REMEMBERING 'WISHNIE'
Posted: Monday, July 30, 2007 9:23 PM by Rob Merrill
By Albert Oetgen, Senior Producer, NBC News Washington
It seems appropriate that a great filmmaker, a great broadcaster and a great sportsman died today. Because Eric Wishnie loved film, television and sports... and he loved the mystery and mysticism of coincidence. He also was a first-rate practitioner of the jagged and self-protective humor that journalists engage in when our front-row seats to life's harrowing events become too close and overwhelming.
You can read Eric's words and you can watch the pieces he produced, but they don't really capture him. There was a remoteness to Eric, for all of the love and affection he showered on his friends here at NBC. And it was that remoteness, that vulnerability, that endeared him to us. He was a perfectionist, and when he wasn't perfect he was embarrassed. He stayed embarrassed most of the time, but he disguised those feelings with a personality that was disporportionately large for his small and delicate frame. (He could eat a big steak at the drop of a hat. Often, he did. If you slapped him on the back, however, he winced in pain.)
Eric was an artist, with the tortured sensibilities of an artist. We all wanted to be as good as he was. None of us succeeded.
The deaths of
Ingmar Bergman,
Tom Snyder and
Bill Walsh will generate thousands and thousands of inches of copy in newspapers here and abroad. Eric's death deserves that treatment. He won't get it. But we have a broadcast network at our disposal, and
did our best to memorialize him tonight, to make sure that people who didn't know about him -- as they knew about Bergman and Snyder and Walsh -- know his great accomplishments and his profound influence on our lives and the broadcast he helped produce. He taught a little something to all of us, and our work reflects that every day.
He also left a slew of stories. Like this one: Eric and I shared a birthday, and a great love for the New York Yankees. Several years ago, we went to Mickey Mantle's Restaurant for lunch to celebrate. There were no tables when we got there, so we sat at the bar. The bartender handed us menus, the only two menus at the bar. When we opened them, we found loose pieces of paper with the day's specials. Printed on fine stock, the specials menu featured the Mickey Mantle logo, a cool graphic of the Yankee Stadium facade, and, in bold face lettering, our shared birthday: June 1.
Eric's interest in mystery, mysticism and coincidence was most evident in his robust hobby: He collected symbols and icons and talismen. Bobble-head dolls, for instance. He had what seemed like dozens. His office was a museum of pop culture. One executive producer called it the most annoying office at NBC. Eric was at his best reacting to that sort of disapproval. "No fun," he said. "No imagination. They'll never make him into a bobble-head doll." Eric pilfered about 40 percent of the stuff he had in his office. He once brought a chunk of the Coliseum back from a visit to Rome, a violation of Italy's antiquities laws punishable by God-knows-what.
So after he ordered the special, it was no surprise to me that he slipped the birthday menu into his coat pocket. I followed suit. (He was a leader.) Several minutes later, after we had been served, a couple of other guys sat down at the bar. The bartender handed them the menus we had used. Eric, who was capable of a vaguely menacing maliciousness that was so inappropriate you could do nothing but laugh when he displayed it, leaned into me, and whispered, roughly: "Those guys are mooks. Morons. They don't even know there's a special today. They should really wait for a table. What do they think this is, their birthday?"
That menu, framed, hangs in my office today. It always makes me think of Eric Wishnie.
Wishnie, as I called him, used to say to me: "I love you, man." I always answered, "I can't say the words. But you know."
I still can't. But I know he knew.
