But Universal’s motion picture division had financial problems, and Mr. Biondi was forced out after two years in a corporate restructuring. He said at the time that, like Mr. Redstone, Mr. Bronfman told him that he wanted to be more hands-on.
“Is it shocking? No,” Mr. Biondi said to The Los Angeles Times. “Is it a bit of a surprise? Sure.” He added that Mr. Bronfman “wants to run the business himself.”
Universal would be the last of his corporate jobs.
Frank Joseph Biondi Jr. was born on Jan. 9, 1945, in Manhattan and raised in Livingston, N.J. His father was a chemical engineer who had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II and later for Bell Laboratories. His mother, Virginia (Willis) Biondi, was a homemaker.
At Princeton University, where he played center field on the baseball team, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He later earned an M.B.A. at Harvard Business School.
He worked at several Wall Street brokerages and set up a financial consulting firm before he went to work in 1972 for TelePrompTer, an early cable television franchise in New York City. He left in 1973 to join Children’s Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) as assistant treasurer, excited to join the nonprofit company that was producing groundbreaking shows like “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company.”
“They’ve done something remarkable in the programming business,” Mr. Biondi told the Cable Center, a nonprofit educational organization, in an interview in 2000, “and here we were trying to make sure it was institutionalized.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/business/media/frank-biondi-dead.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
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