What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [4]
We’ll be back right after these messages with why we have two feet of snow on the ground. (Cut to commercials, real ones I had taped off TV and spliced in.)
This is Chris Licht speaking. Join us next week. (Run credits.)
It wasn’t a coincidence that my network’s name was one letter away from NBC. I loved NBC. When I was little, the Lichts took the 30 Rock tour, and our gaggle of the bug-eyed was taken into a studio, where the tour guides asked for volunteers to play Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. Up went my hand. They made me Johnny and made some older guy Ed, put us in chairs, and gave us a script to read. The older guy was terrible. I was so good my own mother couldn’t believe it. I had Johnny down cold.
One summer when I was nine or so, we rented a condo on Martha’s Vineyard. Carl Stern was renting nearby. Carl was an NBC star, covering the U.S. Supreme Court and the Justice Department, winning numerous awards. Mom says I stuck like glue to the guy. About a month after we got back from vacation, the phone rang at our house.
Dad picked up.
It was Carl Stern.
“Just returning Chris’s call.”
On the Vineyard, Carl had given me his number, probably secure in the thought that no nine-year-old would actually call a leading national television correspondent. But I did, because I felt Carl and I had much to discuss, being in the same business. I used to call Sue Simmons, too, one of the anchors of WNBC–New York’s evening news. I called Sue a lot, enough to become known to her as “Chris from Connecticut.” Mom says I once told Sue, “I’m going to work for NBC one day.” (Years later, my wife worked with Sue at WNBC, and mentioned to her that she was dating someone Sue knew, someone who used to telephone her as a kid. “Chris from Connecticut?” Sue said.)
As my childhood fascination with broadcasting grew, I pictured myself as some kind of network “talent,” an anchor perhaps, certainly a reporter, a person on the air. When I went off to Syracuse University to study broadcasting, Stephanie handwrote a letter assuring her big brother, You’re going to be in Tom Brokaw’s seat one day.
I might have had the voice for it. In the wee hours on weekends during high school, I earned four dollars an hour as a DJ on a fifty-thousand-watt rock station that blanketed Connecticut. This made me a bit of a celebrity among my peers, especially female, and I’d dedicate songs to my buddies who were out doing what more normal teenage males did on weekend nights, which was hang out. If you had been listening, my best friend Marc Nespoli says, you would have assumed from the dulcet pipes that I “was thirty, not eighteen.”
After graduating from Syracuse, I settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to commence my television news ascent. The job there, working for a company that produced and sold medical stories that television stations could air as their own, was instructive and decent. But life in Allentown was slow death in obscurity.
So when a friend suggested I move to Los Angeles to help with his production company, I leaped at the chance to work for nothing, which is what they paid me for the first couple of months. In time, I was working on a television pilot two floors above the newsroom of KNBC, the local NBC-owned station, and I would hang out down there, doing research if asked. I liked the energy of a newsroom. And there I got to know Jeff Kaufman.
In the summer of 1995, Jeff was the executive producer of a nightly program about the trial of one Orenthal James Simpson, who was charged with the knife murders of his ex-wife and a friend of hers. With its threads of sex, race, violence, and police bias, the O.J. trial was big. You might have heard of it. Jeff’s live half-hour program recapped each day’s testimony, beginning at 7:30 P.M. One day, he asked if I wanted a full-time job as one of the show’s writers.
I didn’t know how to write television copy, but that was a minor matter I kept to myself. This was a big show in a big city about big news. I accepted.