Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [149]
There’d be times when I had to say to Keith, “Hey, come on, it’s okay, don’t worry about it,” or, “We’ll get through it.” You had these little reminders for him, because he would take it personally. Walsh was phony with it but eventually he would go through me, and they all went through me, to deliver messages to Keith—to which I said, “This isn’t part of my job description.” There was always a message delivered that seemed like it might have been to me but it was really for me to deliver to Keith. Everybody was afraid to say something to him. So I was Kissinger. But, God, was he entertaining!
KEITH OLBERMANN:
So little of what went into the 11:00 p.m. SportsCenter could be preapproved, largely because neither Dan nor I had any idea what we were going to say until it happened. The thing that in retrospect strikes me about the show and its success was that it was every night, and every night it was organic. It was essentially the same premise as improvisational jazz. We have a vague idea where we’re going with this, we know which instruments we’ve brought out here onto the stage, but Lord knows who’s going to play what and when. Very often it would happen that we would be in one of those situations—the highlight would play and we’d have no idea what was going on. We had not been provided with any information and basically had to guess while looking at a seven-inch-diameter monitor.
So it was obvious very early on that, once you get the mastery of how to deal with highlights dropping on your head like anvils, once you do that and, other than the prewritten on-camera intros to stories or highlight leads, nobody’s approving it. They either approve of you or they don’t. It was very difficult for a specific thing that was said or done to be criticized, because essentially everybody’s goal was to get a great product out while surviving the experience—and there were lots of people who tried to do that but succeeded at neither. What was it Churchill said about, “Nothing is as exciting and makes you appreciate life more than being shot at without success”? I mean that’s really how it was almost every night. So there was very little for them to approve. And again their approach had to be, “you’re buying the whole package; you can’t pick and choose what you don’t like. If there’s something you’ve seen on the air that you don’t want me to do again, that’s fine, go ahead and tell me that.” The idea that I should be in some sort of trouble or Dan or anybody else would be in trouble for doing something when it was so spontaneous—I can’t recall an occasion where they actually did that.
DAN PATRICK:
We never read each other’s scripts because we always wanted to be surprised. We would go in there and he would always have issues but he could write a show in forty-five minutes and spend the rest of the day being upset about something or questioning something with management.
BILL FAIRWEATHER, Coordinating Producer:
It’s the nature of the beast when you put competitive people together. John Walsh is going to butt heads with Keith Olbermann, or Bill Fairweather is going to butt heads with Dan Patrick over how we should do a story.
I had been there for probably three months, so I was the new kid on the block—“Who’s this smartass from Boston who thinks he knows everything?”—and I was working with a coordinating producer who had been there forever, the kind of a guy that got on a lot of people’s nerves and people had frustrations with. And I didn’t care, I wasn’t going to put up with any of his shit. So finally, on one of the overnight shows, we had it out. It escalated to the newsroom, then to the control room. Then it was like a scene out of Good Will Hunting. I said, “Well, we can just go outside.” And I said, “I don’t give a shit who you are, how long you’ve been here. I’ve been hearing from day one that people don’t respect you, and you do nothing but hassle me on every single show.