King World

And then I had a clause in my contract at my insistence that I could cover any story in the world.

at the expense of King World, which produced Inside Edition.

And that brought me to the Berlin Wall.

It brought me all over.

What do I mean by that? These are broadcasting companies that are a whole host of companies that feed into this business, right? I'll give you an example of two companies I used as broadcasting companies.

One was a company called King World.

I think it produces syndicated shows.

It used to produce the Oprah show.

Mm

... that didn't pan out, but King World had said, "Hey, look, if, uh..." I think it was Sean Perry, I think.

"If, uh, GMA doesn't work out, we'd love to have you come over to Hollywood Squares." And, uh, so it didn't work out, and my agent said, "They want you to fly out and test with Whoopi." I didn't really have a deep-seated interest in hosting a game show, but Good Morning America had had to cut me a, a pretty nice check after not picking up-

[laughs]

She said, "I don't wanna, you know, walk into a party and everybody looks the other way."

Yeah.

But Tom, do you remember the very first sales reel that they put together, that King World put together that they took to NATPE to sell the show? It said, "Whoopi and all of her Oscar-winning friends, Meryl Streep-"

Oh, right [laughs]