The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [15]
Mostly, though, it happened because some executives at NBC had a sense of history and were determined to learn from the past, not repeat it.
In the 1990s, as Johnny Carson ended his long, unassailable reign over the only domain that mattered after prime time, NBC had ongoing deals with the two top names in late night in Leno and Letterman, but owned only one Tonight Show chair for one of them to occupy when the music stopped. The network had tried mightily—if ham-handedly—to keep both stars, but the plan blew up. Dave exited in grand opera style for CBS and created the first truly substantial competing franchise to Tonight, proving for the first time that late-night television—and the profits that came with it—could exist beyond The Tonight Show.
Now NBC had the late-night champ again in Jay and, thankfully, only one obvious next-generation successor: Conan. The only problem was the age disparity this time was not so stark. In 2004, Jay would turn fifty-four and Conan forty-one, whereas when Johnny retired, he had been old enough to be Jay’s (or Dave’s) father. Jay clearly had plenty of game left in him, but Conan had by now reached the professional juncture where Letterman had been when he pressed to move up from the lounge (12:35) to the main room (11:35). Though younger than Dave had been (forty-six) when he chafed under NBCʹs decision to pass him over for Jay, Conan had hosted Late Night (the show Letterman had created) for exactly as long as Letterman had—eleven years.
And suitors had already come knocking. Three years earlier Fox had mounted an extended, comprehensive campaign to land Conan, a talent who Fox executives believed was a sweet match for their image of themselves and their programming style—young, hip, somewhat subversive. The wooing had been managed from the very top: Peter Chernin, the chief executive of the Fox entertainment empire—and one of Hollywood’s genuine power brokers—had authorized the pursuit of Conan. But it was kicked off with a contact based in the personal connection between Gail Berman, the talented Fox network entertainment president, and Jeff Ross, Conan’s executive producer and closest adviser. Both now in their forties, the two had become friendly as kids trying to break into the New York theater and music worlds twenty years earlier. Shortly after Berman assumed the Fox network job in 2001, she invited Ross to her office and planted the seed:
“What do you think about coming over to Fox? Not right now, but sometime—you should think about it. When your contract is up.”
Ross certainly appreciated the interest but didn’t think too much about it until the calls from Chernin started. Chernin systematically hit all the legs of the Conan support system—his manager, Gavin Polone; his new group of agents from the Endeavor agency, led by Rick Rosen; and Ross—as well as Conan himself. Chernin’s arguments on behalf of Fox were, as the experienced and savvy Rosen saw them, “incredibly compelling.”
The timing wasn’t bad, either. By 2001, the latest of O’Brien’s deals had a little more than a year to run, and NBC was—as it had too often done with Conan—“dicking around a bit” with the negotiations, in the words of one of Conan’s team. The executive then in charge of NBC’s West Coast division, Scott Sassa, offered Conan a raise, but only of about 10 percent. OʹBrien was, at the time, on the low end of the late-night pay scale, earning about $3 million a year—a fraction of what Leno and especially Letterman (with a salary of upwards of $25 million) were taking in. Conan had come into his own in the preceding years; he was featured on magazine covers and became a darling on college campuses in America.