Spectator

By KURT ANDERSEN

It used to be that whenever Ted Turner announced he was launching or buying some new enterprise, the expert consensus was reflexively dubious -- Turner was profligate, driven by vanity, maybe reckless. But now that every one of his cable-TV channels -- TBS, CNN, TNT, the Cartoon Network -- has turned out to have been brilliant, the pack instinct among journalists and Wall Street touts has pretty much reversed itself. Now Ted Turner is infallible. When it was announced last week that his company would buy Castle Rock Entertainment, an A-list movie-production company, and New Line Cinema, a scrappy little quasi-studio, for more than half a billion dollars, practically no one said it wasn't shrewd. But, in fact, the expert consensus on Turner looks wrong once again.

The analysts' line has been that his entertainment channels, TBS and TNT, require captive sources of product -- Turner-produced movies for Turner-owned cable outlets. But this, like so many putative corporate synergies, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. With six-year-old Castle Rock, Turner is getting no library of movies; the company controls the TV rights to none of its films. Three of Castle Rock's five hits -- When Harry Met Sally, , Misery and A Few Good Men -- were directed by company co-founder Rob Reiner, which means that for $160 million or so Turner is mainly getting the brainpower of Reiner -- yet only, perhaps, until he and partner Alan Horn have a falling-out with their new boss and walk away.

New Line, too, has been producing only a few movies a year, and its library is not big. Even if both companies begin expensively cranking up their output (as Castle Rock intends), Turner's entertainment-progr amming maw would barely register the impact. Turner is getting New Line's distribution system, but as Castle Rock's spokesman says dismissively of his corporate sibling-to- be, they put out mainly "B-type product. They're second tier."

Ted Turner's latest political crusade is violence in movies and on TV; he's against it. That vehement distaste led him to exclude the Godfather movies from his recent purchase of TV rights to 300 Paramount movies. Odd, then, that he's buying New Line, a company whose success has derived from gratuitous martial-arts violence (the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies) and gratuitous slasher-film violence (its Nightmare on Elm Street series, the Friday the 13th series).

But Ted Turner simply pines for a movie studio. The last time he bought one, MGM in 1986, he did so by taking on a billion-dollar junk-bond debt that almost lost him his whole company. A year later, after he was bailed out by the country's big cable operators (including Time Inc.), he was obliged to let the corporate outsiders radically hobble his natural cowboy operating style: since then, mortifyingly, Turner has had to get his board's approval whenever he wants to spend more than $2 million. In 1989 they told him he couldn't buy the Financial News Network, and in the past year they forbade his merger discussions with Capital Cities/ABC. The Castle Rock and New Line deals displeased his Time Warner board members, but evidently not enough to make them raise a serious ruckus. So Turner's movie-studio obsession has come full circle: buying into Hollywood now is a burst of old-fashioned Turner independence, the kind of high-priced, seat-of-the-pants action he has been denied as the result of his last, overleveraged Hollywood plunge seven years ago. It's his party and he'll buy if he wants to.