The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [97]
Fallon started out majoring in computer science at the College of Saint Rose, a onetime girls’ school in Albany, and barely stayed above water in his grades, eventually abandoning the computer stuff for communications. That he could fake his way through while pursuing his comedy. Mostly Fallon was known in college for his obsessive viewing of SNL. No one who knew him doubted he would chase the dream of making the cast of the show that had all but defined his life.
Fallon was good enough in his stand-up by twenty-one that he secured an agent, got bookings, and eventually dropped out of college. He made his way to LA and, in the Conan pattern, took improv classes with the Groundlings. Only a year later he won an audition at one of the showcases that Lorne Michaels held for potential new talent for SNL. Fallon did some of his impressions, including a dynamite Jerry Seinfeld, but he didn’t make the cut. Grievously disappointed, he at least heard later that Lorne had kind of liked him and might take a second look when Jimmy got some of the green off him.
He worked his way back into an invitation to another showcase the following year. Now only twenty-three, not quite as tall as he seemed because of his gawky posture, but puckishly handsome, with the look of a choirboy who’d been sneaking sips of the altar wine, Fallon was convinced he was ready. Before the audition, one of the advance men, talking to all those trying out, offered some advice: Don’t look for Lorne in the audience. If you see him he won’t be laughing, and you may get thrown. It won’t mean he doesn’t like you; it’s just that he never laughs.
Fallon had no more than ten minutes to change his life. He came prepared; he even had some of his old troll material. But he couldn’t help checking out the audience, looking for Lorne. Fallon spotted him easily, sitting quietly in the dark a few rows back. Then Jimmy hit him with his Adam Sandler impression. It was undeniable: Lorne Michaels was laughing.
On the show Fallon scored early with his versatility and his infectious likeability. In Fallon’s first season, 1998-1999, SNL was entering one of its periodic upswings. Will Ferrell was emerging as a star; the cast also included Darrell Hammond, Tracy Morgan, Molly Shannon, Maya Rudolph, and Colin Quinn. Fallon broke out almost immediately, moving from feature player to regular cast member in one season, with characters like Jarret, the stoner with his own Internet show; Sully, the wiseass Boston high schooler who constantly makes out with Denise (Rachel Dratch) but mostly is in love with “No-mah” on the “Sawks”; and perhaps most memorably, a perpetually pissed-off, dead-on Barry Gibb, who hosted his own irrationally enraged talk show with his brother Robin (played with equally devastating accuracy by Justin Timberlake).
By his second year Fallon was among the busiest members of the cast, and was getting noticed—and not only by Lorne. One on of their trips to the show, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein, always on the lookout for potential future late-night hosts, began to see real possibilities in Fallon. He was clearly a big young talent, immensely prepossessing. When Ludwin got into a conversation with Lorne about potential hosts for the “Weekend Update” segment to replace the departing Quinn, Ludwin recommended Fallon. Michaels, who was going to be in sole charge of this choice no matter what any late-night executive suggested, had been kicking around a notion of inserting the show’s head writer, Tina Fey, in that role. Now he saw intriguing potential in a male-female coanchor team, something the show had not had (under Lorne) since Jane Curtin matched up first with Dan Aykroyd, then with Bill Murray, in the late 1970s.
The following season, the team of Fey and Fallon became the hottest act on television. Writers reached for comparisons: Hepburn and Tracy, because she was so smart and he so everyman likeable; Nichols and May, because they were both so spontaneously funny;