“One effect of cancer – corny but true – is you ask what’s important and what’s not,” she said. “But why would I want to go back to being the salaried employee of people who are so uncertain about their own jobs that they don’t know what they think from one day to the next – when here, two blocks from my house, I’m my own boss, I do work that I’m proud of, and I make more money than I ever made at the networks, a lot more money.” “I get offers to go back to the networks even now,” she said in her mild Texan twang, arms stretched behind her neck, sneakers up on her desk. Nick News is just the surface, one part of her main job as co-founder and chief executive of Lucky Duck Productions, an independent company that takes up a whole floor of a large building in Greenwich Village, employs 35 full-time staffers, houses state-of-the-art editing gear, and makes shows and specials for not only Nickelodeon but also CBS, PBS, HBO, MTV, A& E, Lifetime and more.
Now, a decade after taping her last network spot, Ellerbee stands as the clearest proof imaginable of life after exile (and many other pains). a couple more halfhearted news shows, a brief spell as wiseacre for CNN, a commercial for Maxwell House, and – poof! – she vanished into the ozone. A book she wrote about her checkered career, And So It Goes: Adventures in Television, hit the best-seller list, put her on the Carson show, got Hollywood talking about a movie version starring Marsha Mason.Īnd then. Her next series, Our World on ABC, foreshadowed by several years the wave of historical documentaries. Her show Overnight, which NBC buried on the graveyard shift (1:30-2:30 a.m., five times a week), became a cult smash and won a Columbia-duPont Award for being (as the citation put it) “probably the best-written and most intelligent news program ever.” Then her bosses canceled it. Linda Ellerbee? Anchoring for a pack of 9-year-olds? Just 10, 15 years ago, Ellerbee was about as fresh a breeze as ever blew through TV’s Big Three – smart, funny, sassy, irreverent. This may come as a shock to her old fans. She’s the host of Nick News, the Nickelodeon network’s weekly newscast for kids.
If you’re over 30, you may have wondered, from time to time, whatever happened to Linda Ellerbee.
0 kommentar(er)
