St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 53

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH SUNDAY Living and the arts MONDAY Health and science TUESDAY Living WEDNESDAY Relationships THURSDAY The arts FRIDAY Entertainment SATURDAY Consumer news SECTION THURSDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1993 r3i a 1 A 7 KCB 1 1 i it ft-' A i niftlnili im Barry Baker, Money Maker Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp in "Tombstone." All's Wyatt On Western Myth Front RGB 3 By Lewis Beale New York Daily News Mi 'T: OMBSTONE," which opens on Christmas Day, should come with the cinematic equivalent of a IK 3 .1 River City Broadcasting's JtL CEO does it as an outsider MM KM "VP i 6 00 Ob 7 who loves the battle i 4 4 0.6 ABOVE: Barry Baker in one of Channel 30's control rooms. (Wayne LEFT: Baker hobnobs with the cast from "Married With Children." From left to right: Ted McGinley, David Faustino, Christina Applegate, Katie Sagal, Baker, Ed O'Neill and Amanda Bearse. By Florence Shinkle Of the Post-Dispatch Staff IF YOU were born to inherited wealth, then you're a member of Barry Baker's Lucky Sperm Club. "The guy who just invested $48 million with us he's a member of the Lucky Sperm Club," Baker said one day, enumerating the big shots who are now throwing money at him.

"His name is Roy Coppedge III. What does that tell you? Roy Coppedge the third? Lucky Sperm Club." Baker, 41, the chief executive of River City Broadcasting, the corporation that owns Channel 30 (KDNL) and three other television stations so far, is not a member of the Lucky Sperm Club. He's the grandson of a Russian-Jewish immigrant and the son of a meatcutter. And it's the luckiest thing that ever happened to him being the outsider with nothing but smarts, knowing himself as that, having always to prove it to himself. You know how some surgeon general's warning: Caution: This movie deals with Western legend.

Like all such pictures, it is a mixture of history, half-truths and myth. The naive and the credulous must be accompanied by a skeptical adult. Those seeking authenticity should consult their local library. Like more than two dozen movies that have preceded it, "Tombstone" is about the events surrounding Oct. 26, 1881, when two hostile groups of gunmen shot it out for 30 seconds near a corral in Tombstone, Ariz.

More than a century after Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil gunned down Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury, the myth of the O.K. Corral seems branded on the public imagination. That legend of the gun-toting lawman bringing civilization to an anarchic outpost of the Old West has been the subject of numerous books and movies since Wyatt Earp's death in 1929. The story will be recounted once again in "Tombstone," with Kurt Russell as Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. Next summer, Hollywood returns again to the O.K.

Corral when director Lawrence Kasdan's "Wyatt Earp" hits theaters, with Kevin Costner as Wyatt and Dennis Quaid as his alcoholic, tubercular dentist buddy. But don't bet that either of these movies will provide the real lowdown on what happened in a bustling Arizona mining town 112 years ago. The myth is just too powerful. Or, to quote from the classic 1962 movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That's too bad, because the reality of the EarpClanton gunfight is in some ways more interesting, and certainly more complex, than the myth. Richard Maxwell Brown, a history professor at the University of Oregon, places the Tombstone episode in the middle of what he refers to as the "Cochise County War," part of a series of "local wars throughout the West in the 19th century, pitting Northerners, Republicans, industrialists and big ranchers against an alliance of small ranchers, farmers and outlaws," many of them Democrats from the South.

Earp was born in Illinois in 1848. His father was a Republican, and his three older brothers all served in the Union Army in the Civil War. Before arriving in Tombstone in 1879, Wyatt enjoyed a peripatetic career as a law enforcement officer in Lamar, and the Kansas towns of Wichita and Dodge City. In 1871, he jumped bail in Oklahoma after being arrested for horse theft, and there also is evidence suggesting he pimped. Brown calls Earp "a rounder, someone who makes the rounds of dissolute joints." But he also feels Earp craved respectability, which is why, when he and his brothers moved to Tombstone, he allied himself with the conservative Republican forces in town while still working as the gaming manager of a local saloon.

Earp and his brothers essentially became legal hit men for the establishment, a group that wanted See EARP, Page 5 i lX r-tll people have a made-for-television smile? Well, Baker has a self-conception that's made for television the way television is now a battlefield. What Ken Auletta, TV writer for The New Yorker, calls "the new video democracy" is transforming the marketplace. The established networks are losing toehold. Cable channels are proliferating. Everyone is fighting for the ad dollars and audiences that used to go almost automatically to network affiliates.

It's an industry full of treachery and promise, full of loud ties and bonhomie and cadavers. It's the perfect arena for a nimble outsider with a huge hunger for encounter. Michael Switzer, founder of TBWA Switzer Wolfe ad agency: "Barry's always got to be testing himself. When he gets a new stereo, he won't read the owner's manual. He has to figure out how to program it kDNL is WML himself, him against the technology.

"He likes the opponent to have the advantage. That's why he's so perfectly suited for where he is. There aren't going to be any secure monopolies in television anymore. And Barry doesn't want to be a monopolist; he really doesn't. He's got to be smarter than No.

1. Not richest, not biggest smartest." So far he has been. His statistics are like a perfectly cooked roast. They look good no matter where you slice. now the fourth-ranked Fox affiliate nationwide in its market.

And Baker is being canonized by his investors. ABOVE: Baker (left) on the occasion of his bar mitzvah, shaking hands with brother Andrew. LEFT: Baker with Cox Broadcasting executive Stan Mouse. me, could you turn up anything bad on him? Because when we did due diligence, we couldn't turn up a thing. He has done just a stupendous job with all his assets.

And he's having so much fun. He's like a kid in a candy store." Baker: "I lost my wife over this." Deborah, a photographer for National Geographic, left the marriage a year ago. "I think when she really lost faith was when I made the first million and didn't retire the way I'd always said I would." He wore an appraising expression man reviewing a key deal. He hadn't just incidentally botched up a marriage; he'd come to an inner crossroads, renounced one way of being for another. The right move? The truth of his situation registered with him, took possession of him: He's hit the current in the stream now.

"It's just starting to get fun; it's just starting to get fun for me right now." Visibly, he's having fun, untouched by the pressures of his own pell mell wheeling and dealing, an organism perfectly suited to its environment. The guy is so happy even his handwriting is happy full of loops and sweeps. He is the kind of deep-rooted, incandescent happy that comes from doing something not just successfully but as one has been See BAKER, Page 7 They didn't see the potential." He offered Cox $20 million for the station, nice round numbers for a station that had zero profit. Beverly Harms, senior vice president of Communications Equity Associates, Syracuse, N.Y.: "He came to us, wanting to buy the station." What did he put up? Harms: "He put himself up. Everybody bet on Barry.

From the moment anyone meets him, they bet on Barry Baker." Since then, growth has been phosphoric. Between 1990 and 1991, the St. Louis television economy went from $14 million in pretax profits to $10.5 million in pretax losses. During that doom zoom, the wunderkind bought two more independents (WTTV in Indianapolis and KABB in San Antonio) and another Fox affiliate, KDSM in Des Moines, Iowa. KDNL is now the fourth-ranked Fox affiliate nationwide in its market.

The independent KABB in San Antonio did more business in '92 than the ABC, NBC or Fox affiliates. And Baker is being canonized by his investors. Last month, in a time of general downsizing, River City Broadcasting raised an additional $48 million for expansion from the uppercrust entertainment industry investor Boston Ventures. Roy Coppedge the third, partner with Boston Ventures: "You're doing a profile on Barry? Just tell He started out in the St. Louis radio market in 1979.

He was 27, still had his baby fat and was the general manager for the black station KKSS. He changed the call letters to KMJM "Majic 108" and lifted it from 27th to third place in the Arbitrons. In 1983, he went to Koplar Communications' KPI.R-TV, Channel 11. Having never done television programming, he contracted for the Blues and the baseball Cardinals, marking the station as the sports station. Cash flow tripled in three years.

In 1988, Baker and another KPLR employee, Larry Marcus, offered to buy KPLR a move that Ted Koplar interpreted as a palace coup and high treason. He fired the pair. Baker went to Cox Broadcasting, owner of KDNL, the real dog in the St. Louis television market. Baker to Cox: "I said, 'What does an outfit like yours want with that loser? It's never going to be No.

That was all that mattered to them, being No. 1. They didn't see how the station could fit in. Renyold FergusonPost-Dispatch Poof, a 4-year-old female, is spayed, housebro-ken and good with children. adopt: Apply in person at the Humane Society of Missouri, 1 21 0 Macklind Avenue, before noon Saturday..