The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  Friday evening, after Conan wrapped his show for the night, he joined his support group in the conference room. One crucial element remained unclear to him: How much flexibility did he even have with this contract? NBC had put out the argument that nothing in Conan’s deal prevented them from taking this step. On the face of it, that was true, at least to the extent that the deal he signed to host The Tonight Show had no specific language that included time-period protection. But the legal side was examining that issue more closely.

  As he and his team discussed it that evening, Conan found himself trying to see if he could slip that 12:05 suit on. What would it feel like? He figured he had time to let the notion marinate; NBC had assured him nothing was imminent. He could ponder his options without pressure.

  As the group was breaking for the night, Rick Rosen asked Jeff Ross if he wanted to grab some dinner. They took themselves to the Brentwood Restaurant and Lounge on South Barrington in Brentwood Village. Neither man was much of a drinker, but the last two days had left them both fried to cinders. So Rick ordered a vodka. Jeff began doing tequila shots. They ordered dinner, started to mellow out.

  Just before nine p.m. Rosen’s cell rang. He checked the readout: restricted number. Rick had a loose rule not to answer his cell when he didn’t know who was on the line, but things were so fluid he decided he had better pick this one up.

  “Hello, Richard,” a voice said. Jeff Zucker often used the formal first name affectionately when he greeted someone. After some pleasantries Zucker asked how everyone was doing.

  “Not good,” Rosen said

  “Well, have you seen tomorrow’s New York Times yet?” Zucker asked. “Let me read you something.” He proceeded to share an update on the Conan situation, already available online, which included a reference to overt interest in Conan from the Fox network, expressed by an unnamed executive, as well as an assertion from representatives of Conan that the star had not accepted NBCʹs plan and was not likely to anytime in the near future.

  “Let me explain something to you,” Zucker said. “I want a fucking answer from you. If you think you are going to play me in the press, you’ve got the wrong guy. You’re a representative of Conan O’Brien, aren’t you? And you’re talking to the press?”

  “I haven’t spoken to The Times at all,” Rosen replied, getting a bit heated himself. “I didn’t make this comment.”

  “Well, I guess we know who did, don’t we?” Zucker replied, not quite saying the name Gavin Polone. “I want an answer from Conan and I want an answer quickly. You know I have the ability to pay him or play him, and I could ice him for two years.”

  Rosen chose to ignore that little shot across his nose.

  “Well, Jeff,” Rosen said, “we’re going to give you an answer when we have thought about it. If you want an emotional answer, I’ll give you an answer now. If you want the answer after we’ve thought about it and we’ve analyzed it, you’ll get that answer.”

  Zucker remained hot. “Just let me tell you something—you are not going to fucking play me.”

  The conversation ended there. Rosen was stunned at this sudden blast of pressure, coming only thirty-six hours after Conan was hit with the news. He could now picture the whole deal going off the rails. He left a message immediately for Jeff Gaspin. When Gaspin got back to him, Rosen told him that he had just had a nasty conversation with his boss. “If he thinks that by intimidating us he’s going to get the answer he wants, he’s got the wrong guys. You better tell him to chill out and let the process work.”

  Gaspin promised he would take care of the situation.

  Conan didn’t know about the confrontational call from Zucker when he arrived home that Friday night. He was tense, wrestling with the decision that faced him. Conan truly had not figured out what he should—or even could—do. He tried to talk it over with Liza, unspooling the day’s events. “You know, it’s still The Tonight Show,” he told her, watching her reaction closely.

  Liza didn’t contradict him, but she did something that was familiar to him. She gave him a look that somehow combined patience with total skepticism.

  At midday Saturday, after an exchange of e-mails, Rosen spoke to Zucker again. Jeff’s tone from the start was much calmer, and Rosen guessed that Gaspin might have suggested a conciliatory call. While Zucker made many of the same points as the night before, he did so in a far more sensitive way. “Look, we just want to resolve this. I know you guys have to go through your process, but there’s going to be a point where I just need a decision.”

  Rosen, appreciating the sincere effort from Zucker, said he got it. “I know you have this affiliate thing. We’re not gonna drag this out. No one wants to drag this out. He’s just digesting this still.”

  Perhaps signaling that he wanted to keep the line of communication friendly, Zucker shifted topics and told Rosen he also wanted to thank him for steering a new pilot written by the prolific David E. Kelley (Ali McBeal, The Practice) to NBC.

  Rosen accepted the thanks and they closed on familiar good terms.

  Later the same day, Rosen made it out to Conan’s house, where the group was set to meet. Conan had fallen into an angry phase, sitting sullenly during the gathering in his book-lined study. They were all going round and round about whether he should accept 12:05, and Conan still wasn’t sure whether he really had an option to reject it.

  It sounded to Conan that Leigh Brecheen, his lawyer, was suggesting they stall for time while they examined all the drafts of his deals. The issue just wasn’t clear, and as they debated it, Conan started to picture himself as the olive in the middle of an olive oil press—and with every second that passed by, the crank was getting turned and the squeeze was getting tighter. But he never pushed the question of why his deal didn’t contain the overt time-period protection that appeared in so many other late-night contracts.

  Sensing the contractual issue was going to become central, Rosen suggested they start thinking about hiring a litigator. And that meant only one name as far as he was concerned: Patty Glaser. Perhaps the best known (and most feared) litigation lawyer in Hollywood, Glaser had represented the Endeavor agency and had faced off against NBC successfully in the past. Given the go-ahead, Rosen reached her on vacation at the California ski resort Mammoth, and she agreed to come down on Sunday night to meet with Conan and his team.

  That done, the message to Conan was essentially unchanged: Sit tight. He could bide his time for a while longer.

  Conan didn’t feel that way. “I can tell you—as a performer—no, I can’t,” he told them. “I can’t go out there every night and do a show when it’s this unclear what’s happening. It’s too toxic.”

  But without a firm interpretation of where they stood legally, there wasn’t much else they could do.

  As Saturday came to an end, uncertainty prevailed on the opposite coast as well. Zucker began to question his initial read that Conan’s representatives would steer the star toward the sensible resolution of accepting the deal and staying. Zucker had continued to have occasional interaction with Ari Emanuel, but now he started to wonder if that was of any real value. Ari certainly didn’t seem to be as involved as the rest of them in the strategizing going on at Conan’s house; if it was true that he had been pushed out, Zucker suspected it would surely have been because Ari was on the side of looking to settle the dispute and keep Conan at NBC. That likely put Ari—and maybe Rick Rosen, whom Zucker still considered a steadying influence and a voice of reason—at odds with the engineer he believed was driving the runaway train: Gavin Polone. Zucker always believed it said a lot that Polone had named his production company Pariah.

  On Sunday morning Jeff Gaspin walked into the ballroom of the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, where an extra-large gathering of media waited like wolves outside a chicken farm. Surely this was going to be a merry bloodbath: a new NBC executive trying to confront questions about what now looked like the unmitigated disaster of the failed Leno show at ten, an affiliate revolt,
and the apparent demotion of the star NBC had touted as the future of late night.

  At about ten a.m. Gaspin took the stage, accompanied by Angela Bromstad, who ran the Universal television production studio. He opened the session with straightforward confirmation of the news most of the group had already been reporting. The Jay Leno Show would end just before the Olympics, and he had made offers to Jay to move to a half-hour show at 11:35 and to Conan O’Brien to slide The Tonight Show back to 12:05. The barrage followed; Gaspin took each question calmly, responding with complete thoughts and apparent confidence.

  “What is important to me,” he said, “is that I gave Conan something that is very important to him, which was The Tonight Show. So when I asked him to move to 12:05, I made it very clear The Tonight Show was moving with him. What’s important to Jay is telling jokes at eleven thirty. . . . I obviously couldn’t satisfy either with 100 percent of what they wanted. That’s why I came up with this compromise.”

  Gaspin claimed complete ownership of the idea—though he said Jeff Zucker “let me pull the trigger”—and he tied it to the concerns about the affiliates, which he declined to call a threat “so much as it was a dialogue.”

  He didn’t call Jay’s show a failure, suggesting only that it hadn’t done as well as NBC had hoped. As for his plan, he said his goal was to keep all three late-night stars, and “much as I’d like to tell you we have a done deal, we know that’s not true.” He added, “The talks are still ongoing.”

  The comments came across as unusually candid, just as Gaspin came across as remarkably unflinching. He impressed the reporters, many of whom noted in their stories that, contrary to some recent NBC experiences with the press, this one was handled with honesty and professionalism.

  Gaspin took a lot of pride but not much solace in those reviews, because nothing was settled. The intelligence he was receiving, primarily secondhand from contacts with Rosen and Emanuel, was that Conan was having good days and bad, and the agents were not sure they could control the outcome. Gaspin still interpreted that message to mean the agents wanted Conan to stay at NBC, but they certainly weren’t guaranteeing it. Polone clearly had a different agenda, Gaspin heard, and the X-factor was Liza O’Brien. She seemed to be in the camp guiding Conan away from NBC’s plan. Frankly, that made sense to Gaspin, who knew his own wife’s strength of character and how she would respond if he came home declaring his bosses were trying to screw him over.

  That afternoon the Conan cadre met again in Conan’s study, though not much could be advanced until that night, when Patty Glaser would arrive. Conan remained restless and unhappy, eager to find some way out of the olive press. As the group was breaking up for the evening, with Rosen due to meet Glaser back at his house, his cell rang. This time he recognized the number: Zucker again.

  Rosen told him it wasn’t the best time; Zucker asked if Rosen could call back at his first opportunity.

  In his car, on the way home, again accompanied by Jeff Ross, Rosen reached Zucker, who began once more by inquiring about Conan’s state of mind. Rosen reported again that it wasn’t very good.

  The bad report seemed to push Zucker past the limit of his patience.

  “Have you explained the contract to him?” Zucker asked. “Do you guys understand what’s in the fucking contract? I’m going to tell you right now that I can pay him or play him. I can ice you guys.”

  “Jeff, are you threatening me?” Rosen said. “Because if you’re threatening me, I better hire a litigator.” Of course, Rosen was already on that path with Glaser over the contract terms. But if NBC was trying to raise the ante by threatening to fire Conan and keep him off television for the next two years, the litigation route was going to become a fast lane.

  The conversation veered back and forth at high volume over NBC’s ability to pay Conan off and sideline his career. Rosen now had much more to discuss with Patty Glaser.

  When the blowup got back to Polone, it only confirmed for him the message he had been pounding home at these meetings: Jeff Zucker had the ability to shatter someone’s career like this and then get angry at the victims for reacting to it.

  Inside the lower echelons of NBC that weekend, a contingent of Conan supporters found themselves appalled at what had taken place. Conan had always put himself on the line for the network, and for many of the people who worked there.

  For some staff members, it was simply hard to believe that the network hierarchy really wanted Conan to stay. How could they put something like this in motion without knowing they were likely to lose this guy? How would it all play out? Once Jay was reestablished at 11:35, did NBC even have the right to take it away from him again at some unspecified future date to give Conan another crack? Wasn’t Jay now raised to the status of Regis Philbin, a television perennial, seventy-seven and still on the air? Conan had taken one leap of faith that he would inherit the show eventually. Would he ever take another?

  One executive who intended at least to try to get Conan on board was Nick Bernstein, the second-ranked NBC late-night executive under Rick Ludwin. Bernstein had a good relationship with both late-night hosts, and he found himself almost too stunned to work in the immediate aftermath of that week’s upheaval. If Conan could ever agree to this plan, Bernstein could certainly buy into it. So he sent several e-mails out to Conan and Jeff Ross, more or less pleading with them to see the benefit of sticking around.

  At the press tour on Monday, the Fox executive session was dominated by questions about that network’s interest in acquiring Conan—should there be a divorce from NBC. The two top Fox entertainment executives, Peter Rice and Kevin Reilly, did little to hide their enthusiasm for that idea.

  Reilly, who took some special enjoyment in NBC’s latest misery, given his own untimely ouster by Zucker, said, “Conan would be a very compatible fit for our brand. He is one of the few guys on the planet that has demonstrated he can do one of these shows every night.” That, he added, “is probably the hardest form in show business.” Reilly also stressed that he did not believe Conan was “damaged goods in the least” and that, as far as he was concerned, “his show was working.”

  Reilly made it clear, however, that acquiring Conan would not be like picking up a used car. The Fox stations had just come through a brutal financial downturn and many had invested in syndicated programs for use in late night. He said he agreed with estimates by NBC executives that the start-up costs for a new late-night show could go as high as $70 million.

  Still, the gleam in his eye made him look like a guy about to buy a diamond engagement ring.

  If Fox executives had reason to be upbeat that Monday, the mood was even more buoyant in another corner of the television business: NBC’s affiliates, with the official news Sunday that the Leno-at-ten experiment was dead, celebrated quietly all across the country.

  Michael Fiorile, the affiliate board head, took some special satisfaction in achieving his goals without having to come to blows with the network. If there was still some uncertainty about what NBC would use to fill the ten p.m. hour, at least whatever NBC came up with promised to be a likely improvement over Jay’s numbers. And the proposed solution of Jay back at 11:35, with Conan moved back past midnight, sounded more than satisfactory.

  From his conversations with Jeff Gaspin and Jeff Zucker in December, Fiorile had taken away the impression that NBC saw no problem with keeping Conan at 12:05—or, if it came to that, losing him altogether. As Fiorile interpreted it, NBCʹs position was: “If he wouldn’t take it, they’d program without him.”

  Fiorile possessed evidence that the affiliate body did not disagree. NBC had asked him what the local stations’ preference would be at 11:35. Fiorile had quietly polled the affiliate board. The stations had long experience with Jay. (And the age group most of them occupied did not fall anywhere near the core audience of eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds that idolized Conan.) So it was little surprise whom the station owners preferred. Not one voted for Conan

  As measured in other
places, however, the reaction to the proposed move leaned heavily toward Conan. That was to be expected in any form of media that played to a younger audience, like Internet postings. One nerve grew more inflamed as the standoff continued. Resentment raged among the post-baby-boom generation at what they saw as another example of the baby boomers nailing their feet to the stage and not letting go. It would grow into an ongoing theme—even a movement. Readers posting in reaction to press stories took up the theme of Jay as an old hat that should have been shelved: “Geez, Leno, retire already! What a jerk!” ʺNOOOO! What is this obsession NBC has with Leno? The decision shows such little foresight. It’s tomorrow’s ratings that matter. Think of the children!”

  Much of the press commentary sympathized with O’Brien as well. Jay was being portrayed as the usurper, the guy who didn’t stand by his pledge to hand the late-night chair to Conan, the old act who refused to leave the arena when his time had passed. Worst of all for Leno, he was again being tagged as a Machiavelli who had possibly set up the entire episode. As in: Give up The Tonight Show under protest; assail NBC on the air for years for this shoddy treatment; then accept the ten p.m. move, knowing the pathetic lead-ins it would generate would inevitably undermine Conan and force NBC to dump him. That this would entail the monumental embarrassment for Jay of a public cancelation caused no apparent cognitive dissonance.

  But Jay was taking it on his ample chin from all over. Editorial cartoons popped up. In the Dayton Daily News, Lincoln had been erased from Mount Rushmore and Teddy Roosevelt was saying to Jefferson, “He did the Leno show last night.” In The New Yorker, two parents watching TV were chastising their son, who had gotten up in his pajamas: “Go back to bed or we’ll make you watch Jay Leno.” That kind of elitist commentary was easy for Jay to swat away, pointing out that the magazine had lost about $70 million in a year. “I had a better year than The New Yorker. I turned a profit.”