NICK GILLESPIE IN 1995: Terrible Ted Turner.
As I suggested earlier, this may not be entirely the Goldbergs’ fault. They don’t help matters with ham-handed lines such as, “Half visionary, half crackpot, and allAmerican character, Ted Turner is a genuine original,” or “Using second-string producers, third-rate correspondents, and recycled network programming, [Turner] has gone about his task with a singleminded determination.”
But beyond the Goldbergs’ often labored prose, Turner himself seems capable of only the most banal thoughts and insights. In the 1980s he became convinced that he would be shot by an assassin, and told his then-mistress what he would say to his killer: “Thanks for not coming sooner.” At another point, he boasted to a reporter, “I want to set the all-time greatest personal achievement record, greater than Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison, Napoleon or Alexander the Great.” Or consider this deep conversation Turner reports having had with Fidel Castro in 1982: “After three drinks with rum … I said [to Castro] ‘Are you interfering in Nicaragua and Angola?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you are, too.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but we’re the United States. We’ve got every right to be there.’ And he said, ‘How come?’ I said, ‘Because we’re right, we’re capitalists. We’ve got a free country.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but what about people that don’t agree with that?’ I went back and scratched my head. I never even thought there was another side to the picture.”
The secret shame of Ted Turner may be that, like much of the programming for which he became famous, he just isn’t very smart or interesting. Indeed, by the end of Citizen Turner, the protagonist seems less reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane and more like another great fictional millionaire: Jay Gatsby. Turner, now in his fifties, has been spared Gatsby’s tragic fate. But just as Gatsby turned out to be less real than imagined, so too does Turner seem unmasked as more shallow than deep.
QED:
R.I.P. to Ted Turner, the only man with the balls to colorize CASABLANCA.
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 6, 2026