by Carter, Bill
Still, Ohlmeyer was a big, blustery figure with friends throughout the television business (he had also been known to play golf with Jack Welch), and had a reputation for putting a lot of muscle on big problems. Bob Wright had big problems and he needed muscle. Ohlmeyer was hired as NBC President, West Coast, an invented title that basically put Ohlmeyer in charge of everything and everyone in Burbank, including John Agoglia and Warren Littlefield. Both men were told their roles wouldn’t change. But outside NBC it was surely read as a demotion, especially for Littlefield. Don Ohlmeyer would now be the top guy that the other top guys in Hollywood called first when they needed to make contact with NBC.
After some initial rage, Littlefield made the ego adjustment he needed to make in order to work under the new system. He had proved before, during the long years under Tartikoff, that he could be resilient himself. Still, it was a blow. It reinforced the image of some in the Hollywood community that Warren Littlefield was a great number two executive who could not quite cut it as a number one. That perception rankled Littlefield, who felt he had as much program savvy as anyone in television. But after Don Ohlmeyer arrived, unfair or not, it was a perception he had to live with.
Letterman and Leno had started out in the comedy clubs, so NBC’s search for a new late-night host predictably started there. Over the course of several months, Lorne Michaels solicited names and saw acts, trying to stumble into something magical. In reality, his heart was hardly in it. Michaels had never gone after conventional stand-ups to fill spots on “Saturday Night Live.” As he conceptualized the new late-night show, he sought something different within what he knew was necessarily a limited format. The economics more than tradition dictated that there be one host, a small band, a desk, some chairs, and three guests a night who could talk engagingly if not always amusingly. As Michaels reviewed the available comics, he believed he saw a consistent tone of what he called “light hostility” in every act. As he pictured these guys sitting at a desk talking to guests, all Lorne could foresee was the comic constantly bursting out of the host, and then a battle ensuing: Who could score the most comic points, the guest or the host? Michaels was uncomfortable with that kind of television, and he sensed that most viewers would be, too, even at one o’clock in the morning.
Still, he tried to keep an open mind as NBC rounded up the usual comic suspects. As this process went on, Michaels started to put together a production team for the show. He knew he wanted to include Jeff Ross, who had worked for Michaels producing another comedy series, “Kids in the Hall,” featuring a Canadian comedy troupe of unusual inventiveness. They had first played in HBO specials and then in a weekend series for CBS. Lorne figured he himself would help put together the format for the new NBC show, get it off its feet the first several weeks, and then drift back to his consuming duties as executive producer of “Saturday Night Live.” He would still consult on the new 12:30 show and retain the title of executive producer, but Ross would run the show day-to-day as the on-site executive producer.
The show would then need writers and a producer, of course, and Michaels thought immediately of a young writer who had impressed him during a three-year stint on “Saturday Night Live” that ended in 1991. He was best remembered for co-writing a sketch about a nude beach that dropped in the word “penis” fifty or sixty times—a sketch that put “SNL” back in the news again for its outrageousness. Michaels knew the writer had gone on to work for the Fox animated hit “The Simpsons,” but if he could get clear of that commitment, Lorne wanted him brought on as the producer of the new 12:30 show. His name was Conan O’Brien.
The twenty-nine-year-old Conan O’Brien was indeed ready to move on beyond “The Simpsons,” but his plans for his career did not precisely parallel Lorne Michaels’s plans for him. O’Brien’s previous performing experience was confined to work as an extra on “Saturday Night Live,” some improvisational stage comedy with a Los Angeles-based troupe called the Groundlings, and a few appearances in industrial films on behalf of a company selling musical instruments; still, he decided he wanted to be a star.
The real basis for this desire was difficult to trace because O’Brien had mostly built a résumé common to other top-level comedy writers in television. He was out of the Harvard Lampoon, the hub for the underground railroad that for years had been supplying comedy writers to television shows—principally “Late Night with David Letterman,” whose offices constituted a kind of unofficial Harvard Club. At Harvard, O’Brien had carved out a bit of history for himself by being twice elected president of the Lampoon, a feat not duplicated since 1912, when a certain Robert Benchley had earned the distinction. O’Brien’s style was a bit different from Benchley’s, as evidenced by the penis sketch. Conan had a distinct television bent. His first submission to the Lampoon was a parody of the CBS sitcom “One Day at a Time.”
O’Brien was raised in a big Irish family in Brookline, Massachusetts. Both parents were professionals: His father, Thomas, was a doctor and his mother, Ruth, a lawyer. Conan had three brothers and two sisters. And though he grew to be as tall as a basketball forward, O’Brien looked more ungainly than athletic. He was skinny, unmuscled, and his posture wasn’t great. In high school he played on the debate team, not the basketball team. O’Brien also looked like an Irish-American poster boy, with a flamboyant shock of hair the color of Manhattan clam chowder and skin tattooed with freckles.
Coming out of Harvard in 1985, O’Brien headed immediately for Hollywood. He and a partner, Greg Daniels, got jobs writing for HBO’s satirical news series, “Not Necessarily the News.” In 1987 he got his first taste of late-night TV in a writing job for the instantaneous Fox flop, “The Wilton/North Report.” He emerged undamaged on the writing staff of “Saturday Night Live,” where he met Michaels. O’Brien pestered Lorne to use him in sketches, entreaties the executive producer resisted. The best Conan could do was a few crowd-member bits, asking questions at mock press conferences.
But he didn’t relinquish his dream of moving out in front of the camera; he just didn’t do anything about it. He never dropped in at the Comedy Store or other clubs to try out routines. He didn’t go to workshops or acting classes. Conan confined his performing tendencies to spontaneous show-off sessions with the other writers on “The Simpsons.” At that he was successful, however, keeping the room of exhausted writers amused with his antics. Matt Groening, the cartoonist-creator of “The Simpsons,” saw this as a real indication of performing talent. “He can keep a roomful of seething, self-hating, resentful comedy writers laughing for minutes on end,” Groening said. He described O’Brien’s method as pushing the bit he was playing well past his viewers’ endurance until they reached the point of submission to laughter. “He does a lot of shtick and runs around the room. It first makes you laugh, then gets annoying, then exasperating, and then comes full circle and makes you fall out of your chair.”
At the start of 1993 O’Brien hired a new agent, Gavin Pallone, of United Talent and told him of his desire to perform, not write. Pallone eventually told Michaels that Conan didn’t want the producing job on the new 12:30 show; he wanted to be considered for the hosting job.
It was late March and NBC had made a promise to its affiliates that it would have the name of the replacement for Letterman by April 15. Some inside NBC thought it was foolish to set a date, because it only increased the pressure to hire some host nobody was fully satisfied with. But NBC felt the affiliates needed to be reassured so they wouldn’t go off looking for syndicated shows to preempt its regular programming at 12:30. Michaels had winnowed the comics he had seen down to a few, and NBC had a few others it wanted to see. All of them were assembled for a one-night stand/audition at the Improv comedy club in L.A. The list included Paul Provenza, who was Leno’s preferred choice for the job, and other young comics like Drew Carey, Jon Stewart, and Rick Reynolds.
Michaels sat in the audience and watched the performances that night with some of his staff, along with Ohlmeyer and Littlefield. Each
comic did his best ten minutes or so. Everybody laughed; Michaels thought one or two of the comics showed a hint of spark; but nobody was overwhelmingly impressed. The new David Letterman did not emerge.
After the comedy showcase failed to make a strong case for anybody, Michaels began thinking more seriously about Conan. He was young and Lorne wanted young; he wanted to be able to sell the new host as the spokesman for the under-thirty-five generation, who would make up the bulk of the 12:30 audience. Conan was also a pleasant personality. People warmed to him quickly and almost everyone he met spoke well of him. He had a certain comic spontaneity, if no real performing skills. Lorne began to talk himself into the notion that Conan’s lack of stand-up experience could be a plus as well as a minus; he hadn’t learned the habit of looking to hail people with the quick put-down. Lorne had had two exceptionally good experiences in the past with comedy writers who wanted to shift to performing: Steve Martin and Chevy Chase. When Lorne started asking people who had worked with Conan what they thought of the idea of him as host of the show, Michaels got surprisingly affirmative answers. Everybody seemed to like Conan.
So he mentioned the idea to Littlefield. He pitched it in terms of Conan filling the role of comic for the new generation. As Michaels put it, “Conan may not be that funny to people of the forty-plus generation. But he will be the first post-baby boom host.”
Littlefield had some obvious reservations. It was such a crucial job for NBC to fill, with competition sure to come from CBS in a show following Letterman. But Michaels was clearly enthused by the notion of pulling this unknown talent out of his hat. He had done it before with complete unknowns on “Saturday Night Live,” and Littlefield had, after all, labeled Lorne “the master of midnight” in the January press conference. Littlefield agreed to test O’Brien out. He arranged what amounted to a screen test, with Conan O’Brien to sit at the desk on the set of the “Tonight” show, auditioning to be the 12:30 host.
On the evening of April 13, Conan O’Brien, in a blazer over jeans, walked out onto the stage of the “Tonight” show, where he had never before been in his entire life. In front of a hand-picked test audience made up mostly of friends and NBC employees, he stood at center stage and, looking rather sheepish, explained how he was an unknown with no performing experience trying to host a television show for the first time: “Let me explain why I’m here. This is the result of a drunken wager between Lorne Michaels and Don Ohlmeyer.” Most of his jokes had to do with how silly tins whole notion was. Conan said “uh” a lot and giggled occasionally into the camera. He just had a few jokes that he and Rob Smigel, a writing partner from “Saturday Night Live,” had thrown together that afternoon. Conan looked nervous, but surely not as nervous as he should have looked under the circumstances. His jokes weren’t much, and his delivery was close to awful. But he projected a nice-young-man quality that had a certain winning charm.
At the desk he was only slightly less awkward, but he calmed down when his first guest, actress Mimi Rogers, appeared. It was as though the human contact gave him some outlet for his nerves. Rogers was giggly and friendly. O’Brien noted that he didn’t get to talk to many attractive women. He said he lived upstairs from a model and that the extent of their relationship was his leering at her. His ad-libs weren’t much, except for one line: When Rogers talked about posing for Playboy and said she had done it in a “classy way,” Conan replied: “So you’re wearing a top hat and reading The New Yorker?” Later Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld” came out and bantered for a few minutes. Conan kept saying how much he liked it up there on camera. But once, he said, “You sit here and become an asshole,” as if oblivious to the fact that he was supposed to be simulating a network television appearance.
But Conan did not ooze out of the chair into a puddle of sweat; he projected the likability that Michaels expected from him. And Lorne, who watched the performance on satellite in New York, was totally pleased. So was Don Ohlmeyer, who watched live in L.A. He got on the phone with Michaels after the audition was completed, and they both felt they had seen the same thing: Conan was likable—very raw, but with moments of brilliance. The two men had clearly watched the performance with the stardust of hope in their eyes.
Warren Littlefield watched the taping and saw more of the raw than the brilliant. He was concerned enough about the thought that this untested comedy writer would be the successor to David Letterman that he wasted no time taking some action. Without saying anything to Lorne Michaels, Littlefield put in a phone call the next morning to Brad Grey.
Grey represented Michaels, so the fact that Littlefield was calling didn’t surprise Grey in the least. He was in the process of finishing up negotiations with NBC over Lorne’s deal for the 12:30 show, which had still not been completed. But the subject of the call stopped Grey in his tracks. Littlefield wasn’t calling about Lorne’s deal; he was calling about the availability of another Grey client, Garry Shandling.
That Shandling’s name would pop up in the consideration of a late-night host was completely logical. Shandling had once been in contention to be the successor to Carson; he once split the guest-hosting chores with Leno. Now his career was ablaze thanks to the wide praise his latest project, a comedy on HBO, was attracting. In “The Larry Sanders Show,” Shandling was mocking all the conventions of the late-night talk show so brilliantly that many of those in the business, including Letterman, thought they were watching their own lives on camera. “Lurry Sanders” was so effective HBO had run repeats of its first season as an 11:00 P.M. late-night entry of its own—with great success.
Grey told Warren, “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I will certainly be happy to discuss it with Garry.” For Grey this was a provocative phone call at an intriguing moment: In the middle of closing a deal for one client, he was being pitched about another. Grey knew at once that if NBC hoped to land Shandling, they were going to have to offer him a substantial contract.
As soon as Grey hung up the phone with Littlefield, he dialed up Lorne in New York. He asked Michaels if this approach to Garry was part of what he had going with NBC. The stunned Michaels said no, he knew absolutely nothing about it; but he sure wanted to find out. Michaels called Bob Wright and told him, “You’re the one who called me to get me into this thing. What is this all about?” Wright told him he would have to find out.
The Shandling overture grew more serious in the next few days. NBC went past its April 15 deadline of notifying its affiliates of the new host. Conan was put on hold. NBC considered signing him as the backup to Bob Costas for the 1:30 A.M. show, as a way perhaps to get Conan over the kinks of never having performed before. Meanwhile they pursued Shandling.
That prospect cheered some executives inside NBC who saw Shandling as a potential coup for the network, an announcement that would instantly reestablish NBC’s late-night credentials for all those who doubted them in the wake of Letterman’s departure. But Michaels was genuinely offended. He had allowed his name to be used to save NBC embarrassment the day they’d lost Letterman. Now NBC was pinning its hopes on a new star, not on its old star producer.
The deal was getting closer. NBC was discussing an offer of $5 million a year for Shandling. But timing was an issue. NBC wanted him to start in August, right at the end of his commitment to “Larry Sanders” for the season. Shandling, who wanted to bring a totally fresh concept to the late-night area, wanted to wait until January to launch the show.
But there were other complications. Some close associates of Shandling suggested that he, like Carvey, was reluctant to do a show following Leno. And then NBC heard the faint rumblings of CBS and Howard Stringer tiptoeing around Shandling themselves. On April 22, one of the show business trade papers, The Hollywood Reporter, printed a story that said NBC had formally offered the show to Shandling. NBC brought out its vehemence again, denying the story in an unusually detailed press release. Ohlmeyer in particular began to suspect Brad Grey’s motives. He believed Grey had people out planting the stories
that NBC was offering the show to Shandling, a move that did not indicate to Ohlmeyer that Grey was ready to sign the comic with NBC. He began to wonder if Grey was using NBC to force a bid out of CBS for its 12:30 show, or if Grey just wanted to puff up his client in the press before they grandly announced they were turning NBC down. In either case, NBC would end up embarrassed.
A week later, on Monday, April 26, Grey announced that Shandling was turning down the NBC offer. The network angrily denied ever having made an offer to Shandling. Ohlmeyer said the network had never had a “creative meeting” with Garry, and so there could never have been a formal offer on the table. Ohlmeyer said he had always been arguing for Conan, because NBC had research that showed Conan, with zero name recognition, was only .2 of a rating point behind Shandling when viewers were asked if they would watch a show starring either man. Ohlmeyer also felt that the first night Shandling came on NBC, he would be doing at least 90 percent as well in the ratings as he would ever do, while there was “a chance for a big upside with Conan.”
Brad Grey did not back down. He said NBC had made a firm $5 million-a-year offer for Garry Shandling, which Shandling mulled over for a week and then turned down. The outcome was the same in any event: NBC didn’t have Garry Shandling. That afternoon NBC made its own announcement: The new host of its 12:30 A.M. show would be the unknown comedy writer, Conan O’Brien.
The press reaction to the O’Brien announcement was surprisingly favorable. To the press it was intriguing: the kid from nowhere getting a shot at big-time television—as though NBC had picked somebody out of the audience at one of the shows and told him he would be a star. It was such a flight of fancy, it caught people’s imaginations. The fact that Lorne Michaels would be the executive producer of the show, guiding this new face, gave the notion a shred of credibility. Even before anyone knew if he could be good on television, Conan O’Brien was a good story.