The War for Late Night (56 page)

That got much harder thanks to his own misread of who still might be friendly to him. He expected his “10 at 10” interchange with Jimmy Kimmel, scheduled for the fourteenth, the same day Ebersol gave his interview to
The Times,
to be a way to capitalize playfully just a little on all the late-night uproar. One associate on
Tonight
was astounded that the booking had even been made, thinking it was foolish to believe Kimmel might be a friend of the show, especially under the circumstances.

Kimmel expected the interview to kick off some typical give-and-take between comics, based on the whole NBC ferment. But when the segment producer called him to try out a few questions, they couldn’t have been more bland and off the topic, like “What’s your favorite snack junk food?”

“I’m hoping we can talk about everything that’s going on,” Kimmel told the producer. “I have a huge viral thing on my hands because of the imitation.” Kimmel’s impression of Leno was all over the Internet.

“Well, we don’t want to beat that to death,” the producer replied.

“I understand that you don’t want to beat it to death,” Jimmy answered. “But it’s the elephant in the room. It has to be addressed.”

The producer said he would talk to the higher-ups about it. But when Kimmel got the proposed questions later in the day, he saw nothing about the whole Conan dustup. His conclusion: That little fucker Jay intended to neutralize him on the show, sending a message—“Oh yeah, Jimmy and I are friends. That vicious imitation of me he did? That didn’t mean anything.”

Kimmel felt he had been totally up front about what he wanted to discuss, so it would be fair game for him to spin the answers in that direction, even if the questions steered far away.

Knowing the premise of the bit, Kimmel figured he had some advantages. It had to be ten questions, so they couldn’t really edit a few out. And if he gauged his answers correctly, they wouldn’t easily be able to edit individual moments, either. Then he set up his own cameras to tape his end so he would have that to use no matter what Jay did.

Just before they started, the on-site producer tried to tease Kimmel about his friend Adam Carolla, who had become a frequent Leno guest: “I hope you’re half as funny as your buddy Adam when he’s on the show.”

“I’m gonna be funny,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you worry about it, you motherfucker.”

Kimmel sat at his desk for the bit, which was being satellited all the way from Hollywood to Burbank. It began innocently enough. Jay introduced Kimmel with his usual buoyancy, asking if anything was new in late night. Kimmel said he only watched Oprah in late night. (It was an inside joke, because several ABC stations, including a big one, in Chicago, carried a rerun of Oprah at midnight and delayed Kimmel’s start time, which affected his national ratings.)

Nothing much happened until question four, when Jay asked who in the world Jimmy would most want to interview. This was teed up for him:

“You and Conan, together,” Jimmy said.

But it was at question five when Kimmel’s real purpose in the visit became clear: “What’s the best prank you ever pulled?”

After a real answer about the time he painted his aunt’s house orange and green, Jimmy said, “I think the best prank I ever pulled was, I told a guy once, ‘Five years from now I’m going to give you my show.’ And then when the five years came, I gave it to him and I took it back, almost instantly.”

“Wow, wow,” Jay said, trying to laugh along agreeably. “A very good friend,” Jimmy said under the laughs, and then added, “I think he works at Fox or something now.”

Then question six: “Did you ever order anything off the TV?”

“Like NBC ordered your show off the TV?”

Question seven was about the most number of lap dances Kimmel had ever ordered in Vegas. Jimmy first said his mother was watching, then clarified, “Wait a minute. The show’s canceled, right? Nobody’s watching the show.” Then he added, “Strippers I don’t like in general because you have this phony relationship with them for money—similar to when you and Conan were on
The Tonight Show
together? Passing the torch?”

Jay was saying, “Right, right,” to play along. Next question: “What do you fear most?”

Kimmel went through volcanoes and tidal waves before he added, “I fear the network will move my show to ten o’clock.”

“I had that nightmare!” Jay threw in.

At this point, number nine looked like an invitation to open hunting season: “Is there anything you haven’t hosted that you want to host?”

“Oh, this is a trick, right?” Kimmel asked. “Where you get me to host
The Tonight Show
and then take it back from me?”

The final question was a multiple choice on why Jimmy came on the show (with stupid choices like “You like satellite technology” except for the last, which was about keeping Jay happy in case he decided to switch to ABC). Kimmel turned it into an all-Conan fest: “Listen, Jay. Conan and I have children. All you have to take care of is cars!”

“That’s right,” Jay muttered, still playing along but looking to end this thing as amicably as possible.

“We have lives to lead here,” Kimmel said. “You’ve got eight hundred million dollars! For god’s sakes, leave our shows alone!”

Jay, smiling as best he could, finished it up. “A plea from Jimmy Kimmel! Jimmy, thank you, my friend.”

Kimmel had been nervous beforehand, but he was now elated. It had the feel of winning a ten-round fight. Jay’s producers seemed stunned. Kimmel waited until he got out of earshot of the Leno crew, then erupted with his writers. “Oh my god, that was so uncomfortable,” one said. Kimmel thought Jay might drop the whole thing, because it had gone so badly for him and there was essentially no way to edit it.

Jimmy had no remorse. As he saw it, he took what they were trying to do to him—make him Jay’s boy—as a hostile act that justified rough treatment. But he had not expected Jay to just stand there and take it, never deviating from his script. Surely Jay would say something back, Kimmel had thought. But he just let Kimmel pummel him without really throwing a punch in return.

Of course, that posture had defined Jay from the earliest of ages: He’d actually tried boxing once and found all he could do was let the other guy hit him. And then, of course, there had been that incident in school with the kid and the hammer.

Back at Jay headquarters, the discomfort was acute. Jay knew he’d walked into a door being pushed in his face and could blame no one but himself. He’d let it happen, so he wasn’t going to cut it from the air.

Debbie Vickers was furious. Jay accepted it as comedy, so he could not allow himself to be angry. Debbie believed it was bad manners; Kimmel had stepped over some kind of line into sheer rudeness. Jay ascribed Jimmy’s motivation to a small-time guy looking to get publicity from taking on a big-time guy. Not quite the fly who lives off the back of the elephant, but something like that. For Kimmel, Jay figured, this was like the best publicity he could get.

In that, Jay was certainly right. Kimmel climbed aboard a wave of reaction the likes of which he had rarely experienced before. For three days afterward he felt like Rocky on the steps in Philadelphia. For every one who accused him of being an invited guest who’d peed on his host’s carpet—and there weren’t that many who did—he had thousands of claps on the back. The Internet went wild with kudos for how ballsy he was to take Jay on that way face-to-face.

Kimmel couldn’t believe how it had worked out. Instead of giving him a question or two to bat this around, Leno’s forces had tried to avoid it, and he’d batted Jay over the head with it. That question about his greatest prank? That was so perfect, it was almost as though God had told him he had to do it.

He still could not believe that Jay had not expected it. If anyone had paid attention to Jimmy’s career, they would have seen he could be vicious if he needed to be—and that he lived for this kind of setup.

The reaction Kimmel appreciated most came from the other late-night voice reveling in the Jay-Conan saga. David Letterman sent him a brief note to tell him that his Leno bit had been really funny.

 

Through his steadfast massaging of each side, Ron Meyer had broken through on the main financial issues, determining the most NBC was willing to pay and the least the Conan side was willing to take. The math he could handle.

On Thursday, the day of the Kimmel “10 at 10” ambush, Meyer called Rick Rosen, who was still in Palm Springs, to inform him that he believed a deal could be made on the numbers—about $32 million to pay off Conan. Severance for the staff, which Conan had stressed as a condition as well, still had to be resolved. Meyer told Rosen they needed him back in the conference room in LA to finish things off.

When Rosen spoke to the Conan negotiating group, they agreed it was time for him to return, so he chartered a plane and flew back. He met first with Conan and Ross, then joined the group in the conference room at Universal.

There the framework of a deal seemed to be in place; the contract would be settled after one more week on the air for Conan, a concession the host had pushed for in order to set up a proper farewell for his
Tonight
show. But the NBC group needed a break to run things by New York. At that point, the forward movement slowed down. The counsel for GE got involved; GE would need to figure out how to structure the payout over a number of quarters.

NBC also had a few fine points it wanted to discuss, a primary one being an assurance that Howard Stern would not appear as a guest during Conan’s last week. This struck Rosen as a comical request—Conan had no interest in booking anyone as incendiary as Stern—so it was easily accepted. There were also demands that Conan not sit down for interviews with Letterman, Oprah, or Regis Philbin until months had passed. NBC also requested to see the show’s scripts for the final week, but that was never going to happen.

Nothing was finalized on Thursday, and the Friday talks got bogged down as well. Nobody wanted the negotiations to carry over into the weekend, but NBC still had issues to resolve.

On Saturday the
New York Post
ran a story saying that Conan’s staffers felt betrayed. They couldn’t believe Conan wouldn’t at least try to live with the 12:05 idea for a while to see if it worked out, so that they could keep their jobs. They had moved across the country to work with him and now, because of his ego, they would be out of work while he basked in some big $30 million settlement.

The story, which O’Brien had no doubt was a direct plant from NBC, infuriated him, because he had worked so hard to ensure some financial security for the staff, and they had seemed to respond with nothing but support—as evidenced by the near unanimous vote of the writers that he should walk. (In truth, there was a small minority of staff members who expressed some anger about Conan’s giving up the show and their jobs with it.)

Again Conan found himself appalled. The NBC people had observed his work for seventeen years and yet they had no clue about his character? Did they really think he had no regard for his staff? Even after he had paid them out of his own pocket during the writers’ strike? Did they really think he would use his last week on the air to go on a trash tour of NBC? Or book himself onto some other shows to assail Jeff Zucker?

When he saw Patty Glaser at one of the meetings, Conan asked her, “Why are these guys so obsessed with this meaningless stuff?”

“These are very small people,” Glaser replied.

On Saturday Gaspin called Rosen and informed him there was a new problem: NBC could not sign off on certain terms in the deal.

“You can’t be doing this now,” Rosen complained, but Gaspin insisted that it couldn’t be helped. A conference call was set for Sunday, the day of the Golden Globe Awards (to be telecast by NBC), and would begin at eleven, early enough for everyone to get into their tuxes in time for the show.

On Sunday Rosen reached out again to Ron Meyer, telling him he needed his help one more time, because things seemed to be going off the rails. Meyer told him he was being iced out a bit by the NBC team, which had come to believe he was too favorable to the Conan side.

Rosen remained in his new home in Santa Barbara, communicating with Glaser and Brecheen, who were in a conference room at Patty’s firm in Century City. The eleven a.m. start time went by, then noon. Gaspin called Rosen saying the call had to be delayed even further. The afternoon dragged on.

Gavin Polone had scheduled a date for that evening. He thought about canceling; but what were the odds something was getting done with the Golden Globes going on? Besides, it was a second date, and he was interested in this new woman.

Rosen called Meyer again; from Ron he learned that GE had now become a bigger factor. Jeffrey Immelt, the GE chairman, had suddenly started to question why they were paying so much money to a guy they were going to allow to run off to another network.

The call was put off until six p.m., meaning the meeting would surely spill into the middle of the Globes show. (It would be nine p.m. in the east.) It also meant that a gaggle of the highest-priced legal talent in LA would be sitting around doing nothing but piling up billable hours.

By six, Polone had picked up his date and was headed for the movies. He wanted to see
Avatar
in 3D. By the time he got to the theater, it was sold out. The only thing they could get into was
The Young Victoria
. Twelve minutes into that movie, his BlackBerry buzzed: an e-mail from Jeff Ross. They wanted him to call in. Gavin excused himself and fled to the lobby.

The Conan group discussed the latest developments on their own conference call. Now NBC was asking for concessions they saw as totally crazy—among them, the unilateral right to pull the show on any night of the following week if they didn’t like the content. The Conan forces signed off quickly on that one; they could only imagine how it would play for NBC in the press if they decided to pull Conan off the air one night because they didn’t like a joke he told.