The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [80]
On another April day in that spring of 2008, Dick Ebersol invited Jeff Ross to lunch. The NBC Sports chief told O’Brien’s producer that they ought to start kicking around some ideas for how Conan could be incorporated into NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage from Vancouver, which would be taking place about six months into Conan’s new Tonight Show.
The suggestion sounded reasonable to Ross, who, if he thought much about Dick Ebersol at all, regarded him as part of the long-established Bob Wright team, which meant he was likely a Conan supporter. Nothing coming from Dick had ever caused Ross to think otherwise. And a regular shot for Conan during the Olympics certainly sounded like a promising idea.
Ebersol had never hesitated to jump into situations involving NBCʹs late night because for long stretches of his career he had had serious skin in the game. In 1975, as the NBC executive in charge of late night, he pushed to get Saturday Night Live on the air and hired Lorne Michaels to run it. After that he left the network and became an independent producer, heavily involved with late-night programming. That began with a show called The Midnight Special, which ran on Friday nights after Carson in the late 1970s. In 1981, Dick’s closest friend at NBC, Brandon Tartikoff, recruited Ebersol in desperation when SNL, in its first year after the departure of Michaels, was collapsing under a producer named Jean Doumanian. Ebersol stepped in and righted the SNL ship, running it successfully for four seasons—when the cast included Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, and Martin Short—until Michaels returned. After that Ebersol created another late-night series, Friday Night Videos, which became a hit in the Letterman time period. (Dave’s show ran only four days a week on NBC.)
Early on in Conan’s then tenuous tenure, Michaels, whom Ebersol loved like a professional brother, approached him and explained, “Conan is under siege. He needs friends. Will you talk to him?” Ebersol did, mostly advising Conan to listen to Lorne as much as he could and to trust himself. When Conan asked if there was anything about the show he would change, Ebersol said there was just one thing: Andy Richter. Playing around too much with Andy was preventing Conan from connecting with the audience. He should dump him. Conan had obviously not taken that advice, and Andy emerged as a fan favorite later. But Ebersol came away generally thinking Conan was a terrific kid, smart and hardworking.
At his lunch with Ross, Dick had some other advice he wanted to impart. “You’ve really got to be careful at eleven thirty,” Ebersol told him. “You don’t want to have him dancing around, flopping the hair, and touching the nipple and all that stuff.” Of course, the “string dance,” which Conan performed many nights, shifting side to side and then cutting an imaginary string on one hip while touching a finger to a nipple with a sizzle sound, amounted to his signature move on the Late Night show.
“This is the time to experiment,” Ebersol said. “The twelve thirty audience is never going to desert him. They adore him. But eleven thirty is a whole other game.”
To illustrate his point, Ebersol launched into a story about the starting days of Saturday Night Live. Because the show would be sitting in a time period owned by Carson during the week, he and Michaels were summoned to meet the King.
In Burbank, in the same cavelike office that became Leno’s dungeon, Carson greeted them, not yet dressed for the night’s show—he was in a sleeveless white undershirt of the kind Brando wore as Stanley Kowalski. Carson mainly wanted to feel out these two kids to make sure they weren’t planning something too radical. But Johnny had words of advice that Ebersol wanted to repeat for Ross.
Johnny urged that whatever else SNL