I met Roger Ailes about 24 years ago, when I was buying & selling video equipment. He was in charge, or at least an exec at Universal Studios in LA, and was running the Star Trek attraction where people could get dressed up in Star Trek costumes and sit on a set and have their images chroma-keyed into various Star Trek vignettes. It was good fun, and the pile of equipment needed was pretty large. Anyway, my deal with him was to replace 1 of his existing Sony 3/4” videotape recorders, value about $17K at the time (value about ZERO now, LOL) with a brand new one which was a player-only (didn’t record) value about $13.5K and the hard part was that Universal didn’t want to spend a penny on the deal, which was a challenge because somewhere there had to be a sales tax outlay on the brand new machine. The other challenge was that I didn’t have $13K to “float” the new machine while I figured out a way to sell the take-out machine.
The long and short of it was that I worked it all out, Entertainment Tonight (located on the Paramount lot but not Paramount) bought the old machine, Univ got the new machine for not a penny in outlay, Mr. Ailes congratulated me for on working the whole thing out without costing him anything, and was totally friendly & cooperative throughout the whole thing.
Those were great dealmaking days.
Good memory, and a good story, Attention Surplus Disorder!
That Ailes was impressed with your deal-making skills should not come as a surprise, based on his ability to take Fox from almost-nothing in terms of ratings to #1; and since he left MSNBC, well, we know what their ratings are!!
(BTW, in my earlier post I misspelled Ann Hampton Callaway’s name. Sorry!)