The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [184]
“Blow it up,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MANIFESTO DESTINY
Just before noon on Tuesday, January 12, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein were headed over to the Tonight offices, hoping for a last-ditch conversation that might convince Conan O’Brien to accept the reconfigured NBC lineup. They didn’t hold out much hope, but they both valued Conan so highly they felt they had to try.
Marc Graboff was in his office, waiting to hear something more from the Conan camp. The last word he’d had from Rick Rosen was that Team Conan was arming up with a litigator in the wake of Jeff Zucker’s threat to remove Conan and bench him for two years. To Graboff it sounded a bit like Mafia families going to the mattresses. He hoped he would have an opportunity to head off a war that surely would not be good for business.
In his own office at 30 Rock, Jeff Zucker remained near the edge of his patience with the Conan camp, concerned about how they were using the press to assail the network and Jay Leno.
David Letterman and all the other players in late night were meeting with their writers, continuing to follow the events at NBC with the kind of glee usually reserved for political sex scandals. Dave prepared a couple of pointed jokes for that night—“I got a call just before I came out here from NBC. And they said, ‘Look, look, we still don’t want you back’ ”—and the show was also putting together an elaborate promo parody for a series called “Law & Order: Leno Victims Unit.” It opened with a stentorian announcer intoning, “In the television industry there are two kinds of talk-show hosts: Jay Leno, and those who’ve been victimized by Jay Leno.”
Having just ignited the fire that morning, Conan OʹBrien walked down the hall from the Tonight Show conference room, stepped into his office, and shut the door behind him. In the center of the sunny office was the same old battered wooden desk he had had back in his Late Night days, shipped all the way out to California—the desk that seemed to Conan to have been tossed out by some crappy insurance company in the 1930s. It had been in his office in New York when he arrived in 1993.
Feeling not too different than he had at his low point during his first year on the air, when Tom Shales in The Washington Post had so wittily dismissed his chances for survival, Conan approached the desk. This time, however, he didn’t drop to his knees and crawl beneath it; he simply lay down and stretched out on the floor next to it, staring at the ceiling in silence, waiting for the statement to go out—and his fate to be sealed.
The television world began to read it just after noon:
People of Earth:
In the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.
Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.
But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.
Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the Tonight Show to 12:05 to accommodate the Jay Leno