The War for Late Night (47 page)

Gaspin pressed the NBC lawyers in Los Angeles and New York: Do I have flexibility here? After some contractual analysis, the answer came back: Absolutely yes. In the deal Conan had signed to host
Tonight
, the duration (three years) and the salary (about $12 million) were specified. All kinds of other details—producers’ salaries, head writer’s salary, band size, other departments—were specified. Time-period protection was
not
specified—not remotely specified, the NBC lawyers told Gaspin. As they broke it down for him, the only thing the operative contract contained was boilerplate language about the show’s “being scheduled at the network’s discretion.”

The lawyers also emphasized to Gaspin that they were confident they stood on unassailable ground, because whenever time-period protection
was
granted in television contracts—and that was infrequently—the issue was clearly spelled out. That had been exactly the case with the previous occupant of
The Tonight Show
—Jay and Ken Ziffren had negotiated specific, unambiguous time-period protection. That kind of language had become common in contracts with late-night stars, at least ones with a shred of leverage. Letterman had the clause written in from his first day at CBS; Jon Stewart had specified the time period in his deal with Comedy Central; Jimmy Kimmel had it in his deal with ABC.

Conan doesn’t have it, the lawyers assured Gaspin. He was guaranteed
The Tonight Show
. He was not guaranteed that it would start at 11:35 p.m.

The legal interpretation cemented Gaspin’s resolve to go forward. Had Conan’s contract had the same specific time-period protection that all those other late-night stars had, Gaspin knew his course would have been radically altered. He would not have gone through these machinations. Had Conan’s
Tonight Show
been locked in at 11:35, the options would have narrowed to the elemental choice: Fire Jay or fire Conan.

 

Gaspin had his assistant set up the appointment for sixish, shortly after Jay finished taping his show on Tuesday, January 5. That evening, with darkness descending, Jeff got in a car with Rebecca Marks, the head of corporate communications on the West Coast (also a close friend of Debbie Vickers), and they made their way east on the freeway, over to Burbank.

The bare bones of the mission could have been delivered as a bad-news /good-news joke: You’re canceled; but hey, you get to go back into late night.

Gaspin had no intention of taking it lightly. The stakes were too high for Jay—and NBC. Besides, it wasn’t his style.

Jay, already in his denims, greeted them in his more spacious, less dungeony private digs in the new studio. Debbie drifted in at about the same time, saying hello a bit tensely to Gaspin and Marks. Gaspin suspected Vickers might know what was coming, thanks to a tip from her producer soul mate, Zucker.

Gaspin initiated a bit of small talk about that night’s show; it was forced, and it was pretty obvious that it was forced. Finally Rebecca Marks bit the bullet, saying simply, “We have an issue.”

“We have a problem,” Gaspin seconded, stepping up to the task. “Our affiliates are incredibly unhappy with ten o’clock. They want us to make a change. If we don’t, they’re threatening to preempt. They’re threatening to talk publicly, negatively, about the performance of the show. We’ve got a real problem here.” Gaspin spoke directly to Leno, and he could read the impact of his words in Jay’s face.

“What do you want to do?” Jay asked.

Gaspin, though feeling terrible, didn’t hold back. “We’re going to pull the show,” he said.

Very quietly Leno said, ʺOK.ʺ

Debbie Vickers grasped the bottom line:
We’ve just been fired.

The room fell silent. Finally Jay spoke up again. “What do you want to do?” he said. “How do you want to handle it?”

“I want you to go back to eleven thirty,” Gaspin said.

Jay’s relief, Gaspin noticed, was instantaneous. His face lifted and brightened. “Yeah, let’s do it!” he said, the pitch of his voice almost as high as performance level.

Debbie Vickers, in her quiet but forceful way, got herself in between Gaspin and Jay’s enthusiasm. She suggested that they hear more.

“It’s not that simple,” Gaspin told them. “I only want you to do a half hour.”

Now Vickers jumped all the way in, clearly thrown by the proposal. What did he mean, a half hour? What kind of show is it? Just comedy material? No guests?

“Look,” Gaspin said. “Some days you have guests; some days you don’t.” He described it as monologue, then comedy material, then maybe a guest, maybe some music. “You know that in every hour show there’s a good half hour. You get to do that show every night.”

Gaspin emphasized that Jay would get to do his long monologue every night—just as always. That was the prime selling point, as Gaspin saw it. Like many others, Gaspin had heard Jay’s story about being dumped by an agent who told him he was a good comic but he would never get into the press. Now Jay always had jokes quoted in the press—and he kept track. In the Sunday Week in Review section of
The New York Times
Jay always counted how many of his jokes made the weekly list. It was another form of competition for him. He almost always beat Dave and he was proud of that.

Starting to put it together, Jay turned to the other obvious lingering issue. “What happens with Conan?” he asked.

“He goes at twelve,” Gaspin said. “Everything just moves back.”

“So I wouldn’t get
The Tonight Show
?ʺ Jay asked.

“No, Conan would keep
Tonight
,ʺ Gaspin said. Jay stared at him during another extended silence. “Look, we have a tough situation here,” Gaspin finally said. “NBC is in trouble. If you leave or Conan leaves, it gets worse. We really want both of you. We think both of you are big talents. We’re trying to figure out a way to keep both of you.” He tried to appeal to their long loyalty to a network, now facing a real crisis. The company could fold, Gaspin told them. “We can’t afford for this to fall apart.”

Jay paused again, considering it all. “You think Conan will go for this?”

Gaspin indicated they were confident they could make him come around, though nothing with Conan was settled yet.

Leno told Gaspin that he didn’t want Conan to be hurt, but he was still trying to get his head around what this half-hour-at-11:35-not-
The-Tonight-Show
really meant. “I’ve done an hour for eighteen years,” he reminded Gaspin.

Vickers’s head was also spinning. She pressed again: How would they do a half hour?

Gaspin said that would be an issue for another day if they could all agree on the overall plan. “I don’t need an answer tonight,” he said. “Think about it, and let’s talk more tomorrow.”

Vickers had one final question, something she had to know before she committed even to thinking about switching to a half-hour format: What would happen if they said no? “Would you release us from our contracts?” she asked. Jay wanted to know the same thing.

“No,” Gaspin said. “We’re not going to release you.”

 

After his discussion with Jay, Jeff Gaspin felt sufficiently confident to bring Marc Graboff into the tight circle aware of the new late-night strategy. He needed Graboff because as NBC’s chief deal man with talent, Graboff would be the one in direct talks with Ken Ziffren about any redrafting of Jay’s contract.

Graboff, like most of the other top NBC executives, had spent the holidays wondering which of the several suggested scenarios to resolve the ten p.m. dilemma would be put into effect. He was mildly surprised that they had decided to take this option, but the train was leaving the station and he knew what his next stop would be: a call to Ziffren.

As Graboff set off to contact Ziffren, the small retinue of NBC executives on both coasts who were now briefed on the plan mulled over the increasingly interesting sidebar to this big news: that it was Jeff Gaspin and not Jeff Zucker driving the action.

It seemed to this group that, besides the obvious inference that Zucker probably wanted to maintain some distance from this decision, Gaspin’s willingness to ride this plan to completion had much to do with his wanting to establish himself as “the guy”—the executive truly in charge of resolving this crisis.

The corporate dynamics at work fascinated some of the close NBC observers. Just as new owners were appearing on the scene, Jeff Zucker had appointed Jeff Gaspin to a job that had previously defenestrated two other promising executives, Kevin Reilly and Ben Silverman, in quick succession. Gaspin, a shrewd insider, had clearly observed this development and decided he couldn’t allow himself to be seen as another puppet of Jeff Zucker in the job. In almost every move Gaspin had made since taking over the entertainment division, he had seemed to be sending a message:
I’m running programming; I’m running scheduling.
For the first time since he had moved back east, Zucker was not attending—or running—every NBC prime-time scheduling meeting. Gaspin had agreed to bring Zucker into a monthly overview of scheduling, but he had emphasized that Zucker was not leading NBC Entertainment day to day anymore.

That had struck a sizable portion of the staff as both a good and a necessary development. Somebody had to build a firewall against what the staffers saw as incessant intrusion by New York. Now, with the Comcast takeover imminent, the dynamic grew even more intriguing for the Gaspin-Zucker analysts. Gaspin had even more incentive to separate as much as possible from Zucker, because he needed to prove to the Comcast duumvirate of Brian Roberts and Steve Burke that he was not another Jeff Zucker captive. Thanks to his years managing NBCʹs cable networks, Gaspin even enjoyed a potential advantage: The Comcast guys knew him; they had worked with him. Who could predict what Comcast’s real intentions were? It could only be to Jeff Gaspin’s benefit to step away from Jeff Zucker’s penumbra as much as was reasonably possible.

Marc Graboff was one of the few NBC executives with enough experience and status not to have to be preoccupied with such palace intrigues. He had shared the title of chairman of the entertainment division with Ben Silverman and he remained a trusted lieutenant to Zucker. Now he had to face off against Ken Ziffren, knowing that he held nothing in the way of cards, while Ziffren, armed with the pay-and-play deal he had negotiated for Jay, held a fistful.

Graboff could not guess what to expect when he called Ziffren to follow up on Gaspin’s meeting with Jay. NBCʹs legal department had advised Graboff not to blanch if Ziffren threatened to seek an injunction. Thanks to Leno’s unusual contract, Ziffren might actually have some grounds to try, they told him, though no court was going to give him that. Graboff himself, having observed Leno up close for as long as he had, guessed Jay would have no stomach for a move like that anyway.

But even as Graboff was explaining to Ziffren that they couldn’t be sure yet whether Jay was going to have to switch to a half-hour format, the lawyer expressed an eagerness to make a deal—right there on the phone. For Graboff it was a sign of just how badly Jay wanted the ten p.m. show in his rearview mirror. And that he wanted a new agreement secured quickly.

Graboff made a provisional deal with Ziffren, dependent on whether Jay shifted to a half hour or wound up back in an hour-long show. Ziffren told Graboff to let him know what NBC ultimately decided, and they would go from there.

What Marc Graboff didn’t know was that at least one NBC executive, privy to some of the internal concerns of the Leno camp, had no doubt that Jay would have welcomed any move that might save him from disappearing from television altogether. Dick Ebersol, working the corridors of NBC in his usual fingerprintless way, had a long-established back-channel connection to Jay through Debbie Vickers. They spoke often—easily often enough for Dick to have known, since shortly after Thanksgiving, that Jay expected the worst. From Debbie, Ebersol learned that Jay knew full well the ten p.m. show was not working, and given the unhappiness of the affiliates, he didn’t see how he could survive. The message Ebersol heard from Leno’s camp: Jay expected to be cut off, handed a check, and sent on his way. There was no mention of lawsuits or injunctions.

Ebersol didn’t know when Gaspin was actually going to lower the boom on Leno, but as soon as he did, Dick got word of it. Not more than fifteen minutes after Gaspin left Jay’s dressing area that Tuesday night in Burbank, Debbie Vickers dialed him up. Dick was in Dallas, preparing for NBCʹs coverage of that Saturday’s NFL play-off game. Debbie told him that she had been surprised—not by the news itself, which Dick, too, suspected she had been tipped about by Zucker—but by Jay’s instant embrace of the network’s proposal. Jay had shown a little too much leg, Debbie concluded, wishing he had resisted NBC’s pretty ill-formed ploy of cutting him back to half an hour. “How will I get an audience?” she asked him. “We’re not going to have time for a guest of consequence and we can’t have a music act, because that will destroy Conan when he follows straight up at twelve. What’s our show going to be?”

 

Wednesday morning, Jeff Gaspin arrived in his office to a message that Jay Leno was on the phone. As soon as the conversation started, Gaspin realized that the tone was different. Jay was waffling. Thinking about it in the hours after their meeting the day before, Jay told him, he had started to question if he could really work in a half-hour format. To Gaspin, this sounded like Debbie Vickers talking. He told Jay he understood his concerns and asked if he could drop by to discuss it with him and Debbie after that night’s show.

Back in Jay’s postshow enclave, Gaspin presented his rationale again, talking it through, this time adding a little high emotion. Speaking of how difficult it had been to find a solution that would not leave either Jay or Conan behind, Gaspin said, “I’m not trying to make Sophie’s choice. I’m really trying to be fair to both of you.”

Jay and Debbie pressed him on the Conan issue: Did Gaspin really think Conan was going to take this?