George Mair, author of Oprah: The Real Story, quotes Winfrey's explanation for buying the studio: "I did this to really expand into the areas I wanted to and take over the show to create more time for me to do features and TV specials. Winfrey's desire to expand into film and television was fueled by her successful acting debut in The Color Purple She was especially interested in projects relating to African American characters and issues.
Reviews of the film were mixed, but Oprah Winfrey made her debut on the big screen in The Color Purple in Reproduced by permission of The Kobal Collection.
Brewster Place was the first show filmed in the new Harpo Studios. The show, however, was not as popular as the movie and ABC quickly cancelled it, although the network continued to broadcast films produced by Harpo. And, like only a handful of celebrities, she was so famous that she was known by just her first name. Regardless, Winfrey did not escape criticism. Even though her talk show was number one in the country, the segments often featured sensational topics and guests, such as devil worship and members of racial hate groups.
One critic was Vicki Abt, a professor of sociology. In , Abt attacked Winfrey and other talk-show hosts for featuring trashy topics. The professor met with Winfrey and made suggestions for improving her content. The same year, Winfrey's show began to take on a more positive, uplifting tone. In , she told Ebony she was disgusted with talk shows that "are designed to appeal to the lowest sense of ourselves, the bottom of what people experience.
By , her show reached about fifteen million viewers every day and was broadcast in dozens of countries around the world. The company also remained interested in producing films for theater release.
Its first feature film, Beloved, was released in by the Walt Disney Company see entry. Based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison , the movie featured Winfrey, but it was not a hit with the public. The movies had high ratings and won praise from critics. Featuring acclaimed actor Jack Lemmon , the movie won four Emmy Awards, television's highest honor. Still, Winfrey's success came primarily from her daily show, as she proved in with the introduction of Oprah's Book Club.
Once a month, Winfrey selected a book she enjoyed, and featured the author on her show. After a show aired, sales for a Winfrey pick skyrocketed, often by as much as one million copies. Winfrey ended the book club in , disappointing many authors and publishers, but she promised to promote worthy books as she discovered them. The studio covers 88, square feet and features three separate sound stages. Sound stages are areas where movies and television shows are filmed. The development of Harpo Studios made Winfrey just the third American woman ever to own her own studio.
Winfrey continued branching out into new media in The Web site let viewers of Winfrey's show keep track of recent book club selections, suggest topics for future shows, and share their thoughts on personal subjects. The same year, Harpo Group LLC joined with several partners to form Oxygen, a new cable channel dedicated to women and their issues, which also had its own Web site.
Before Oxygen's debut in , Winfrey told Newsweek her goals for the network. Although Oprah Winfrey has millions of fans, not everyone has had kind words for her or her show. In , a former employee quit Harpo, Inc.
She claimed she left Harpo because of the "environment of dishonesty and chaos. In , Winfrey was involved in a very public court case. On a show that examined how cattle are raised and the possibilities of getting "mad cow disease" from tainted beef, Winfrey said she would never eat another hamburger. Soon after, prices for cattle began to fall, and several Texas cattle ranchers sued her under the False Disparagement of Perishable Foods Products Act.
This Texas law prohibits making false statements about food produced in the state, if the statements hurt business. Some people noted that cattle prices were already falling before Winfrey's comment, but the case went to trial in Amarillo, Texas, in January Instead of avoiding publicity over the lawsuit, Winfrey moved her show to Amarillo for the length of the trial.
On her shows there, she praised Texas culture and won the support of the local citizens. In court, she defended the fact that she and her guests had the right to speak their minds. According to Texas Monthly, she testified: "I provide a forum for people to express their opinions. Two months after Oxygen came on the air, Winfrey entered the publishing business with her own magazine 0, the Oprah Magazine.
After just seven issues, 0 had two million subscribers, making it the most successful new magazine in U. Although Winfrey worked with Hearst Magazines in producing 0, she had complete control over its content. The magazine was a print version of her show, featuring interviews with celebrities and articles on how readers could find more meaning in their lives.
The story of her success includes overcoming incredible odds with a singular determination that inspires her audience. Born in to teenage parents in Mississippi, Winfrey lived in terrible poverty on her grandmother's farm before moving to Milwaukee at age six to live with her mother. There, she was sexually abused by male relatives, and at the age of 14, Winfrey gave birth to a premature baby, who died shortly afterwards.
After running away and being kicked out of a juvenile detention home because all the beds were filled, she was finally sent to Nashville to live with her father, Vernon Winfrey. A barber and businessman, Vernon provided the discipline that was lacking in his daughter's life, instituting a strict curfew and stressing the value of education. Under his guidance, Oprah quickly changed her life's direction. In , at the age of 19, Winfrey was hired as a reporter by WVOL, a radio station in Nashville, and her broadcasting career was off and running.
Two years later, she became, in addition to her duties as reporter and anchor, the host of that station's program "People Are Talking. One month after Winfrey became the host, the program had become the number one show in the city, and the producers gave Winfrey an extra half-hour for the show. Her poignant performance and her first-ever acting experience as Sofia would win her a nomination for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.
The following year, she would costar with Matt Dillon in Native Son, the second movie adaptation of Richard Wright's classic novel. Winfrey's love for the screen and her desire to bring quality entertainment projects into production were what prompted her to form her own production company, Harpo Productions, Inc.
Early that year, Jacobs managed to buy the syndication rights to the show and began distributing it through King World Productions. Less than a year later, the program was ranked the top syndicated talk show in the United States, pushing out longtime leader "Donahue.
The show would remain the number one talk show for 12 consecutive seasons, receiving a total of 32 Emmys, seven of which went to the host. Also in Winfrey received the International Radio and Television Society's "Broadcaster of the Year" Award, making her the youngest person and only the fifth woman ever to receive the honor.
Harpo's first co-produced project was The Women of Brewster Place, a film released in , in which Winfrey costarred with Paul Winfield, Robin Givens, and Moses Gunn, which recounted the lives of the female denizens of an inner-city brownstone, adapted from the Gloria Naylor novel.
The film would later inspire a television miniseries of the same name. Other productions, such as Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane's autobiography of growing up under apartheid in South Africa, followed, as well as the feature film Beloved, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Toni Morrison.
Winfrey would spend ten years producing and would star in the film, directed by Jonathan Demme. When originally purchased, the old complex featured three stages, screening rooms, production offices, a darkroom, kitchen facilities, and indoor parking. The renovation added office space, a gym, a larger stage for Winfrey's daily show, and an updated look for the exterior of the old building. In addition to her roles as television host and CEO of a production company, Winfrey found time for social causes and philanthropy.
Senate Judiciary Committee to establish a national database of all convicted child abusers. During this time, Winfrey had formed a new division called Harpo Films.
In ABC and Harpo Films announced a three-year agreement under which Harpo would produce six made-for-television movies for the network under the "Oprah Winfrey Presents" banner, extending the relationship between ABC and Harpo, which had already produced several miniseries, movies, and primetime specials for the network.
The company also optioned the rights to The Keepers of the House, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Shirley Ann Grau, chronicling the lives of a wealthy white Southern landowner, his black housekeeper, and their three children from the s to the s. Other projects in the pipeline for the company included adaptations of Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on a novel of the same name by Zora Neale Hurston, which was slated for airing in In , after eight years in syndication, Winfrey was at a crossroads both personally and professionally and began to think about retirement from the talk show industry, which had become characterized by scandal and theatrics.
Instead, however, she opted to alter the focus of her show, moving from popular controversies to featuring poetry, music, literature, authors, and actors, as well as human issues such as dealing with the loss of a child, weight loss topics, and the like.
The following year, Winfrey signed an unprecedented contract with distributor King World, extending her show through the end of the 20th century. Winfrey also became one of King World's largest shareholders, with more than a million shares to her name.
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