Posted by chicagomedia.org on December 01, 2008 at 11:32:26:
Former anchorman Bill Kurtis hasn't lost his voice
He's everywhere: '30 Rock,' AT&T ads, A&E, in chicago restaurants--and in court
Steve Johnson
It is the winter of a long and celebrated career.
The TV news anchor ought to be retired, golfing or some such, in DuPage County or Arizona, maybe hosting the occasional weekend public-affairs show on UHF, just to keep the feel of the spotlight.
Instead, Bill Kurtis at 68 is suddenly everywhere, or in enough places that you can't help but notice.
There he is pitching modern technology while making fun of the kind of all-knowing anchorman persona he helped define�and voicing a new catchphrase at the same time.
"I'm Bill Kurtis," he says in one of 2008's ubiquitous series of AT&T ads, holding a laptop, his voice deep and cocksure as ever, his keen reportorial instincts somehow missing the abominable snowman right behind him. "I've found the Internet!"
And there he is, too, on some of the best Chicago restaurant menus, principal of something called Tallgrass Beef, a company that raises cattle the prairie way, eating grass from a field rather than corn from a trough.
Although Kurtis is only on A&E, his longtime cable-TV home, in reruns these days, his Kurtis Productions still makes 20 hours of new, non-fiction TV a year for Discovery and CNBC, he says.
But the A&E work continues to resonate: " Cold Case Files" and especially the true-crime series "American Justice." It showed up several times in HBO's "The Sopranos," and, on Nov. 20, as a key plot point in the NBC comedy " 30 Rock." As the character Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) watched TV, there was Kurtis' sonorous voice describing how the Menendez Brothers plotted to kill their parents and convincing Jordan his own young sons had the same plan in mind for him.
Kurtis even made the news last month for an unusual trademark lawsuit, one involving the makers of the "Little House on the Prairie" TV series and a former Laura Ingalls Wilder family homestead, now a museum, located on Kansas land owned by Kurtis' grandfather.
"He is just so tireless," says Walter Jacobson, Kurtis' longtime news-desk partner at CBS' WBBM-Ch. 2 in Chicago. "I don't know how he does it."
Yet in conversation at his River North production company and over a Tallgrass Beef lunch at Harry Caray's�capsule review: Every interview subject should sell gourmet steaks�Kurtis doesn't seem exhausted so much as delighted. He laughs frequently and fully:
�When the hostess at Harry Caray's asks him if he's found the Internet, a question he says he now gets all the time.
�When I tell Kurtis it's still amazing to be reminded that that voice is how the newsman talks in real life too.
�As he recounts the tale of improvising in one of the AT&T LaptopConnect ads, getting kicked in the shin by a "leprechaun" after Kurtis asked, "What, has a day-care center let out around here or something?"
"That one," Kurtis says, "is for the outtakes"�or for the DVD extras, it is suggested, which makes Kurtis laugh again.
Reluctant pitchman
Kurtis at first turned AT&T down, an automatic reflex from his days as a journalist. He anchored at WBBM alongside Jacobson for much of the 1970s and '80s, forming the iconic Chicago anchor team, and even went network for a time, anchoring the "CBS Morning News" from New York in the early 1980s. He left WBBM in 1996 and moved fully into the cable-production and hosting world.
"We've always looked down on somebody who did [ads]. That was in my head," he says.
But when the ad folk called back, he and life partner Donna La Pietra, he says, "went through that conversation, and I kind of realized that maybe I was clinging to an old image of journalism. First of all, 24-hour news cable now is more like news talk. The old straight news guy that I always was, there's not exactly much room for it. And also, what do I do? I narrate crime shows. It's not exactly social-issue documentaries.
"But more than that, commercials have become, on the one hand, funny. It takes the edge off. But they've also become platforms for validation, you know, that, hey, you're hot enough to do this. So I said, 'Why not? Let's play along,' " Kurtis recalls. "It's like 'Anchorman.' Is 'Anchorman' making fun of the deep stentorian voice, or are you part of the whole entertainment?"
'Anchorman's' anchorman
Indeed, Kurtis had already had, and enjoyed, a taste of mainstream comedy success, playing against his image in 2004's "Anchorman," serving as the narrator.
The Will Ferrell comedy, says Chad Harris, AT&T's director of advertising, was what convinced him Kurtis could sound deadly serious, but still put across comedy to pitch its LaptopConnect cards, which allow Web access from your laptop wherever you can make a cellular call: "Those words are delivering humor, and he's nailing it."
"Bill Kurtis is a stud," Harris adds. "You get to these shoots, and sometimes you never know what you'll get, especially when you have celebrity talent. � Kurtis was a pro all the way through."
The veteran anchorman sounds, in fact, a little amazed at how well the five ads have worked out.
"It's one thing to do a commercial," says Kurtis. "It's another to become part of a campaign that coins a new phrase that enters household usage. Jesus."
And while the humor was important to him for the first ads, now, he says with a wink, "I'm not above doing a straight pitch."
'Little House' dispute
In the lawsuit, his grandfather's Kansas ranch turns out to have been, it is believed, the spot where Laura Ingalls Wilder and family lived for a time, in what we'll call, to keep from becoming embroiled ourselves, a petite domicile on the plains.
There's a non-profit museum there, which his late parents used to run, and "because a niece of mine wanted to sell some dolls," as Kurtis puts it, the museum registered trademarks to the name Little House on the Prairie. Now the entertainment company that made the 1970s TV show, which believes it has all rights to "LHOP" merchandise, is suing to get that trademark back.
"The Kansas museum is flouting the law," says Trip Friendly, head of Friendly Family Productions. "They will tell you they are only operating a small museum in Kansas, but the fact is that Mr. Kurtis and his sister are running a vigorous retail store on the Internet � selling a wide variety of unauthorized merchandise bearing the Little House on the Prairie mark."
Kurtis disagrees�the museum reportedly clears less than $100,000 annually�vowing to fight and saying, "Somebody who's much larger than we are shouldn't be able to come in and kick a not-for-profit around the prairie."
Here's the beef
Tallgrass Beef leases some of the land adjoining the museum site. That company began, Kurtis says, because he had a ranch in Kansas that he bought 13 years ago and "you have to try and make the land pay the loan."
From hosting and producing "The New Explorers" for years on PBS and A&E, he knew about sustainable farming and grass-fed beef, which is considered healthier than the alternative.
So in 2005, he started Tallgrass, and, as it turns out, journalists only think they know everything.
"It's the hardest thing I've ever done," Kurtis says. He has had to recruit investors, hire a geneticist, a production manager and salespeople, and even do a lot of the selling himself.
Right now, the company is well established in Chicago, in places such as Caray's, Frontera Grill, Charlie Trotter's and Fox & Obel.
"It is the way the animal originally thrived," says Rick Bayless, chef at Frontera Grill and a Tallgrass fan. "They know how to make tender and beautiful meat out of that. Take a whole chunk of rib-eye and slow-roast it; that grass-fed stuff is the best you'll ever taste."
Some suburban supermarkets carry Tallgrass, and the next push is into New York. The company is close to breaking even, Kurtis says, slaughtering 2,000 head of cattle a year, offering not just steaks but hamburger and hot dogs. But the slumping economy is a worry for this premium product.
"We'll never be McDonald's," he says. "We're decaf coffee. We're just an alternative."
If the company does grow to the point that it gets a national advertising budget, it's a safe bet it'll know where to turn for its ads.
(Chicago Tribune)