Kevin and the Peacock – Part Nine

If you are one of my Facebook friends, you can check out the photo album I posted featuring several pictures of NBC’s Burbank facility. But I took the pictures to show my students, and I don’t want to risk disrespecting those who allowed me to take them by blindly posting them on the web. Nevertheless, I did make another trip to visit the peacock. Though, one hopes a phoenix might be a more fitting bird for the place.

Once more, with feeling…

Despite my beer gut and extra chins, I consider myself in active person. I prefer movement to being sedentary. I prefer to participate in things rather than watch them. In other words, I am a horrible audience member.

Even if I wasn’t a horrible audience member, years of working on television shows has conditioned me not to clap or cheer loudly. Working on a production crew, you are not supposed to stand out on camera.

All this is my explanation of why I got yelled at by a moron at yesterday’s taping of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” I decided to go and say goodbye to the crew members I’d come to respect over the years. I still have my NBC ID, and the security is so inefficient my name is still in their database as having “walk on priveledges.” Nevertheless, I didn’t just want to stroll idly. I wanted to see the show.

I never got to attend a live taping of “The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson.” In the 1980s, when other kids thought about sneaking out of the house to drink, have sex, and do drugs, I preoccupied a lot of my formative years sneaking to the one television set my family owned to watch Carson. In later years, my family had a VCR and I recorded a lot of episodes of “The Tonight Show,” but there was something special about tuning in at 11:30 p.m. and knowing millions of others were going to share and enjoy the same program at the same time. The next day at school, other kids would talk about WWF wrestling, Go-Bots, or the Laker game, but none of that interested me (well, OK, I did own a few Go-Bots).

Johnny Carson taught me what innuendo was. He taught me how to succeed by failing. He taught me what funny was.

My first visit to “The Tonight Show” didn’t happen until 1994. My boss at CNBC, Michael Hollander, was a former NBC Page, and he generously helped me add my mom and I to the guest list of a taping. For those not in the know, the poor schmucks who wait outside the studio are usually not the ones who get seated first. NBC employees can ask to be added to the show’s guest list. Those on the guest list meet up in the NBC gift shop, and a page walks them past the miserable fools who waited all day (sometimes overnight) and into the studio.

To be on the guest list does not guarantee a front row seat, though. To get a front row seat, you have to:

A) Be a hot chick
or
B) Know the right people

In 1994, neither A nor B applied to me, so my mom and I found ourselves in Studio 1 (Leno was still taping his shows in the Carson studio at the time), about halfway up the audience bleachers, with a partially obstructed view of the stage floor. I didn’t care about the crappy seats. I was finally attending a taping of “The Tonight Show.”

Jay Leno walked onto the stage before taping began to say hello, answer a few questions, and pose for a few pictures. His preshow banter was identical in every way to the banter he engaged in last night. The same jokes rehashed for a new audience. And why not? After all, most people don’t attend multiple tapings of a TV show. If a bit works, it can be recycled again and again. So Leno encourages the audience to eat and drink as much as they like (there is no food or drink in the studio). He talks about how it is important to laugh at his monologue, not for himself, but so the night’s guests don’t get self-conscious (insert self-effacing grimace here).

In ’94, then announcer Edd Hall did the warm up. Again, for those not in the know, TV shows with studio audiences typically employ someone to raise the energy level of audience members. It is particularly problematic to keep sitcom audiences enthused when they have to sit through multiple takes of the same gag. Edd Hall’s one audience participatory joke was to ask everyone to turn around and shake the hand of the person seated behind them. This is, of course, impossible if everyone turns around at the same time… a smattering of laughter follows, but the audience also feels animosity towards the guy who made them look dumb.

During the years I worked at NBC, “The Tonight Show” brought in a guy who did a great job warming up the crowd at the top of the show. And even though he did more or less the same prepared bits every day, the different audience members he’d choose to assist him on stage made it different, which made it entertaining for the crew.

Last night, announcer John Melendez did the warm up. John opened with the handshake gag Edd Hall used to use. I didn’t know John. John didn’t know me. We were not to be friends.

John (formerly Stuttering John) broke out into song. This did not go well. He wanted the crowd to join in, and many reluctantly did. I did not, and this posed a problem for John, since this was no longer 1994. Again, to secure choice seats, one needs to either:

A) Be a hot chick
or
B) Know the right people

Option B seemed easier for me to achieve. I’d been placed near the front row center seat, and John couldn’t have me sitting there doing nothing. The thing is, while I am not a hot chick, I am also not a barking seal, and I don’t need to be trained to jump through hoops, bark, or clap on command. I was ready to cheer when the theme was played and Jay emerged. I was not ready to jump through hoops for John.

Aside from the folks in the page office, nobody at “The Tonight Show” noticed me. Until John tried to humiliate me in front of the rest of the audience, that is. John asked me to stand up, and I was suddenly being greeted by a host of friends. John was suddenly very confused. He seemed the type to confuse easily. Assuming I was humiliated, he attempted to appease me with a free hat.

Most of the crew had not changed since the first show I saw back in ’94; many held their jobs as far back as the Carson era. Ask around. In this industry, to hold the same job for two years is rare. To be consistently and gainfully employed for decades is the rarest of rare. These guys (and a few gals) have weathered strikes, network cutbacks, and advances in technology that threatened them into near obsolescence. They endured together.

As the show began, the routine resumed. From the wings of the stage emerge the writers. If you want to know who wrote a given monologue joke, just listen to which writer tries to laugh the loudest at the punchline. Frankly, I think I’d prefer the silence that comes with flatlining material rather than desperately laughing at my own material to make it seem better than it is.

The “Headlines” segment is always a crowd pleaser, and it couldn’t be easier to do. Hold up a clipping, read it aloud, mug for the camera, pause for laughter. Repeat for six minutes.

I know many people are not fans of Leno’s style (or… some would say… the lack thereof), but the man knows how to work a crowd. I’ve said many times that he is funnier in person, one-on-one or with a smaller group of people. Granted, his incarnation of “The Tonight Show” is more formulaic than Carson’s was, but Leno is responsible for increasing the quantity of comedy in late night. At least the first half hour of each “Tonight Show” is devoted almost entirely to comedy, and as the years have gone on, most of the rest of late night has followed suit.

During commercial breaks, Vicki and the rest of the Tonight Show Band blow the roof off of the place (again, for a live-to-tape one hour show, no warm up act is needed… just decent music through the ads). The producers will enshroud Jay at his desk to prep him for whoever or whatever is next. Franz Hahn, who I’m almost convinced was the makeup artist on “Triumph of the Will” (just kidding… Franz is a gentle soul with a fun sense of humor, but he has been plying his trade for some time) will oversee any hair or makeup retouching (every time a hair stylist “fixes” Leno’s hair on set, he will immediately run his own fingers through his hair, mussing it up again).

Back from commercial, and it is time for some interviews. And it is time for Debbie Vickers to constantly prompt Jay with questions. You see, Vickers and at least one writer will position themselves so that Jay can pretend to be looking at the guest, but in reality be looking at Debbie and/or a staff writer. Having watched this from multiple angles, I can say that the majority of questions asked by Leno are not coming from his head, but from cards held up behind the guest. Reasons for why range from the rumor that Jay has severe OCD, to the rumor that the early criticism of his poor interviewing style has stuck with him, forcing him to rely on others as a crutch. Regardless, on camera, the methods used go unnoticed.

A few years ago, while listening to John Mellencamp and his band perform a sound check, I noticed one of the speakers near the band was blown. I went to the audio booth and told the engineer, who told me I was full of crap and didn’t know what I was talking about. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he went to the stage floor and investigated for himself. Once I’d been proven right, he and I got along fine. When it comes to acoustics, Studio 3 really has come a long way. Walls have been baffled, and bands (whether the Tonight Show Band or musical guests) perform from angles better suited to music than to video (basically, they get wedged into corners). Even the short skirt wearing pop diva sounded good during her performance, though I’m nearly certain she was singing nonsense lyrics most of the time (like when a children’s choir conductor tells the kids to mouth “watermelon” if they forget the words).

After the show, I went backstage and talked shop with some of the crew. I won’t get into all that was said, as I doubt it would appeal to too many people (too much “inside baseball,” as the saying goes). What made me laugh was when the subject turned to my former employer, Dick Clark Productions. Even though NBC Burbank is more or less a ghost town, people came out of the woodwork to share their stories about working for Dick Clark. I won’t repeat them here, because I’ve said all I need to say about his production company. But I took some small comfort in knowing I was not the only one with a well-deserved grudge against the company (for the record, I don’t hold the man personally responsible for me not getting the money I am owed… I don’t think Dick Clark even knew I existed, so I doubt he actively sought to bilk me out of a couple thousand dollars).

As I walked the halls and saw what was still there (and what wasn’t), I realized that the place itself isn’t all that special. In point of fact, the place itself is a dump. It was the people employed there, and the experience they brought with them, that made the NBC Studios in Burbank such a different place to work. I realized that I wasn’t visiting the NBC studios… I was visiting the people who worked there… the people who made the place feel like a home.

Short-term thinking led NBCUNI to sell the facility and break apart the NBC family, but long-term thinking might hold a glimmer of hope. Instead of getting the wrecking ball this summer, NBC has leased back the studios from its new owner (yes, NBC is now paying for something it used to own outright). It looks as though a three-year lease will keep the team together for a little while longer. Leno’s new show will emanate from “beautiful downtown Burbank.” And if NBC allows its own team of craftsmen to build the sets for the new “Tonight Show” and Jay’s new show, “scenic operations” (a.k.a. the carpenters) will be back in business with saws buzzing. If “Days of our Lives” remains on the lot, and one or two other shows take up residence, there may be new life in the old girl yet.

And that would be reason to clap and cheer.