Would you like to take a little tour?
It’s May 22, 2012, a typical Tuesday in some ways and yet in others a very special evening for GMA. The season finale of Dancing with the Stars is being broadcast live on ABC, and eighteen million viewers, the network’s biggest prime-time audience in months, are expected to tune in to see Donald Driver, Katherine Jenkins, and William Levy compete for the show’s mirror-ball trophy. GMA will get an automatic boost in its ratings by virtue of all the televisions that will still be tuned to its network when people turn their sets back on in the morning. But the real bonanza, the real benefit of there no longer being thick walls separating self-promotion, entertainment, and journalism, will come as a result of exclusive interviews with the winners and losers at the studio in New York City the next morning, after the competitors are flown overnight from the West Coast but before Americans have had a chance to gather ’round the water cooler and hash out what happened.
Dancing with the Stars ends at eleven p.m. East Coast time, and the charter flight with the valuable payload of guests is supposed to touch down at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at six a.m. During the broadcast Ariane Nalty, a GMA producer in charge of getting the dancers onto the plane, calls Jay Shaylor, the overnight producer, with good news. Len Goodman, the competition’s persnickety British judge, has, after a little bit of cajoling, agreed to say, “Coming up next, the Good Morning America dance party.” This to you may pale in comparison to, say, the victory of General P. G. T. Beauregard at First Manassas, but when you work the graveyard shift in morning television, it’s the little wins that get you through the night.
Postgame interviews with reality show stars are the stuff of which ratings coups are constructed. They are one of those things, like chocolate, that always work. CBS has done them with Survivor and Big Brother. GMA has been doing them with Dancing for years. (NBC, inexplicably, doesn’t do them with The Voice as well as it should.) But this time, just to keep things fresh and fancy, the producers want to stage an early-morning red-carpet arrival at the GMA studio in Times Square. They want to turn it into an “event.” That is, if the plane arrives on time.
In the almost-empty sixth-floor production office of GMA, twenty blocks north of Times Square, Dancing is playing silently on an overhead TV. So far it’s a slow news night—though Shaylor, superstitious in the manner of many TV producers, won’t say the word slow aloud.
At 11:25 p.m. Shaylor is about a third of the way through his workday, and the show is falling into place, as neatly as it ever does. A special preview of the movie Men in Black 3 is ready to go; a news story about Facebook’s bungled IPO is about half-finished. There are still a couple of blanks on the rundown. That’s by design: Shaylor has to leave space for the unexpected.
Shaylor, a talkative Columbia Journalism School grad wearing black-rimmed glasses, a T-shirt, and jeans (the dress code is one of the perks of this shift) is about to screen a rough cut of a story about a missing Louisiana girl when a production assistant tells him to pick up the phone. “The dog,” he says, “is having a problem.”
“GMA, this is Jay.”
The dog is a two-year-old coonhound named Maddie who has achieved online fame for standing atop things—canoes, trucks, cabinets, people. Yep, just standing there on four legs, on top of things. Maddie is morning show gold—just the kind of surprise in-studio guest who will keep people watching even as they text their friends and tell them they ought to watch, too. Morning show viewers love animals, especially dogs. (Even Stephanopoulos, who feels it is his job to lobby for more serious segments, sometimes e-mails his wife when there’s a cute dog coming up. “Tell the girls,” he writes.) The dog, like the dancers, was a go for the next morning’s show, but now Shaylor can’t believe what he’s hearing.
There is no way to sugarcoat this, gentle reader. Josh Elliott’s “Play of the Day” segment may be in danger.
On the line is Theron Humphrey, a thirty-year-old photographer who is Maddie’s proud and opportunistic owner. When GMA discovered Maddie on the Web and asked to have her on the show, Humphrey rushed Maddie to Los Angeles International Airport on his own dime, ready and willing to take a red-eye flight to New York for a TV appearance that will last three minutes at most. But at the gate he discovered that Delta requires the owners of pets to have a health certificate from a veterinarian, even if the beast travels with the luggage. After years of booking lizards and turkeys and cats and dogs, some heroes, others more into tricks and such, no one at GMA had known about the requirement. Now it looks as if it’ll prevent Maddie from arriving in time for the show. Suddenly there’s a poignant, dog-shaped hole where Segment 7 used to be.
“How is that possible?” asks Shaylor. “I mean, people fly with their pets all the time…”
With the help of Humphrey, Shaylor calmly but persistently wrangles a Delta representative, Jerry Hughes, onto the phone and begins his negotiations. “How can I get this dog on the plane?” he asks with practiced seriousness. Skilled in the ways of fluff-management, he’s listening for inconsistencies and gradually applying more and more pressure.
“Where is this in the paperwork? I’ve never heard of this…”
Pause while he listens.
“If I go across the street to United or American are they going to treat me this way?…”
Pause.
“I’m platinum on Delta. Happy to give you my number…”
Shaylor wants to find a “creative way,” as he puts it, to fly Maddie to New York. If you’ve ever been stopped for speeding in northern Georgia, or Sardinia, you may have heard yourself saying this same sort of thing. But the Delta rep isn’t wavering, in fact is claiming that by federal law he can’t waver—and time is running out. It’s 11:34 p.m. now, and the flight is scheduled to take off in fifty-six minutes. If Maddie misses this flight, Shaylor tells the Delta man “then the dog will miss its hit time,” as if an airline customer-service rep might know what that meant. The man then asks if Shaylor can hold. Things are not looking good, and yet whatever happens with Maddie, tonight will probably not go down as a night of historically bad proportions. It will not rival the time in 2005 that a GMA producer was detained for trying to stop the Today show from interviewing the hostage victim he thought he had booked first. Or the time in 2011 when GMA landed the first big interview with Gary Giordano, the suspect in the disappearance of his female companion on a trip to Aruba, but Giordano wouldn’t leave his hotel room. A producer sped to the Ritz-Carlton, coaxed him outside, and delivered him to the studio with just about two minutes to spare.
A minute later Shaylor is still on hold. While he waits he explains to me that this, right here, is why he never says the word S-L-O-W.
* * *
Like its main rival, GMA is on a twenty-four-hour clock. The first formal meeting of the day starts at ten a.m., when the top producers gather in the office of Tom Cibrowski to get their assignments. Cibrowski, a bald, fatherly guy who could talk anyone off a ledge, became the executive producer of GMA in March 2012 when Goldston moved up to the VP job he had wanted all along. Goldston remained involved, but it was understood that the show was now Cibrowski’s baby.
The top producers reconvene at four p.m., this time to speak more specifically about their expectations for each segment—how to approach the story, how to sell it to viewers, how to get it done by airtime. They also talk holistically about the mix of segments planned. Is the balance of “light” and “dark” right? Is there time baked in for chitchat between the hosts, showing off their chemistry?
Some of these producers, like Cibrowski, have been up since four a.m., so they head home by five or six p.m. Senior producer Angela Ellis oversees things until Shaylor arrives at about eight thirty. Before Ellis leaves they run through the stories being stitched together overnight, like the correspondent Bill Weir’s segment about Facebook. “I think Cibrowski likes it as the lead,” Ellis says.
“Totally,” Shaylor says.
Shaylor’s night is a
lways busy. He edits the scripts submitted by producers and screens early versions of the next morning’s pieces. Besides making sure that no story will bore the audience at home, he looks for legal and ethical booby traps: Have we licensed that video? Have we called that lawyer for comment? Have we included both sides?
“We want our viewers to wake up to something they haven’t heard,” Shaylor explains. So in scripts he crosses out words like yesterday, and encourages the correspondents to say what happened “overnight” or what’s going to happen “later today.”
Shaylor’s been on the overnight shift for a little more than a year. He sees it, just as his predecessors did, as a stepping-stone to a job with better hours.
Until then, he has to solve the late-night dog dilemmas.
Thinking synergy, Shaylor wonders if he can get Maddie on the charter flight that’s whisking the Dancing with the Stars entertainers to New York in a few hours. But as it turns out the charter is full.
In a few moments he is back with Delta Guy. “Can we carry the dog on?” he asks. “What if we put a raincoat and a hat on the dog?”
“For that, you’d have to go through passenger service,” the rep mysteriously says.
Then Shaylor thinks, If it’s a health certificate that the dog needs, let’s find a damn veterinarian.
By 11:54, Shaylor is on the phone with a vet in Los Angeles. “They’re willing to accept faxed paperwork,” he says, but the doctor says he must physically examine the dog.
“How far are you from LAX?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Yeesh, that’s cutting it close.”
Shaylor asks the vet to start driving. Miraculously, the man makes it in less than twenty minutes and gives Humphrey the necessary paperwork. But the process takes just a few minutes too long, and the flight leaves without Maddie. Humphrey calls back a couple minutes later with the bad news. Shaylor, undeterred, asks if he’ll fly to New York tomorrow instead. “Tomorrow’s more than fine with me,” says Humphrey.
Shaylor has one more question.
“You would continue to honor doing it exclusively with us, right?” he asks, not wanting to see Maddie standing on Al Roker any time soon.
Humphrey says, “Certainly.”
* * *
Booking battles are the war within the war on morning TV. GMA and Today duke it out over presidents and eyewitnesses, over A-list actors and teens who’ve been expelled for tattoo-related reasons, going to extraordinary lengths to reel in great “gets.” If the bookers have any shame, they have suppressed it. They will drop off homemade cookies and handwritten notes on a crime victim’s front porch. They’ll take campaign strategists out to dinner and get them drunk. They’ll strike up months-long friendships with the family members of the jurors in a sensational murder trial. They’ll flirt, cajole, cry, beg, and their bosses don’t want to know what else, because they believe ratings and their own paychecks are at stake. (The bookers at ABC barely flinched when one of their own bragged of sleeping with an adult witness in a child abuse trial to secure an interview.)
For the biggest bookings, the hosts themselves often make calls and write notes by hand. But the bookers are happy to go a step further for the right guests, and guarantee the interviewer of his or her choice. Is that ethical? Not exactly, but it is closer to the line than a lot of the other stuff they do, such as tailing a guest like a private investigator, sequestering a guest in a hotel room and standing guard at the door—or pretending to be someone else and canceling the other guy’s guest’s plane tickets. “One of my producers nabbed Ted Williams—the homeless man with the ‘golden voice’—when he walked out of a competitor’s studio for a smoke. We basically kidnapped him,” Santina Leuci, the head booker for GMA, bragged in 2011. Leuci, according to a colleague, looked for three attributes in her booker hires: “They had to be hot, able to talk their way into or out of anything, and be a chameleon.”
If the circumstances call for it in their opinion, the two leading shows will spend enormous sums of money on bookings. Someone like Humphrey, Maddie the dog’s owner, would just receive free airfare and a couple of nights at a hotel. (Humphrey later complained that GMA never paid him back for his flights.) But higher-profile guests are treated to lavish dinners with the producers and personal attention from the hosts. To win the first interview with David Goldman when he brought his eleven-year-old son back to the United States from Brazil after a highly publicized custody battle between 2004 and 2009, NBC paid for a charter flight and put him up in a presidential suite at Universal Studios, an amusement park partly owned by its parent company. The network’s investment, a clear violation of traditional journalistic ethics, paid off handsomely in the ratings.
The shows say they don’t directly pay for nonperforming guests, but they will sometimes license photos or videos from the subjects of news stories—a backdoor way to secure an interview. One of the most embarrassing incidents involved the “Botox Mom,” a California woman who claimed in 2011 to have injected her eight-year-old daughter with Botox. A GMA producer called her after her story appeared in the British newspaper the Sun (British papers are founts of free story ideas for morning shows) and subsequently offered to pay a broker ten thousand dollars for photos of the eight-year-old receiving injections. The story was assigned to Spencer, who had been back at GMA for only a few days. “It does sound unreal,” Spencer said on the air—but then introduced the segment anyway. It was unreal, the woman later claimed in an interview with TMZ. “Honestly, I don’t even know what Botox is,” she said, alleging that the newspaper had scripted the whole thing and paid her two hundred dollars to participate. ABC executives didn’t know what to believe, but they admitted privately that the episode was embarrassing for Spencer and for GMA. The ten-thousand-dollar payment, thankfully, never went through. Ben Sherwood came out two months later and said he’d banned the licensing practice, with exceptions to be granted only in extraordinary circumstances.
Sometimes the networks publicly condemned booker behavior, but said very different things behind the scenes. See, for instance, what happened in 2002 when NBC, ABC, and CBS all vied for the first on-camera interview with two teenage girls who were abducted and raped north of Los Angeles. Today secured the first interview thanks to Couric and Gloria De Leon, a star booker in NBC’s Burbank, California, bureau. Twenty-six years old at the time, De Leon was in charge of “babysitting” (her boss’ word) one of the girls before the interview. “Katie was on a plane from New York,” De Leon recalled, when she took the girl shopping. Normally NBC’s standards prohibit giving gifts to interview subjects, for gifts can be construed as indirect payments. (Of course, so can airline tickets and hotel accommodations and licenses for photos, but the standards are the standards.) But De Leon bought a sixty-dollar pair of jeans for the girl, knowing that the girl’s favorite pair were in police custody because they were stained with blood. “She wanted to wear jeans in the interview to show she was the same woman that she was before the rape,” De Leon said. The family of the victim couldn’t afford to buy her a new pair, so De Leon did. “I thought it was a nice gesture,” she said. It was their little secret—until one of the bookers from the other networks called the girl’s mother in another attempt to snag the interview away from NBC. The mother told the booker that her daughter had gone “shopping with Gloria from the Today show.”
That tidbit must have made its way back to the rival network, because within hours reporters from USA Today and other news outlets were on the line with Jonathan Wald, the top producer at the time, demanding to know whether NBC had paid for a pair of jeans. Wald thought no—but after talking to De Leon, he had to call back and say, “I was wrong, I was misinformed, we bought the pants.” Wald had to call back De Leon, too, and say, “We’re going to have to suspend you.”
“This was a rape victim!” De Leon said years later, still amazed by the sequence of events. “Back in those days we were doing thousand-dollar dinners” with potential guests, she adde
d. But the standards are the standards. She was publicly slapped on the wrist with a week’s suspension; the newspaper reporters were told that. They weren’t told this: “When I got back, NBC gave me my first six-figure contract for being, in their words, ‘a bulldog,’” De Leon said. “I can go to war thanks to the lessons I learned,” she added.
* * *
At 1:21 a.m. in New York, Nalty calls in from LA. “Wheels up!” she announces over Shaylor’s speakerphone. The Dancing with the Stars cast members are now on their way here.
“We’ve never left this late,” Nalty tells Shaylor. “William Levy”—one of the dancers—“was taking his sweet little time in his trailer.”
Shaylor says he’s worried that they are not going to make it on time. To have the dancers at the GMA studio in Times Square by seven, to shoot their red-carpet entrance, the charter needs to land by six fifteen a.m.
“I just told the pilot, you have to make this,” Nalty says. “They’ll catch it up in the air.”
“They’re not drinking?” Shaylor asks.
“No.”
After he hangs up, Shaylor looks at me and says, “Sometimes they drink.”
At 4:40 a.m. Shaylor’s boss Cibrowski arrives at work at GMA’s Times Square studio. At 5:04 Stephanopoulos walks into Cibrowski’s office. He asks the same question he asks Cibrowski every morning at this time: “What’s happening?” And today, an extra question: is the charter on time?
At six thirty Cibrowski and Denise Rehrig, the senior broadcast producer, relocate to the show’s bunker-like control room. Around them a dozen producers, writers, and technicians fiddle with graphics, camera angles, and scripted intros. They get good news: the Dancing cast members are off the plane and in a convoy of cars on the way to Times Square. The red-carpet arrival will go off without a hitch. One floor below, in the studio, Robin Roberts and the other hosts are practicing their lines and touching up their makeup. And a few blocks away the Today hosts and crew are doing exactly the same things. Thanks to a small television monitor in a corner of the GMA control room that streams the feed Today is sending out to its network affiliates, Cibrowski and his crew can see them in their ritual labors. Right now Matt Lauer and Ann Curry are proofreading scripts and primping. NBC no doubt has a similar peephole into GMA. In this business, you always keep one eye on the other guy.
Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV Page 17
