He mentions the whole process of sending it out to numerous producers, and how it happened to get to Goodson. The whole string of happenings between then and his getting the "Price" job is quite a read as well!

http://www.dobkowitz.com/Thesis/index.html

Downloading it right now (not even close to safe for slow connections at 104.7MB), but the small story on the main page is awesome in its own right.

Amen to that! Cool story.

I'm now 25 pages into the 116+ page thesis, and if you've got some spare time, it's most definitely a must read. The history lesson that you're going to pick up from it looks like a gold mine.

Great story, and an inspiration to anyone who wants to work in television. I think it's even sweeter that one of our own posters, in a roundabout way, helped Roger get on his journey.

And it's very interesting how a lot of things Roger mentions in his thesis have come full circle for the genre (comedians as hosts, page 17 or 23 in PDF numbers), and there appears to be a chapter on the decline of the genre in the 1960s, or how a big money game show jump-started the genre, then became the number one show that season...

ETA: Oh, and 21 game shows offering a half-mil in 1956, which is about $3.8 mil now. Million Dollar Wheel doesn't sound so bad now... ;-)

So far, very impressive stuff.

Please don't whoosh me, but which poster would that be?

I could be completely wrong, but I think the posting of this thesis is somewhat closure for him.

Ron Greenberg

Correct, and no whooshing necessary. :-)

Never forget that Roger got in during the golden age of game shows, when the three networks programmed hours and hours of them five days per week. Those days are gone forever. Irrevocably, irretrievably gone. Affiliates are not going to give those daytime time slots back. The networks no longer develop game shows and no longer do three pilots per quarter. Goodson and Todman, Heatter and Quigley, Barry and Enright, Hatos and Hall, all out of business. Overall, the long-term employment prospects in game shows are bleak compared to the days when Roger got into the business. Aside from TPIR there are assorted, short-lived game shows in syndication and on GSN. Roger's story may be inspiring but it happened in a totally different era. As a career path to get you from age 25 to age 65, I can't recommend it.

I was not surprised at all when I read that Ronnie Greenberg was the one producer gracious enough to start Roger down his professional (golden) road. Around the same time that Roger was looking to get into TV game shows, so was I. My path was a bit more littered with security blankets, since I decided to go to law school as a fallback instead of going for broke. The result was that I altered my focus from trying to be an employee to being a creator and, like Roger, contacted all the then-producer/packagers to pitch my games. The only one to invite me in to pitch--and let me return whenever I had a new idea--was Ronnie Greenberg. To make a long story short, that entree led to one of my creations being developed into a show for which NBC bought a pilot. It didn't sell, but Ronnie and I have been friends ever since. Believe me, it was quite a honor for a random student to be taken under Ronnie's wing and get to see his creation come to life. I will always be grateful for the opportunity and the game show community should be proud that someone like Ronnie is one of their own.

Is anyone else getting a blank screen after the download? I was able to download it and view it as a web page a couple of days ago. I figured I could always go back and finish reading it, but now I can't pull it up?

This sucks....midway through the download, I got an error that read something to the effect of "This file is damaged, and cannot be repaired". The screen then goes blank.

It took a while, but I didn't have any trouble downloading it. Maybe I was using a different internets. :)

TPIR, Wheel, Jeopardy, Family Feud....the only four games currently first-run on-air that debuted before 2000, no?

Millionaire, 1999 (i know, I get the point.).