Spectator: Ted Goes Hollywood II

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But Ted Turner simply pines for a movie studio. The last time he bought one, MGM in 1986, he did so by taking on a billion-dollar junk-bond debt that almost lost him his whole company. A year later, after he was bailed out by the country's big cable operators (including Time Inc.), he was obliged to let the corporate outsiders radically hobble his natural cowboy operating style: since then, mortifyingly, Turner has had to get his board's approval whenever he wants to spend more than $2 million. In 1989 they told him he couldn't buy the Financial News Network, and in the past year they forbade his merger discussions with Capital Cities/ABC. The Castle Rock and New Line deals displeased his Time Warner board members, but evidently not enough to make them raise a serious ruckus. So Turner's movie-studio obsession has come full circle: buying into Hollywood now is a burst of old-fashioned Turner independence, the kind of high-priced, seat-of-the-pants action he has been denied as the result of his last, overleveraged Hollywood plunge seven years ago. It's his party and he'll buy if he wants to.