isn't Graham mentioning the Dahmer case?" he demands. "All I can hear is crap about vehicular manslaughter. Tell him to talk about Dahmer."
In his days as editor of The American Lawyer, Brill was famous for margin notes to writers, asking indelicately, "Is English your second language?" or "Where did you learn to write—Bulgaria?" Says former staffer Christi Harlan: "He screams. He throws things." But most of Brill's employees would probably agree with Graham, who says, "You can't be a pussycat and accomplish all that Steve has."
Indeed, Brill's plunge through life has been more like a hull's. The son of Martin Brill, a liquor store owner, and his wife, Anita, a homemaker, he spent his childhood in Queens, N.Y. First at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and later in college, Brill was a grade grubber and credentials snob. "Even now, he asks people what they got on their SATs," says a former colleague.
As a freshman at Yale, Brill snagged a summer internship with New York City Mayor John Lindsay, then continued on as a speech writer and liaison to city agencies. His future wife, Cynthia Margolin, a fellow Yalie who also became a lawyer, was impressed that Brill was "already out in the real world doing things."
Brill began writing stories for New York magazine in 1975. "He fell Yale Law wasn't challenging enough," says his editor, Clay Felker, with a laugh. Brill never took the bar exam, opting instead for a less certain financial future as a New York reporter. "I could have taken a job at a big law firm." he says. "I just never considered that what I was doing instead was risky."
In 1978, Brill began writing an Esquire column about the doings of corporate lawyers. It developed such a following that Brill tapped Clay Felker's British backers for funds and, in 1979, cofounded The American Lawyer. He and the young reporters he recruited were less interested in the result of a criminal or civil case than in how it was won, how the firm got the client and how much money was collected. Most lawyers, unaccustomed to such scrutiny, initially dismissed the magazine's stories as gossip or worse. But over the years The American Lawyer proved its mettle. Hard-nosed investigations of the likes of Finley Kumble, a Manhattan law firm that turned out to be a pyramid scheme, have earned the magazine three National Magazine Awards to date.
Despite his achievements as an entrepreneur, Brill values himself most as a writer and reporter, and practically every issue of The American Lawyer carries one of his lengthy stories. He does his own reporting and then sits down to write, usually in the attic of his weekend home in Bedford, N.Y. He favors articles that have "no adjectives—it's completely deadpan," he says—and his stories never mention subjects' spouses, children or pastimes. He is similarly closemouthed about his own private life. Wife Cynthia serves as Court TV's general counsel; the Brills' offspring, Emily, 9, Sophie, 7, and Sam, 3, are cared for at the couple's Manhattan co-op. The children are Steve and Cynthia's major hobby. "We probably spend more time with our kids than most parents we know," Brill says. "It's what we want to do." Yet when he accompanies his daughter to a swim meet, he takes along a briefcase.
The truth is that Brill can't stop working. There's always the next idea: to sell abridged editions of U.S. trials to British TV, to teach with Court TV in law schools, to cover the nation's appeals courts. He's interested in profit, of course, but he's also endlessly fascinated. "The legal system," he says, "is the way we fight our battles in this society."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
