How Celebrity News Empire TMZ (‘Thirty Mile Zone’) Got Its Name

Harvey Levin got behind the wheel of the ‘shittiest car’ in his company’s parking lot and brought home TMZ.com

For a couple of decades, TMZ co-founder Harvey Levin has wondered if he would ever hear from the guy who, back in the late 1990s, created BattleBot robots known as “Team Minus Zero” — a man Levin met only once, but someone who was inadvertently pivotal to the rise of his media empire.

When Levin set out to create an aggressive entertainment website for AOL and Telepictures — a way to break stories immediately rather than wait for them to air on television — the biggest issue was deciding what to call it. “We were trying to come up with a name and we just couldn’t,” he remembers.

Credit: Irvin Rivera

He offered up one he liked, Pop Salad, but everyone hated it. Even people he polled in impromptu man-on-the-street interviews in Marina del Rey told him, “It sucks. It’s awful.” Levin asked everyone he knew for ideas, including David Auerbach, a big-shot executive at Warner Bros. Auerbach rattled off dozens of potential names. “Hated, hated, hated,” Levin remembers thinking. That is, until Auerbach spit out “Thirty Mile Zone,” an old movie industry term that set the physical boundaries of a labor agreement between the unions and producers. The zone radiated out from the onetime headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers at the intersection of La Cienega and Beverly boulevards.

Levin was ecstatic. He had always liked initials and was prone to calling his former show, Celebrity Justice, “CJ.” He loved the sound of TMZ.com. There was only one problem: The robotics guy owned the domain name. “We couldn’t design the website without the title,” Levin says. Corporate suits got involved, trying to buy the URL. A week went by and the suits hadn’t moved the needle. The site was slated to launch in a month, and Levin — a man who does not take a no or a “no comment” for an answer — was determined to get the job done. “I’m going to call this guy,” he told the executives.

The execs quietly eye-rolled him. The name had to be worth at least 100 grand. Levin was undeterred. Sitting in his Glendale office, he looked up the address for Team Minus Zero — which proved to be only about four miles away; the BattleBot guy wasn’t far. “I called him and said I had this show on TV that my boss just canceled, so like I am thinking of starting a website,” he told the robotics dude in a deliberately rube-like voice, explaining he wanted to call the website TMZ.com. “I don’t know, man, would you consider selling it to me?”

Credit: Chris Nichols Collection

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The domain name owner hesitated. His website wasn’t active. The last thing had been posted six months before. “I don’t know … ” Levin pressed, and the guy asked for five grand. Levin played it cool, trying not to yelp with joy. He asked if he could think about it and hung up. He paced around the office for 40 minutes, jittery with excitement, and called back. “Would you really do it for five grand?” “Yeah,” came the response.

Levin, who drove a Mercedes, hung up and bellowed, “Who has the shittiest car in this parking lot?” He took the cash, jumped behind the wheel of a Toyota Corolla banger and drove the four miles. He left with the URL signed over to TMZ. And never heard from the guy again.