The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  His mother had heard Jimmy do killer knockoffs of enough celebrities to know that when the Bananas Comedy Club down the river in Poughkeepsie announced it was holding an impressions contest she had a potential winner in the family. Fallon got inspiration from a high school graduation gift of a troll doll. He put together a routine based on celebrity endorsers of troll dolls—and he killed. He won the contest, of course, and jumped right into a stand-up career, often accompanying himself on guitar, even as he was starting college.

  Fallon started out majoring in computer science at the College of Saint Rose, a onetime girls’ school in Albany, and barely stayed above water in his grades, eventually abandoning the computer stuff for communications. That he could fake his way through while pursuing his comedy. Mostly Fallon was known in college for his obsessive viewing of SNL. No one who knew him doubted he would chase the dream of making the cast of the show that had all but defined his life.

  Fallon was good enough in his stand-up by twenty-one that he secured an agent, got bookings, and eventually dropped out of college. He made his way to LA and, in the Conan pattern, took improv classes with the Groundlings. Only a year later he won an audition at one of the showcases that Lorne Michaels held for potential new talent for SNL. Fallon did some of his impressions, including a dynamite Jerry Seinfeld, but he didn’t make the cut. Grievously disappointed, he at least heard later that Lorne had kind of liked him and might take a second look when Jimmy got some of the green off him.

  He worked his way back into an invitation to another showcase the following year. Now only twenty-three, not quite as tall as he seemed because of his gawky posture, but puckishly handsome, with the look of a choirboy who’d been sneaking sips of the altar wine, Fallon was convinced he was ready. Before the audition, one of the advance men, talking to all those trying out, offered some advice: Don’t look for Lorne in the audience. If you see him he won’t be laughing, and you may get thrown. It won’t mean he doesn’t like you; it’s just that he never laughs.

  Fallon had no more than ten minutes to change his life. He came prepared; he even had some of his old troll material. But he couldn’t help checking out the audience, looking for Lorne. Fallon spotted him easily, sitting quietly in the dark a few rows back. Then Jimmy hit him with his Adam Sandler impression. It was undeniable: Lorne Michaels was laughing.

  On the show Fallon scored early with his versatility and his infectious likeability. In Fallon’s first season, 1998-1999, SNL was entering one of its periodic upswings. Will Ferrell was emerging as a star; the cast also included Darrell Hammond, Tracy Morgan, Molly Shannon, Maya Rudolph, and Colin Quinn. Fallon broke out almost immediately, moving from feature player to regular cast member in one season, with characters like Jarret, the stoner with his own Internet show; Sully, the wiseass Boston high schooler who constantly makes out with Denise (Rachel Dratch) but mostly is in love with “No-mah” on the “Sawks”; and perhaps most memorably, a perpetually pissed-off, dead-on Barry Gibb, who hosted his own irrationally enraged talk show with his brother Robin (played with equally devastating accuracy by Justin Timberlake).

  By his second year Fallon was among the busiest members of the cast, and was getting noticed—and not only by Lorne. One on of their trips to the show, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein, always on the lookout for potential future late-night hosts, began to see real possibilities in Fallon. He was clearly a big young talent, immensely prepossessing. When Ludwin got into a conversation with Lorne about potential hosts for the “Weekend Update” segment to replace the departing Quinn, Ludwin recommended Fallon. Michaels, who was going to be in sole charge of this choice no matter what any late-night executive suggested, had been kicking around a notion of inserting the show’s head writer, Tina Fey, in that role. Now he saw intriguing potential in a male-female coanchor team, something the show had not had (under Lorne) since Jane Curtin matched up first with Dan Aykroyd, then with Bill Murray, in the late 1970s.

  The following season, the team of Fey and Fallon became the hottest act on television. Writers reached for comparisons: Hepburn and Tracy, because she was so smart and he so everyman likeable; Nichols and May, because they were both so spontaneously funny; Astaire and Rogers, because “she gave him sex and he gave her class.” Michaels himself suggested the last one, though only the sex part seemed apt. Fallon provided more sass than class; he came across as kind of the cute-and-I-know-it bad boy of the act. What mostly worked was that the jokes—one part smart satire, one part ribaldry—had real bite. “After experiencing chest pains Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney was rushed to George Washington Medical Center,” Tina intoned one week in her mock-serious newsbabe voice. “When asked how Cheney’s angina would affect the administration, President Bush confidently told reporters, ‘Boys don’t have anginas!’ ”

  Jimmy could occasionally push the limits: “Sesame Street Workshop announced this week they are laying off sixty workers. News of the firings was brought to employees by the letters F and U.ʺ

  The team hit all the magazine covers; they pushed SNL back into the national conversation. Jimmy hosted the MTV awards; he was named one of People magazine’s fifty most beautiful people; he started getting movie offers. Many other SNL grads had followed the latter path, of course—everyone from Chevy Chase to Adam Sandler (and eventually Tina, as well). But Fallon’s decision to try films played, for some reason, as presumptuous arrogance to many of the growing legion of his detractors. It was too soon for Fallon to run off to Hollywood, the argument went. What made him think he was a movie star?

  None of that quibbling would have mattered if the movies were hits. Instead Fallon picked losers like Taxi, a misbegotten comedy with Queen Latifah. Fever Pitch, about an obsessive Boston fan, was a reasonable success—it might have helped that he had established credibility as a Red Sox fan thanks to Sully—but overall, Fallon’s film career was going nowhere.

  That did nothing to dissuade Lorne Michaels, who, in pondering possible replacements for Conan, never had another thought after Jimmy, whom he saw as having “a natural appeal for the audience.” That and his real comedy chops would see him through. Lorne backed Fallon with the best producer at his disposal. Mike Shoemaker was one of Lorne’s top lieutenants at SNL, who had run the “Weekend Update” segment when Fallon was there.

  Lorne’s idea was to go back to Late Night’s roots—an experimental comedy show for a different generation. The target would be the college crowd that had anointed first Letterman and then Conan. Now, of course, because that group had infinitely more diversions for its time, most of them tech based, a new young host would have to be adaptable to the tech world. Even with his truncated computer science background, Fallon filled that bill as well as anybody in comedy at the moment.

  Michaels still believed that what worked on late-night talk shows was a host people could identify with and like. “The more time you fill on television, the more and more of you comes out,” Michaels said. “These jobs define overexposure.” He had total confidence that he had a new team that would step in smoothly to Late Night—far more so than had been the case with the installation of Conan sixteen years earlier.

  “That,” Lorne recalled, “was a difficult birth.”

  In early December, Jeff Zucker gathered his West Coast entertainment chiefs, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff, to announce some important news: Jay Leno had agreed, in principle, to stay with NBC and move to a new show, airing five nights a week at ten p.m.

  Both men were flabbergasted; neither had played a direct role in NBC’s effort to retain Leno because Zucker had taken full hands-on responsibility. Silverman, who had been heavily preoccupied with fending off attacks from other quarters of Hollywood and the press for NBCʹs latest roster of prime-time misses, had tried to build a relationship with Jay, but he had never really penetrated Jay’s self-protective shell. Graboff was widely liked but mainly restricted himself to the business side, which kept him from confronting many personnel and talent issues.

  Zuc
ker took obvious pleasure in the announcement, and Graboff could see why. A move like this would accomplish several goals at once. It would take Jay off the market, while at the same time protecting Conan and The Tonight Show. It also had the potential to solve a few problems for Silverman and his development team. A weeknight strip of five editions of Jay at ten would effectively refashion NBC in the Fox model, needing only to fill the eight-to-ten p.m. hours with other entertainment programming. With five fewer hours a week for NBC Entertainment to supply, the cost savings would surely be significant. It sounded to Graboff like a very interesting play.

  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 forward to an unbilled walk-on: Stephen Colbert had agreed to drop in and do a “Year 2000” bit with him at the desk. Otherwise it looked like another day to work on stretching the monologue out a bit, maybe kick around some other ideas for The Tonight Show with Jeff Ross, head writer Mike Sweeney, and the rest of the writing staff.

  Conan and Ross had heard that Rick Ludwin was coming to town, maybe something related to Saturday Night Live, which Ludwin always attended when he was in New York.

  In fact, Ludwin was scheduled to arrive later in the day to meet with Zucker, but the issue had nothing to do with the SNL of two nights previous. The two of them were going down to visit with Conan and break the news: Jay had accepted NBC’s offer of a five-night-a-week show at ten p.m.

  The two executives knew the conversation had the potential to be long, or tense, or maybe contentious. In essence space had been cleared for Jay to move ahead of Conan again. NBC was building Jay a beachfront house right between Conan’s and the shoreline. Certainly they expected Conan to be more than a little surprised—he had not heard anything about this proposal. For all those reasons, and just good business judgment in how to break possibly bad news to a performer, Zucker had resolved to wait until the taping of that day’s show had been completed and Conan had made it back from the stage to his office.

  Out on the West Coast, meanwhile, Jay Leno had some business of his own to conduct. His deal now set, Jay felt an obligation of professional correctness. At around midday in LA, during a break from the usual joke rundown, Jay first called Peter Chernin at Fox, thanking him for his generous interest but letting him know he was staying at NBC, because the network was handing him the ten p.m. weeknight slot. Chernin, generally taciturn about all business matters, simply thanked Jay for the call.

  Then Jay called Bob Iger at Disney. Clearly the matter had gone farther with Disney and ABC, and Jay had spent a lot of time laying the groundwork with Jimmy Kimmel for a possible tag-team effort. So with Iger he was more expansive, describing how deeply he had appreciated the interest, how impressed he was with ABC’s proposal, and how close he came to accepting. But in the end, NBC had come up with something that he felt he could not turn down: ten p.m. each weeknight.

  Iger took the news equably; in truth, he wasn’t all that disappointed. Switching networks was always a crapshoot. Maybe Jay wouldn’t have provided a surefire windfall, and at least he didn’t have to face an immediate confrontation with the ABC news division over Nightline.

  By now it was getting on toward evening in the east, and Conan was backstage ready to go on. He had no clue about Jay’s calls, or the ones that followed. Iger was making a few, to notify some of the people who had been with him in the Leno hunt that it was over. These calls, naturally, set in motion talk around the ABC headquarters, and the news of NBCʹs bold move quickly seemed too delicious to withhold.

  Around six p.m., Cory Shields, the top corporate communications executive for NBC executive, got a call from The New York Times: They had the information about Jay Leno and ten o’clock.

  When Zucker heard the news had leaked, he realized he had to act fast. If Conan happened to read about Jay’s getting ten p.m. on the Times’s Web site before Zucker had a chance to break the news to him, it could become a dreaded “This is how I find out?” moment. Zucker and Ludwin made their way down to Conan’s offices to meet him directly after the show.

  In California Rick Rosen, Conan’s principal agent, sat behind the wheel of his car, cruising south on 101 back from Santa Barbara to LA. He had spent the morning checking out a possible new home. No business matters pressed; the drive was lovely. When his cell phone rang he picked up the call, which was from Kevin Reilly, now ensconced as the entertainment chief at Fox. Reilly, of course, had heard the news from Chernin.

  “Is this true about Jay and Conan?” Reilly asked.

  “Is what true?” Rick said, feeling a little tremble at the question.

  “I hear they’re gonna move Jay to ten o’clock.”

  In New York, as soon as he left the stage, Conan heard Zucker and Ludwin were coming down to Jeff Ross’s office and wanted him to stop by for a
chat. No real worries there; could be about anything. Conan arrived and splayed himself out on Ross’s couch, as he normally did. The two NBC executives were soon escorted in. Zucker greeted both men cheerfully and got right to the point.

  “I’ve figured out a way to keep Jay,” he said, with just a little note of triumph in his voice. “At ten o’clock.”

  Conan and Ross glanced at each other, a bit unsure what this meant. Finally Ross spoke.

  “So . . . ten o’clock? You don’t mean, like, every night?”

  Zucker assured them that was the plan. Ross could not restrain his surprise. “He’s going to be on five nights a week at ten?”

  “Look,” Zucker said. “This is good for you guys, because he was going to go someplace else.”

  Conan, as he often did at big moments, contained himself, letting Ross speak for both of them. When they had discussed it between themselves previously, he and Ross had never conceded the point that Jay was certain to land somewhere else. It always seemed to them that Jay’s hints of leaving were merely leverage to force NBC to come across with something that might finally make him happy. Ross had still leaned toward Jay’s stepping away from television altogether, because if he did defect and then fail at ABC, it would be a notably bad end to his career. Conan likewise couldn’t imagine Jay’s making that ultimate call to leave NBC, given his borderline obsessive-compulsive attachment to the routines of his work schedule. When they had batted it around previously, Conan had always told Ross that, if Jay really wanted to go to ABC, let him. If Jay wanted to end his legacy by jumping to another network and taking on The Tonight Show, he should go right ahead. Game on.

  The two men pressed Zucker for details on how long this arrangement would be in place. Zucker glossed over the question without offering specifics, but he did allude to its not necessarily being long term—two years, maybe.