Wayne's World, the Sequel

By John Greenwald

H. Wayne Huizenga is not too proud to admit he comes from trash. The chairman of Blockbuster Entertainment, which operates the world's largest chain of home-video stores, got started in business as a private hauler, collecting garbage from 2 a.m. until noon in Pompano Beach, Florida. After showering and changing clothes, he spent the rest of the day hunting up new customers. The eventual result: Waste Management, now called WMX Technologies, the world's largest garbage company. Using the same grit and gumption, Huizenga parlayed 19 Blockbuster stores into a 3,200-store empire. "Huizenga is one of the world's great salesmen," says Roy Akers, who follows the entertainment industry for the investment firm Advest Inc. in Boca Raton. "He makes Ross Perot look like he's backing up."

So who better than Huizenga (pronounced High-zenga) to charge into the brawl between Viacom Inc. and the QVC shopping network for control of Paramount Communications? With the aim of accelerating Blockbuster's expansion beyond video stores, Huizenga, 55, agreed to invest $600 million in Viacom last week and thereby strengthen the MTV owner's $7.6-billion bid for Paramount. The move gave Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone critical support in his battle with QVC chairman Barry Diller for Paramount, though Redstone will need even more help to get closer to QVC's nearly $10 billion offer. "This opens up new dimensions for us," Huizenga says. "It clearly puts us in a better position to be more involved in entertainment than ever before."

That will be true even if Viacom fails to win Paramount. Under terms of the agreement, Blockbuster can withdraw half its investment and still retain its seat on the Viacom board if Viacom does not acquire Paramount by Aug. 31, 1994.

Huizenga, whose personal fortune is worth some $600 million, is bent on transforming Blockbuster into a 21st century entertainment juggernaut. While he claims the coming of interactive TV that will allow people to call up movies on demand will not hurt his video business -- as industry analysts frequently charge -- he has been rushing into new ventures as restlessly as he once bought garbage trucks. By the year 2000, Huizenga plans to turn his stores into one-stop family centers that offer videos and recorded music discs as well as virtual-reality parlors and playgrounds for tots. At the same time, he is investing in film and TV studios and even raises the possibility of a Blockbuster cable-TV channel. "We're going to be your neighborhood entertainment experience, your neighborhood Disney," he says.

Though Huizenga lives near Blockbuster headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, his video stores have already made him a leading player in Hollywood. With revenues of more than $1.2 billion, Blockbuster accounts for fully 15% of all video rentals and can make or break movies, depending on how many it orders. The company can even help mend ailing careers: it turned actor Louis Gossett Jr. into a more viable star after his Rocky-like 1992 film Diggstown recovered from a box-office knockout to become a video champ. (Blockbuster refuses to carry titles rated NC-17 and other so-called adult films.)

Even as Huizenga wheels and deals in Hollywood, his professional sports properties make him a folk hero in South Florida. Huizenga holds the majority share of the Florida Panthers, who are joining the National Hockey League this year, in addition to 15% of the Miami Dolphins and 50% of their home field, Joe Robbie Stadium. While watching Dolphins home games in 1989, Huizenga realized that a baseball team would mean an additional 81 days of revenues for the stadium. So he personally paid $120 million for the controlling share of the Florida Marlins, a National League expansion club that took to the field this season. That's the way Huizenga operates. He often works 18-hour days, declaring, "I have more fun at the office than on the golf course." The 5- ft. 8-in. boss, who surveys his domain through steely blue eyes that some employees call "Wayne's lasers," misses little. He has been known to drop by stores unannounced and check them for cleanliness -- right down to the fixtures. Huizenga checks out job applicants just as thoroughly, requiring them to take drug tests that a company he owns administers.

Occasionally Huizenga shows a lighter side, appearing last year at a 1960s- theme Blockbuster convention in love beads, long hair (a wig) and other counterculture accoutrements. "How many other baseball owners would go onto the field in front of the fans and do the hokey-pokey with their mascots?" asks Robert Wuhl, an actor-comedian and close friend. At his inland-waterway . home, Huizenga revels in a collection of antique cars. The prize: a 1937 Rolls-Royce his wife Marti gave him for his 50th birthday. (The Huizengas each have two children from their previous marriages.)

The grandson of a Dutch immigrant who ran a Chicago garbage-collection business, Huizenga moved with his parents to Florida at 15. He took over a three-truck garbage route in the late 1950s and put together Waste Management in a merger with three other firms a decade later. The new company promptly set out to become a giant and once acquired 90 trash haulers in a feverish nine-month binge.

Such frantic growth spawned accusations of mob connections -- never proved -- and led to state and local fines on charges ranging from price fixing to illegal dumping. In 1976 Huizenga signed a consent degree, without admitting guilt, in response to Securities and Exchange Commission charges that the company had made improper political payments in Florida. In 1990 Waste Management paid $19.5 million to settle a class-action suit in Philadelphia that accused the firm of fixing prices between 1978 and 1987.

Weary of shuttling between his Fort Lauderdale home on weekends and Waste Management's Chicago headquarters, Huizenga retired in 1984 and vowed never to run another publicly held company. But he changed his mind after a friend urged him to visit a Blockbuster store in Chicago. While Huizenga didn't own a VCR, rarely went to movies and had thought of video stores as dingy purveyors of X-rated films, he was intrigued by the large, well-lighted store and its vast range of titles.

Sensing that he could build up these video stores the same way he had strung together trash haulers, Huizenga and two partners paid $18.5 million for 35% of Blockbuster in 1987. They promptly bought out rival chains and opened stores around the globe at the rate of one every 17 hours (current pace: one every 24 hours). Today Blockbuster rents 10 million videotapes a week; roughly a third of its stores are in countries from Japan to Venezuela.

Still, Huizenga continues to expand. Since last November, when Blockbuster paid $185 million for 237 Sound Warehouse and Music Plus music stores, Huizenga has been on his most ambitious spree yet. In February Blockbuster ponied up $25 million for a 35% stake in Republic Pictures, whose library includes such classics as High Noon and It's a Wonderful Life. A month later, Huizenga paid $140 million for control of Spelling Entertainment Group, which holds the TV rights to such hit shows as Dynasty and Beverly Hills 90210 and films such as Basic Instinct and the Rambo trilogy. Among other ventures, Huizenga joined forces with Britain's Virgin Retail Group to expand Virgin's music Megastores.

Wall Street analysts expect such ventures to reduce the video-store component of Blockbuster's business from 85% today to as little as 60% by 1998. But Blockbuster has no plans to abandon such stores. On the contrary, Huizenga envisions them as the heart of a worldwide chain of enterprises that will make the Blockbuster name as familiar as Coca-Cola, MTV or McDonald's. "For a company that's going out of business next month because of video- on-demand," he says, "we're doing quite nicely, thank you." And with a piece of Paramount, even nicer still.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Peter C.T. Elsworth

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Blockbuster Entertainment}]CAPTION: BLOCKBUSTER'S ENGAGEMENTS

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami and Jeffrey Ressner/ New York