What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [8]
As a result of that little episode, by the way, we have a new rule: no reporters in the control room.
One summer, Joe’s twenty-one-year-old son, Joey, was an intern on the third floor of 30 Rock, where Morning Joe lives, and after a while Joe asked if Joey had formed any impressions of me.
“Oh, Chris is great,” Joey replied. “He’s great.”
“Well,” Joe said, “I’ve heard that he can be an asshole. That’s the word people use.”
“In the control room,” Joey said, “Chris is an asshole. But you need that. There is so much chaos going on in there.”
Control Room 3A is a few dozen feet down the hall from the gentility of the Morning Joe set. It is my domain. It is not always genteel. It is a dark, low-hanging universe of dozens upon dozens of flat-screen monitors; of consoles and headsets and fatigue and snap decisions; of telephones, jumbo coffees, and chatter, which can morph into shouts, profane shouts, if a teleprompter freezes or Mika’s mike is left on during a commercial break or a guest is sonorous. A dialect is spoken in 3A, but it is only tangentially English, things like “We’re about thirty heavy” or “Animate now to the hard out.”
This is live television, the most difficult kind, because the first take is the only one. The planned sequence of segments is a malleable thing because we may drop a guest as we go, we may add one, we may be surprised by what one says, we may have breaking news, we may lose a satellite feed, we may change songs leading into commercial, we may have to remind those on the set what to say or what not to.
They are the most fun hours of my day. To stand in the shower and come up with an idea for that morning’s show and see it take shape is the legal high of being an executive producer. So is opting in midshow to try to hunt down a traveling congressman for a live shot and pulling it off; whispering in Joe’s earpiece and hearing the nugget come out of his mouth seconds later; keeping those on the set cool and calm while we in the control room douse a metaphorical fire.
Each day, however, I make hundreds of decisions that go far beyond the mere technical challenges of running a control room. While I get a huge amount of help from the MJ team, particularly my senior staff, the buck stops with me. In large part, I assembled the small, dedicated team that puts out the show each day. If a controversy brews up because of something said on the air, damage control falls to me. If a newspaper calls to check out a rumor about the show, I have to weigh how to handle it. I make sure the mix of guests is stimulating and smart. If I have doubts about the authenticity of a news item we’re about to air, I hold it, which I did recently regarding unsubstantiated reports a black employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been fired for racist remarks. I wanted confirmation from the Obama administration, which we got and aired, a decision that left Joe pretty pleased because unlike others, we hadn’t jumped to any conclusions.
At its core, the look and feel of Morning Joe reflects collaboration among Joe, Mika, and me. One of us will have an idea for a segment. We’ll massage it, play with it, add elements until, by the end, it’s tough to pin down authorship. More than anything, I try to keep Joe’s original vision fresh, to turn his sparks into cutting-edge television, to stay inside his head.
As the 2010 midterm elections approached, for example, I wanted to do something special on the day after the balloting. Why not, I thought, do the show from Studio 8H, the biggest at 30 Rock and the home of Saturday Night Live? Joe and Mika and our guests could sit on the stage before a live studio audience, which is what SNL always has but which morning shows rarely do. Using such a legendary venue would be an electric way of saying the election was a grand, historic event—and we’re the team to tell you about it. It would create buzz for us. And it did. People were clamoring for tickets. The New York Times took note.
Mike Barnicle, a former