Jack Barry (television personality)

Infobox Person
name = Jack Barry

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caption = Jack Barry in 1984 as host of The Joker's Wild
birth_date = March 20, 1918
birth_place = flagicon|New York Lindenhurst, New York, USA
death_date = death date and age|1984|5|2|1918|3|20 | death_place = flagicon|New York New York City, USA

Jack Barry (born Jack Barasch, March 20, 1918, Lindenhurst, New York; died May 2, 1984, New York City) was an American television game show host and producer. Barry's career was nearly ruined in the quiz show scandal of the late 1950s, but he made a successful comeback in the business over a decade later.

Early life and career

Barry grew up in a town east of New York City and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, in Philadelphia. In the 1940s he began on radio, where he met his partner Dan Enright. Once television broadcasting began, Barry and Enright would get involved in local programming, and eventually national programs, thanks in part to the success of early Jack Barry hits such as the children's show "Winky Dink and You" (conceivably the world's first interactive television program) as well as "Juvenile Jury" and "Life Begins at 80". In the 1950s, Barry and Enright got involved in game shows, with Barry hosting "The Big Surprise". He was eventually dismissed from his hosting duties and was replaced by Mike Wallace, persuading Barry to begin packaging his own game shows.

The quiz show scandals

In 1956, Barry and Enright debuted "Twenty One", which was sponsored by Geritol, and "Tic Tac Dough". Both game shows were hosted by Barry. In 1958, on one episode of "Twenty One", a game between challenger Charles Van Doren and champion Herb Stempel was found to have been rigged. (The 1994 movie "Quiz Show" was based on the Stempel-Van Doren contests.)

Within three months of the published revelation, "Twenty-One" was cancelled; another Barry-Enright production, "Tic-Tac-Dough", was cancelled as well. Barry next hosted the nighttime version of a new show Barry and Enright created with Robert Noah and Buddy Piper, "Concentration". Barry was dismissed from the nighttime after four weeks, with the quiz show scandal ramping up and Barry-Enright forced to sell their production operation to NBC. The original daytime "Concentration," hosted for most of its NBC run by Hugh Downs, ran for 15 years.

Though it was Enright and his "Twenty-One" assistant, Albert Freedman who rigged the shows, Barry admitted in the 1970s and 80s his eventual role in covering for them once he found out. After sponsor Geritol complained to Barry and Enright about the dullness of the first, un-rigged "Twenty-One" episode (the two initial contestants repeatedly missed questions) Enright admitted in a 1991 PBS interview that "from then on we decided to rig "Twenty-One." According to game-show historian Steve Beverly, Professor William Martin of the University of Georgia, one of the government investigators probing the quiz scandals, said Barry did not likely know the deception until after a "Twenty-One" episode during which Barry defended the show. According to Beverly, "Martin insisted Barry still likely did not know of the deception until after that night, when NBC began pressing for the truth and Enright, apparently aware the entire company could go down, told Barry of the controls."

Barry was apparently not averse to "juicing" a show, even after the "Twenty-One" and "Tic Tac Dough" debacles left his career in eclipse. A veteran quiz producer once said that in the 1960s, when Barry was working on a pilot of a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production featuring "spontaneous" filmed responses, Barry would feed his respondents scripted lines to make them funnier.

After the scandals

Dan Enright found television work in Canada with Columbia-Screen Gems, while Jack Barry went to California. The two collaborated on small Canadian produced quiz shows including "Photo Finish" shot in Montreal and "It's a Match" taped in Toronto. It was on these shows that a number of young American and Canadian producers and directors got their start, including Mark Phillips and Sidney M. Cohen.

Move to Los Angeles

After being unable to find national broadcasting work for several years in the wake of the quiz scandal Barry finally bought a Los Angeles-area radio station (KKOP 93.5 FM, Redondo Beach, later renamed KFOX, now KDAY). In later interviews, he stated that he bought the station specifically because it would require him to have a license from the FCC, and that if the FCC would be willing to grant him a license, it would effectively show that he no longer was "tainted" by the game show scandals. Barry also owned a cable TV system in Redondo Beach.

In the mid 1960s, Barry was featured on KTLA (Channel 5 in Los Angeles)in a variety-format program dubbed "The Jack Barry Show". This commenced as a weekly program but slowly became locally popular principally because it featured whatever celebrities who were performing in Los Angeles who wanted to promote their appearances. The show continued for about a three year period, during which at one point it became a daily program and was also, rather briefly, syndicated.

An interesting feature of this program was the appearance of a group of five children dubbed "The Juvenile Jury," later "The Paramount Panel" (KTLA was then owned by Paramount Pictures, who also served as the syndicator when Barry's show went national) which commented on news and other current events amusingly. Art Linkletter, at that time, had a popular program based principally on such a format, so in some sense, the Barry show was attempting to capture this audience segment (as well as revive the memory of one of Barry's popular 1950s TV creations).

Notable among the child actors on this panel was Gary Goetzman, today a well known director and producer of major films. Probably Barry's unfortunate game show experiences sensitized him to people ostracized by the Hollywood establishment of the time. As an example, he had a number of artists and comedians as guests on the show who had been blacklisted during the dark McCarthy period of the 1950s and were attempting to return to the American stage in the mid 1960s. The musical director of the program, Kip Walton, was responsible for bringing in major jazz artists with regularity, such as Lionel Hampton.

After a successful three-year run the show was canceled principally because the station format was modified after its purchase from Paramount by an investment group headed by Gene Autry, which later controlled the California Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) baseball team and Channel 5.

Return to game shows

"Slowly," said a 1984 article in "TV Guide" which discussed game show hosts, "he began to receive calls: Would he fill in for five weeks on this game show? Yes. Of course." Barry appeared on a few local game shows in L.A. during this time (mostly on KTLA), which included a local version of "You Don't Say", which would be hosted nationally by Tom Kennedy, and even played a newsman on the premiere of the mid-1960s TV series "Batman". He did a guest reporter spot on the TV series "The Addams Family".

Finally, in 1969 he became a host again, for ABC's "The Generation Gap", replacing original host Dennis Wholey for the final weeks of its series.

Later in the year, Barry embarked on an idea which would launch his national comeback, and eventually become the most successful game show project of his career. He developed and produced two pilots for "The Joker's Wild" in association with Goodson-Todman Productions, emceed by Allen Ludden. CBS held off on picking up the series at first. In 1970, Barry produced a pilot with a similar concept called "The Honeymoon Game" hosted by Jim McKrell. After that failed to sell, Barry reworked the format and launched a local version of "The Joker's Wild" in 1971 on Los Angeles' KTLA, while early in that same year, also selling "The Reel Game" to ABC. Barry also hosted this show, pitting three contestants in answering questions centered around vintage newsreel footage, for cash prizes, and the chance for a new car (which nobody won). The series ran weekly in prime-time for 13 weeks.

"The Joker's Wild" made its national debut on CBS in 1972 with Barry hosting and producing the show (as Jack Barry Productions) until CBS cancelled it in 1975. Jack Barry Productions, meanwhile, produced "Hollywood's Talking", Geoff Edwards' first game show, and "Blank Check", hosted by veteran quiz and game host and announcer Art James. Even before "Joker", however, Barry had displayed no loss of concurrent hosting and production skill, doing both with "The Reel Game" and a 1970s revival of "Juvenile Jury".

Barry even brought Dan Enright back as "The Joker's Wild"'s executive producer during its first network run, mentioning Enright at the end of the final CBS installment. The two renewed their working partnership full-time in 1976, launching "Break the Bank", hosted by Tom Kennedy, on ABC. (When ABC cancelled the show despite decent ratings, Barry himself hosted and produced the show for weekly syndication during the 1976-77 season.)

In the fall of 1976, Barry sold reruns of "The Joker's Wild's" final CBS season to several stations, including New York WOR-TV and Los Angeles KTLA. These reruns rated highly enough that Barry and Enright produced new installments for first-run syndication beginning in 1977, with Barry again the host. The show was distributed by Dick Colbert Television Sales and produced at the Chris Craft Studios of KCOP (Los Angeles-13) in Hollywood. The series was seen in L.A. on KHJ-TV Channel 9, despite being produced at KCOP, and despite the test run of the final CBS season having aired on KTLA the season before. "Joker" eventually did air on its flagship KCOP during most of the "neon era".

The new, syndicated "Joker" was a huge success, enough that it enabled Barry to reach back to his days as a children's program creator and host, launching in 1979 "Joker! Joker!! Joker!!!", a weekly kids' version of "The Joker's Wild" in which children could win savings bonds (their parents played the bonus rounds).

The new "Joker" was so successful that Barry and Enright gambled on reviving a show formerly as tainted as they had been by the ancient quiz show scandal: "Tic-Tac-Dough", with new host Wink Martindale, which initially ran for eight weeks on CBS' daytime schedule in 1978. The syndicated run of the show (debuting in the fall of 1978) became successful and ran for eight years with Martindale and in its final year, with Jim Caldwell as host.(Martindale left the show, to concentrate on his own new game show, "Headline Chasers" which he produced in association with another game show veteran, Merv Griffin) From there, Barry & Enright in the 1970s and early 1980s developed and produced games like "Bullseye", "Play the Percentages", "Hot Potato", and "Hollywood Connection". They also produced several unsold pilots such as "Decisions, Decisions". They even developed a resurrected "Twenty-One", though this version never saw air. In due course, Barry & Enright Productions moved to film and series television production work.

In his final years, Barry renewed ties with NBC and began developing game show projects, including "Hot Potato", which proved to be his last that made it to television. He also made an attempt to sell "The Joker's Wild" and "Tic Tac Dough" to NBC affiliates in an attempt to remove a winnings limit of $50,000 imposed due to the amount of CBS affiliates airing both series, as NBC had no winnings limit. That limit was eventually removed shortly before Barry's death.

Death

Barry, along with then-producer Ron Greenberg, eventually began grooming a successor host for "The Joker's Wild", his periodic fill-in Jim Peck, and planned to retire from hosting in September 1984. On May 2, 1984, less than a month after completing "Joker's" seventh syndicated season and returning from a visit to his daughter in Europe, Barry suffered a massive cardiac arrest during a morning jog in Central Park. He died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, after doctors were unable to save his life. Barry's body was flown back to Southern California, and is now buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

Prior to his death, Barry had planned to appear in the season-opening episode of "The Joker's Wild" and announce his retirement, then bring in Jim Peck and hand over the hosting reigns to him. Instead, Bill Cullen became the new host of The Joker's Wild and continued to do so until the syndicated version ended in September 1986.

References and notes

External links

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* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=10374 Jack Barry] at Find-A-Grave