JANE FONDA’S VIDEOTAPES WORK OUT FOR PRODUCER

Genius, Thomas Edison told us, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In the case of Stuart Karl, producer of several mega-selling exercise videotapes, the genius may have been his, but the sweat was Jane Fonda’s.

In less than seven years, sales of the five Fonda ‘Workout’ tapes have spearheaded the growth of Karl-Lorimar Home Video into one of the world’s leading producers of original programming for the home video market. It’s a rapidly growing market that Karl dubs “the fourth network.”

“People want to program their own lives,” said Karl, 32, who will discuss the video business at 11 a.m. today at Cal State Fullerton as part of the university’s Communications Week activities.

“The advantage of a fourth network is that people can do their own programming--they can come home and put on an exercise tape or a video magazine or a movie,” he said.

A resident of the exclusive Big Canyon area of Newport Beach, Karl has watched his Irvine-based company mushroom from a one-man operation in 1979 into a firm that now employs more than 200 people and has offices in Irvine, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Toronto and one scheduled to open later this year in London. He projected 1986 sales for Karl-Lorimar at $80 million to $100 million.

When Karl started the company, the videocassette business was still dominated by adult films and a smattering of feature films that were available. The success of the Fonda tape was among the first to reveal a substantial audience for original programming on home video.

The original “Jane Fonda Workout” tape, Karl said, has sold more than 1 million copies. In all, nearly 2 million copies of the five Fonda tapes have been sold.

With each new tape, the goal was to reach a different audience.

“The person who buys the ‘Workout Challenge’ isn’t going to be buying ‘Prime Time,’ which is for older people,” Karl said.

Although it was the Fonda exercise tapes that established Karl in the home video business, the company now produces programming in five categories: sports and fitness, entertainment (including feature films and video magazines), education, children’s and how-to tapes.

Karl got the idea to do magazines on videotape from his experience in magazine publishing before starting Karl Video Corp., which was bought in 1984 by Lorimar Productions, a major independent film and television production house. The result is video editions of publications such as Playboy, Working Woman, Consumer Reports, American Health and others.

Later this year the company will begin marketing videotapes about 20 minutes long designed “for the weekend athlete” and selling for under $10.

Another burgeoning area for video producers is corporate-sponsored tapes such as a Ford Motor Co. defensive driving program and a workout tape sponsored by Crystal Light soft drink mix company. With such sponsorship, the burden of some or all of the production costs are taken off the producer.

Because sales are more important to video producers than rentals, Karl said his company is pushing ahead into such outlets as K mart, supermarkets and other mass merchandisers “where customers go to buy” rather than conventional video stores that specialize in rentals.

In terms of marketing, “probably the difference between us and a publishing house is that we sell a package of goods. We’re more like Procter & Gamble,” Karl said.

Despite his general inclination for looking ahead, Karl suggested that in some ways original home video programming is “going backwards.”

“Serialization--like the serials of the ‘40s--is going to be important for creating repeatable, collectible programs,” he said. “Like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ you create characters that can return in another show.”

Further, Karl predicts that made-for-video movies may only be a year or so away. “Once there are enough video machines out there,” he said, “movies may not have to go to theatrical release first. “