The War for Late Night (20 page)

 

If they had had a vote, a group of television executives from the other networks would have happily stumped for Conan as well. To the hierarchy of ABC and Fox, NBC’s move had the look of a free ticket on the late-night gravy train. Were they
really
going to usher the dominant late-night star out the door? And leave him open to sign elsewhere, bringing along the $50 million to $100 million in profits that had previously gone to NBC? Was there a catch?

Maybe. It would certainly take strenuous wooing to land Leno, who was famous for his reluctance to change any habit (like those denim shirts and Payless shoes), never mind one as big as whom he would work for. And there was that ungodly long wait. Who knew what NBC might pull in the end, if it really looked as though a competitor was about to grab Leno? Still, it was surely worth trying.

ABC still had its
Nightline
issue, but the network had shown its hand in 2002 when it chased Letterman. For the right talent the 11:35 hour would be offered up, no matter how loudly the news division might howl to the moon (and the press). Leno was clearly the right talent. It went beyond a no-brainer; if ABC
didn’t
pursue Jay, the Disney shareholders would have a right to sue them for malfeasance. Bob Iger, who had been named chief executive of Disney in 2005, personally took charge of supervising the Leno courtship, with help from Anne Sweeney, the top ABC corporate executive, and Steve McPherson, the head of entertainment.

Over at Fox, Peter Chernin, still eager to fill the network’s late-night void, might still have preferred Conan, in terms of matching the sensibility of his network. But how could any network pass on the opportunity to sign the biggest dog in the yard? How could Fox stay on the sidelines? Chernin decided again to head up the Fox effort to lure away an NBC late-night star.

Fox’s hunger to grab a slice of late night had not abated since the disappointment of failing to land Conan in 2001. The network had sniffed around for other potential candidates, and in 2007 made a full-frontal assault on what it considered to be a potential game-changing name in late night when Chernin and Fox took a serious run at Billy Crystal.

The well-respected comic, whose already soaring career went stratospheric thanks to his eight-time much-celebrated hosting performances at the Academy Awards, had not previously been part of the big late-night derbies. With movies, one-man Broadway shows, and Oscar duties, Crystal hardly needed the profile boost of his own talk show. But when Fox came calling, he listened.

For one thing, Fox presented a compelling case. It had put together a PowerPoint presentation of what it called a late-night deck, which broke down what the comic could expect in terms of station clearances and advertising sales, and even a guess at what size audience might be available. (Once again, the pitch was to launch a show at eleven p.m., giving Crystal a half-hour jump on Leno and Letterman.) And then there was the $20 million-plus potential payday.

The Fox executives were convinced they had gotten close, really close, to making a deal with Billy. He asked all the right questions; the interest was there. But if he hadn’t already been aware of just how much effort went into these jobs, having done the late-night rounds himself—including, famously, being the first ever guest on Leno’s
Tonight Show
—it hardly took much due diligence to learn. “When Billy found out how much you have to work,” said one Fox entertainment executive, “he thought,
No way
.”

Workload was never going to be an issue with Jay Leno, of course, whose reputation preceded him. The product might not always be fresh or exciting or new to the critics, but it was going to be pumped out on a regular basis and it was going to generate numbers—and dollars. NBC’s competitors knew if they somehow could lure Jay away, the tectonic plates in the late-night world would slide and shift with devastating results.

But the rules had to be observed. NBC held exclusive rights to Jay Leno’s television work for the full period of his contract. That meant that any flirtations that went over the line into an actual pass—as in, anything resembling a real offer of future employment for Jay elsewhere—would be grounds for a legitimate claim of tampering, or tortious interference, if it ever got to court.

Hollywood deals generally hold only loosely to such legal niceties. Agents and managers test the waters of future associations for their clients all the time, and studios and networks have their ways of letting talent know how much they love the idea of getting together someday. Everyone in the late-night game remembered how David Letterman’s team had handled his contractual complications with NBC when the star looked to flee in 1993. Though bound by limitations stipulating when Letterman would be free to negotiate any kind of new deal, his agents at CAA simply told suitors to make their best pitch—and all Dave would do was listen.

Now Leno found himself in a similar position: He was all ears.

The approaches from ABC and Fox were general at first. Interest was conveyed; discreet conversations were held. Everyone understood the terms. Jay was locked in at NBC through January 1, 2010, and NBC retained exclusive negotiating rights with him until late November 2009. No outside entity could engage in any negotiation with him before that time. Jay, of course, had no formal representation, so the only way to get to him was either directly or through his lawyer, Ken Ziffren. Quiet though it was, none of this activity caught NBC by surprise in the least. “I expect Bob Iger and Peter Chernin are camped out at Leno’s garage,” one top NBC Entertainment executive said.

If they were not there exactly, they were certainly cruising the neighborhood. And if NBC didn’t get word of Jay’s courtship some other way, Leno had his own means of communication—like the night when he was doing his act two “Headlines” segment and put up a local newspaper’s Sunday TV listings insert. The cover featured a picture of Jay himself, with the tagline “Starring Jay Leno of ABC.”

Jay, swallowed-canary grin firmly in place, peered into the camera and said: “Like a headline from the future.”

 

On November 5, 2007, the monologues stopped—for everybody. Looking to press the networks and studios for a bigger payday from their material being used on new media like Internet videos and webisodes, writers walked off their jobs, shutting down every scripted show on television. That included the late-night shows, all of which relied on a stable of twelve to twenty writers.

The late-night hosts felt the pressure almost immediately. They were all writers themselves, of course, and members of the Writers Guild of America. But they were also signature stars for their networks, and so usually much closer to the network management than stars of sitcoms in Hollywood were. The top network executives, sensing one way to undermine the solidarity of the union and its supporters among actors, directors, and the other Hollywood guilds, almost immediately pushed for the late-night hosts to return to work. They argued that the hosts could mount shows without the writers.

The hosts had to add that pressure to the pain the strike was inflicting on their nonwriting staff members. Segment producers, researchers, assistants, and artists would all go without pay as the result of a game in which they had no stake. NBC told the producers of its two late-night shows that it would pay the staff through November, but after that layoffs would begin.

O’Brien was the first host to pledge that he would pay the staff out of his own pocket, if it came to that. Jeff Ross made that promise public but tried to shame the network a bit by adding, “We’re hoping it will not be necessary because GE’s pockets are a lot deeper than Conan’s.”

OʹBrien was not the only host taking steps to protect his staff. Jon Stewart had already given his group a similar assurance. David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants was already responsible for paying his staff directly, because in his unique arrangement with CBS, Letterman owned his show. The company announced that the staff of Letterman’s
Late Show
as well as that of
The Late Late Show
—which had installed Craig Ferguson as the new host less than a year earlier—would continue to be paid, but not in full. (Rob Burnett was already plotting a special course of action for Worldwide Pants.)

Quietly several of the shows in New York began back-channel talks among themselves, hoping that there might be safety in numbers if they acted in concert in returning to the air. Letterman had to be looked to as the leader—he was the longest-serving host and obviously the prime mover in New York. All the shows wanted to return to the air, but they also wanted to respect the writers and their cause, and they also didn’t want to run afoul of any union strictures about what would be allowed on the air if they did return. (In essence, no written material, only ad libs, would be permitted.)

Meanwhile, out west, Jay Leno was looking to do a little back-channeling of his own. While he made some gestures of support for the writers, including turning up on the picket lines with a stash of doughnuts, being off the air always drove Jay a little buggy. If there was going to be a way to get back on TV, Jay wanted to explore it. He reached out to a guy he suspected might be a kindred spirit, at least during the strike: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel.

That Jay could even have a civil discussion of any kind with Kimmel seemed beyond imagining only a short time earlier. Late-night competitors may have a history of barbed comments about each other; Kimmel’s early remarks about Jay were barbarous. A lifelong Letterman disciple, Jimmy had arrived in the late-night cauldron in 2003 spilling over with disdain for Leno and his brand of comedy.

First Kimmel gave an interview in which he said of his upcoming ABC show, “I want to do the comedy version of
The Tonight Show
.ʺ Then, after Jay called Kimmel’s publicist to complain, Kimmel said he had only been goofing around, though he couldn’t help reacting publicly to the phone call by saying, “It’s just amazing how insecure he is.” Kimmel clearly had the prevailing view of most Letterman devotees: “Leno was so great when he was a guest on Letterman. Great, great. I just think he worked it too hard. I think he turned comedy into factory work—and it comes across.”

Kimmel even rationalized about becoming a competitor to the great Dave himself by turning it against Leno. “I figure this: The people who like Leno are largely the stupid group. The people who root for Letterman are the smarter group. The people who like me? Also stupid. I figure I cut into the dummies.” And he suggested that his greatest fear in starting up his own talk show was the bad example the late-night audience was already setting. “In a world where Jay Leno beats David Letterman every night, you can’t be sure of anything.”

Leno, who seemed to read everything written about him, was flabbergasted by the trashing Kimmel was dishing out—before he even had a show on the air. Jay was never one to flinch from picking up the phone and seeking an explanation from people who maligned him, even occasionally viewers who wrote letters of complaint. He dialed up Kimmel.

Jay didn’t spew anger in these calls. He usually presented himself as mystified about the impetus for the attack and interested in knowing if he had done anything to provoke it. Put on the spot, Kimmel told Jay he had been wrong to make comments like that. He explained that he was coming into late-night with a morning-radio mentality, because that was where he had spent most of his young career. In that venue, everybody looks to gut the other guy. And then, of course, Kimmel admitted he was a huge Letterman fan and as such was angry at Jay because of what had happened with Dave at NBC, which, he said, he later came to realize he had no right to be. Kimmel acknowledged he had a chip on his shoulder with regard to Jay, and maybe that was silly.

As it turned out, they had a pleasant conversation that set up a rapprochement. Kimmel concluded that Leno, who seemed to have no real emotional investment in any of this, wanted to patch things up, just move on. That made sense. Leno was on top; it was in his interest to snuff out any conflict.

Kimmel was willing to go along with that—for now.

 

Maybe it had to do with growing up in Las Vegas. From a young age, Jimmy Kimmel liked to put it all out there and let it ride. He was born in Brooklyn—that may have factored into the bravado as well—moving west to Nevada at age nine. His father, also James—German-Irish side and wryly witty—worked for IBM. His mom, Joan—from the Italian side of the family and a pistol—raised a close clan of J-offspring, her sons Jimmy and Jon and their sister Jill.

In his youth Kimmel had two all-consuming fascinations: art and David Letterman. The art he pursued in school, when he wasn’t indulging his wiseass nature. When he was eight, still in Brooklyn, a teacher suggested a career in comedy. In high school, then in Vegas, he cut up in class so persistently that one teacher ordered a strict limit of one joke a week. That was good for comic discipline: Kimmel knew he had to get off a memorable line with that single shot.

He generally stayed up well past midnight, mesmerized by the show on the little black-and-white set on the desk in his room. If David Letterman was on, Jimmy Kimmel was watching. For his seventeenth birthday, his mother surprised him with a cake in the shape of the
Late Night
logo, along with a “Late Night with David Letterman” jacket she had made for him. When he got his first car in high school, the license plate read, “L8 NITE.”

His parents expected Kimmel to pursue his talent for drawing; he had other ideas. Because Letterman had started in radio, that was where Jimmy would try to break in. (Letterman had actually started in TV as a local weatherman in Indianapolis, and his radio career was a poor choice to emulate in any case, because Dave had bombed when he did a year’s stint in talk radio.)

By then Kimmel already had unusual responsibilities: a wife and family. He had married his college sweetheart at twenty-one, and three years later they had a daughter, adding a son two years after that. Career objectives got filed deep behind bill-paying concerns. The radio jobs came—and mostly went: Seattle, Tampa, Palm Springs, Tucson. Kimmel usually blazed in and then flamed out, mainly because he got on the wrong side of somebody.