By Dom Serafini
Patrick Zuchowicki-Jucaud is known in TV trade show circles as a pioneer of emerging TV territories — first Eastern Europe, then the Middle East, and later Africa. Some of the TV trade shows he founded include DISCOP East, DISCOP Istanbul, and DISCOP Africa.
He was born and raised in Paris, France as Patrick Zuchowicki, but in 1966, when he was seven years old, his father, who was born in Poland and emigrated to France, changed the family’s surname to Jucaud. “[He said it was] to make it more French,” Zuchowicki-Jucaud said. “Overnight I had a new name and never liked it.”
In 1980, as Patrick Jucaud, he created Video International, France’s first home video magazine. It became a media partner of Bernard Chevry when Chevry launched VIDCOM (a precursor to MIPCOM) in Cannes. The publication was sold a year later, and Jucaud moved to New York City to work in the closeout trade industry, buying and selling salvage, surplus, and discontinued merchandise for export purposes.
In 1984, still as Jucaud, he relocated to Los Angeles. Four years later, he left the closeout trade business and started an event and management company that was commissioned by the city of Vevey in Switzerland to plan an event to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s birth.
But one of Jucaud’s biggest coups was the acquisition of large fragments of the Berlin Wall just after the fall of Communist East Germany. The fragments were later used to build a collection that was subsequently sold to Belgian violin virtuoso Michael Guttman.
In 1991, Jucaud returned to the television industry, first funding EMPORIUM, a trade event held in Nice, France that brought together 20 production companies from Central and Eastern Europe to meet with their U.S. and European counterparts, and second by forming DISCOP. At first, drawing from his experience in the closeout business, he wanted to call DISCOP the “DisCounted Program Market,” but “it didn’t sound too good with potential clients,” he said, so he shortened it to DISCOP.
While he didn’t fully return to the TV industry for a number of years, TV’s siren song had indeed attracted Jucaud earlier, when, in 1987, he attended NATPE, and tried, without much success, to buy programs at a discounted price for export, just like for any closeout deal. He learned, however, that offering 10 cents on the dollar wouldn’t get him any takers.
This reporter vaguely remembers that Zuchowicki-Jucaud’s earliest entry into the TV trade show business occurred in 1981 when this VideoAge reporter attended a market he organized not too far from Paris in the Champagne country. For it, Zuchowicki-Jucaud can only recall that “it must have been under my magazine, Video International.”
Described as the first TV market for Central and Eastern Europe, DISCOP premiered in Warsaw, Poland, and in 1993 moved to Budapest, Hungary, where it is still going on, but is now organized by NATPE, which purchased it in 2011. With 20 years of ownership, DISCOP Budapest was the longest-held property for Zuchowicki-Jucaud. Shopping TV, a teleshopping network serving Poland and Hungary that he co-founded, was sold in 1997, two years after its launch.
In 1996, Zuchowicki-Jucaud became an American citizen, and, he said, “I knew that I could change my name (provided that the FBI or INTERPOL was not after me). My father left France in the early 1980s and moved to Belgium. When he died in 2012, my mother told me that the real reason my father (who was a big-time gambler) had changed his name was not because he wanted to sound more French but because, while still called Zuchowicki, he had voluntarily asked the French authorities to ban him from casinos and horse tracks. But then one day he couldn’t [resist the temptation to gamble] and decided to change his name to Jucaud, so that he could get back to gambling under a new identity. [There and then I] decided to go back to Zuchowicki. [However,] both of my sons (and now my granddaughter), who were born in the U.S., are named Jucaud. So I [added it to my last] name and became Zuchowicki-Jucaud to keep the connection to my sons.”
The story of Zuchowicki-Jucaud’s father is actually even more dramatic. In 2012, when Patrick took his birth-name back, he told a story to this reporter about how, when his father would drive to Monte Carlo to gamble, he would fill his car up with fuel, figuring that even if he lost all his money, he could at least return home.
Patrick was still known as Jucaud when, in 2007, he started DISCOP Africa (first in Dakar, Senegal; later in South Africa), and a year later he organized DISCOP Istanbul, which ran for nine years. After that, the market moved to Dubai.
But Zuchowicki-Jucaud’s experience with emerging TV territories also extends to countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Plus, Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
Pictured above, Zuchowicki-Jucaud at one of his many DISCOPs
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