Week of April 19 1988
U.S. warships and aircraft destroy two of Iran’s Persian Gulf oil platforms, sink a
patrol boat and damage two Iranian frigates. It was the most intense direct U.S.-
Iran conflict since President Reagan ordered last summer that Navy forces be
strengthened in the gulf, where Iran and Iraq have been at war since 1980.
The Supreme Court rules that the government may disqualify military veterans
who are alcoholics from receiving benefits by viewing their condition as “willful
misconduct” rather than an uncontrollable disease.” The court did not decide
whether alcoholism is a disease but said the VA is not compelled to regard it as
such.
More Democratic delegates - Massachusetts Gov Michael
S. Dukakis wins the New York primary - beating the Rev
Jesse Jackson and Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee.
Dukakis had 51% of the vote, 37% for Jackson and 10% for
Gore. Vice President George Bush won the Republican
primary, running basically unopposed... Later - Sen. Albert
Gore Jr., $1.5 million in debt and winless in any state race
in the last six weeks, halts his campaign for the 1988
Democratic nomination, but holds-on to his 421 delegates.
The Senate passes legislation that would make $20,000 payments to about
60,000 Americans of Japanese descent who were ordered from homes in
California and other West Coast states during World War II and put in detention
camps.
The IRS invokes the tax-exempt status
of bankrupt PTL, dealing a serious blow
to fund-raising efforts of the scandal-
plagued ministry. The IRS claims that
PTL has not acted like a ministry since
1980. The television ministry was noted
for a variety of fundraising schemes used
to build hotels, a water park and a
shopping mall and to allow founder Jim
Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye , to live the good life.
Top video rentals
Stakeout
Beverly Hills Cop II
The Princess Bride
Week of April 19 1988
Dirty Dancing
The Lost Boys
The Living Daylights
Star-studded week at the hospital - Eddie Van
Halen , James Garner, Sid Caesar and Morey
Amsterdam are all patients at Cedars Sinai
Medical Center near Beverly Hills. Van Halen was
stricken with a tropical virus after a recent vacation
in Fiji.. Amsterdam had blood clots removed from
each leg, Caesar, who had hernia surgery two
weeks ago, was being treated of a staph infection
and Garner was undergoing a series of tests in
preparation for heart surgery.
Paul McCartney is busy on a new album. He’s
collaborating with Elvis Costello... REM lands a
five-album deal with Warner Brothers for as much
as $2 million an album. The group is guaranteed full CD royalties and full
mechanicals, while its master recordings revert to the group after 10 years.
L.A. rapper Ice-T composes and performs the title track for Dennis Hopper’s new
hit movie “Colors.”
Bruce Springsteen is currently on his “Tunnel of Love” tour, which began in
Worcester, Mass in February.
Sports television and radio update ...
ESPN is healthy - debuting in September of 1979, the
network, near financial ruin in 1982, made a profit of $70
million last year. It’s hard to believe that the channel was
so hard up for programming, it use to show taped slow-
pitch softball, rodeos and billiards. Things are different
today. Sportcenter’s Chris Berman was their highest paid
talent making $150,000 a year, until the channel signed
Joe Theismann as an NFL commentator for $400,000.
Currently - 80% of ESPN is owned by Capital Cities and
20% by RJR Nabisco. Things turned around for the network after a key decision
was made in late 1982 - to charge cable systems 10 cents a subscriber per
month to carry the channel. It was a gamble, because up until then, ESPN was
giving cable system owners 10 cents for each sub! The company gambled that
once ESPN was in homes, it would be hard to get out - cable operators would
Week of April 19 1988
meet resistance from their subscribers. The fee now is 28 cents, plus another
9.25 cents for systems that take the NFL package. ESPN grossed $218 million in
1987. About 60% of that came from advertising and the rest coming from cable
operators. Last year, ESPN made a 3-year $153-million deal with the NFL - the
network’s first deal with the NFL. ESPN still doesn’t have a contract with the
National Basketball Assn, nor do they have anything from professional baseball.
It’s now available in 46.2 million homes.
What about all-sports radio? ... Last July 1, WFAN
(The Fan) debuted in New York City at 1050 on the
AM dial. The ratings haven’t been so good, and
there’s talk that owner Emmis Broadcasting may
drop the format. But wait... Emmis just bought
WNBC (660) along with WYNY-FM from NBC, as
part of a five-station deal for $121.5 million. There’s talk that Emmis may move
WFAN from 1050 to the superior 660 channel. 1050 has a highly directional
signal and can’t be heard west and south of New York City. 660 covers the entire
metro area and beyond. WFAN has the broadcast rights to the Mets and WNBC
has the rights to the Knicks and Rangers. That would give “the new station” an
incredible team base. Some of the WFAN announcers include Steve Somers
and Pete Franklin. Jim Lampley just left as a WFAN host. Lampley started doing
his broadcasts from the station, but moved to the West coast and was doing his
New York show via satellite. Reasons cited for his leaving: - NY Mets pregame
shows would have pre-empted him, plus his commitments to CBS and HBO and
satellite costs were making the show unprofitable... (WFAN did move to 660 and
went on to become one of the top-money making stations ever with its all-sports
format. The station spawned format imitators coast-to-coast).
More radio - Larry King (54) - late night radio talk show
host is now heard on 322 stations and conducts a
nightly interview program on Cable News Network. Each
Friday, he publishes a column in USA Today. And he
has a new book out this week - “Tell It To The King.”
Technology - Tandy Corp says that it has developed the
first compact disc that can be recorded and erased at
home. The announcement brings a protest from the
recording industry because it would allow copying of
high quality audio. Tandy says its erasable CD recorder
will be available in two years. ..
. Also this week, Tandy
unveils its “clone” of an IBM PS/2 personal computer -
the first PS/2 clone. Dell announced it would ready with its PS/2 clone at the end
Week of April 19 1988
of the year.
Eastman Kodak agrees to buy the sales and servicing arm if IBM’s U.S. copier
business in a deal that would make it a major competitor to Xerox
In computer news - IBM says that it has invested
$10 million in Metaphor Computer Systems and
that the two companies will jointly adapt
Metaphor’s graphics- oriented software to IBM
machines. Like the Mac, the Metaphor system
employs pictorial icons and divides the computer
screen into “windows.” Users navigate through
data with a pointing device known as a mouse,
rather than typing commands. Apple recently sued
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft in an attempt to
block the release of a pair of programs that
produced screen displays resembling the
Macintosh’s. But that will have no effect on this
deal, because the Metaphor system predates the
Macintosh. David E Liddle, Metaphor chairman worked for Xerox until 1982,
where he headed the team that is widely credited with having invented the
concept of a graphical user interface, the graphics-based look used on the
Macintosh and other computers.
Bestsellers -
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
Rock Star - Jackie Collins
The Icarus Agenda - Robert Ludlum
Treasure - Clive Cussler
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel
Garcia Marquez
Inheritance - Judith Michael
The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
Citizen Cohn - Nicholas von Hoffman
Love, Medicine & Miracles - Bernie S.
Siegel
Trump: The Art of the Deal - Donald J.
Trump
The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure - Robert E.
Kowalski
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers -
Paul Kennedy
Washington goes to War - David Brinkley
Week of April 19 1988
Being A Woman: Fulfilling Your Femininity and Finding Love - Toni Grant
Monday night television -
CBS - Kate & Allie, Designing Women, Newhart,
Eisenhower & Lutz , Cagney & Lacey
NBC - ALF, Valerie’s Family, Movie
ABC - MacGyver, Movie
PBS - Discoveries Underwater, An Armenian
Journey, Slow Fires
Lifetime - Cagney & Lacey, Jack & Mike,
Investment Advisory
Nick at Nite - Make Room For Daddy, Mr. Ed, My
Three Sons, Donna Reed, Laugh-In, Car 54,
Where Are You?, The Monkees, Susie
Designing Women - An old friend from prison makes Anthony a business
proposal.
Cagney & Lacey - Mary Beth and Chris learn one of their first investigations
together may have resulted in a miscarriage of justice
Pop music this week in 1988 -
Where So Broken Hearts Go - Whitney Houston
Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car - Billy Ocean
Devil Inside - INXS
Wishing Well - Terence Trent D’Arby
Shattered Dreams - Johnny Hates Jazz
Angel - Aerosmith
Out of the Blue - Debbie Gibson
Pink Cadillac - Natalie Cole
Girlfriend - Pebbles
Rocket 2 U - The Jets
I Saw Him Standing There - Tiffany
Some Kind of Lover - Jody Whatley
One Step Up - Bruce Springsteen
Check It Out - John Cougar Mellencamp
You Don’t Know - Scarlett & Black
I Wish I Had A Girl - Henry Lee Summer
Pamela - Toto
What A Wonderful World - Louie Armstrong
Week of April 19 1988
Top Albums -
Dirty Dancing soundtrack
Bad - Michael Jackson
More Dirty Dancing - soundtrack
Bad - Michael Jackson
Now and Zen - Robert Plant
Hysteria - Def Leppard
Out of the Blue - Debbie Gibson
Tiffany - Tiffany
Kick - INXS
Faith - George Michael
Skyscraper - David Lee Roth
Good Morning Vietnam -
soundtrack
Other albums -
Naked - Talking Heads
Make It Last Forever - Keith Sweat’
The Lion and the Cobra - Sinead
O’Connor
Diesel and Dust - Midnight Oil
Pontiac - Lyle Lovett
Top Country -
I Wanna Dance With You - Eddie Rabbit
At the movies -
Beetlejuice - Michael Keaton, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones,
Catherine O’Hara, Winona Ryder
Colors - Sean Penn, Robert Duvall,
Maria Conchita Alonso
Moonstruck - Cher, Nicolas Cage
Good Morning Vietnam - Robin
Williams
Walt Disney’s Return To Snowy River
Part II
Above The Law - Steven Seagal, Pam
Grier, Sharon Stone, Daniel Faraldo,
Henry Silva
World Gone Wild - Bruce Dern, Michael Pare, Catherine Mary Stewart, Adam
Week of April 19 1988
Ant, Rick Podell
Bad Dreams - Jennifer Rubin, Bruce Abbott, Richard Lynch, Dean Cameron
Casual Sex? - Lea Thompson, Victoria Jackson, Stephen Shellen, Jerry Levine,
Mary Gross, Andrew Dice Clay
The Seventh Son - Demi Moore, Michael Biehn, Peter Friedman, Jurgen
Prochnow
A Time Of Destiny - William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, Melissa Leo, Stockard
Channing
Permanent Record -
Lady In White - Lukas Haas, Len Cariou,
Alex Rocco, Katherine Helmond
Wall Street - Michael Douglas, Charlie
Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Martin Sheen, Hal
Holbrook
Biloxi Blues -
Bright Lights, Big City - Michael J. Fox
The Unholy (You haven’t got a prayer)
- Ben Cross, Ned Beatty, William Russ,
Jull Carroll, Hal Holbrook, Trevor Howard
Stand and Deliver - Edward James
Olmos, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rosana De Soto
South of Reno - Jeffrey Osterhage, Lisa Blount, Lewis Van Bergen
The Last Emperor -