The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [99]
Both Silverman and Graboff immediately wanted to know, however, what this would mean for Conan. As the three men discussed it, they agreed that he surely would not be thrilled with this development. Graboff asked Zucker who was going to break the news to Conan, and Zucker immediately acknowledged it was his responsibility and promised to do it—but first they needed to get Jay signed.
With Zucker having already secured Jay’s verbal agreement to a new deal for ten p.m., Graboff approached Ken Ziffren with a simple enough proposal—an extension for Jay, with more money because he would now be in prime time.
Ziffren responded with a request like none other Graboff had ever heard in more than twenty years in the business. He asked for a four-year pay-and-play contract. Everybody in Hollywood knew what a pay-or-play deal meant: The performer was paid in full for his two-year or four-year or whatever commitment, even if he was removed from the job at an earlier date. When shows got canceled, stars and writers with pay-or-play deals got their checks for the amounts negotiated at the start, and they couldn’t sue for damages, claiming their career had been ruined; if a network chose to, it could also bench the performer for the life of the deal. If they decreed the star would sit at home for eighteen months, he would sit at home for eighteen months.
What Ziffren wanted for Leno was substantially different. Pay and play meant that for the agreed-upon time the network guaranteed both to pay the negotiated salary and to keep the star’s show on the air. And if the contract were to be breached in that time, the performer had the right to sue, claiming damage to his career. In addition, a breach would mean instantaneous freedom for the star: no being sent to the beach.
Clearly the last element had been on Jay’s mind. He wanted no possibility that NBC could keep him off television again.
Graboff blanched at both the pay-and-play notion and, especially, its four-year duration. That provision, fortunately, he was able to negotiate down to only the first two years of the four-year deal; after that, specific ratings considerations were put in place that would determine whether NBC could cancel the show. The message Graboff took away with him, which he assumed came indirectly from Jay, was that this new show might take time to build and that NBC needed to agree to leave it alone, without getting worked up about things like “making the quarter.”
But after accepting the cut-down to two years, there would be no further concessions coming from Jay’s side. NBC had to accede to his terms or watch Jay Leno disappear. Graboff, faced with a new, unrecognizable animal, wanted all the official clearance he could get. He requested that he be given assurance, in writing, from NBC’s general counsel—as well as from Jeff Zucker himself—that the pay-and-play arrangement with Jay Leno, while unprecedented, had been vetted and approved. Graboff printed out the e-mail acknowledgements from the general counsel and Zucker—who in his message signed off on how unusual the deal truly was, but described the decision to do it as “the price of admission”—and stuck them in the files with the contracts.
On December 8, 2008, Conan O’Brien took his little journey past the holiday tableaux outside in Rockefeller Plaza and made his way to the elevator bank up to his offices. It was a Monday, which meant the writers would have some fresh ideas from the weekend. Conan was especially looking