Conan Helps Jordan Find a Home (remote)
(Jul 29, 2009)
Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien — statehood quarters
“New York: Home of Bernie Madoff’s Daily Federal Probe.”
Dave Letterman - interview with Paris Hilton after she gets out of the slammer.
Paris’ feelings were “hurt” after Dave brings back painful memories in which she actually had to face consequences for idiotic behavior!
Sep. 29, 2007
Paul McCartney to appear on Letterman for first time tonight (July 15, 2009).
“the former Beatle performed Wednesday afternoon on the roof above the Ed Sullivan Theater marquee before his appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman,” which is taped in the theater. Wednesday’s performance began at 5:30 p.m. ET and included a set of classics including “Get Back,” “Band on the Run,” “Helter Skelter” and “Back in the USSR.” Sporting a pink button-up shirt and suspenders, McCartney played to a huge crowd that blocked off traffic near the intersection of 53rd Street and Broadway.”
(CNN.com)
“Obama: The Worst President Ever!”
“he can’t pronounce the name of a town in Alabama,
his teleprompter fell down during a speech,
he tripped!
looks like he’s giving someone a run for their money.”
(Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, 7/14/09)
Conan O’Brien in his Rockefeller Center office, not long before taping his final episode of “Late Night.”
Heeeere’s … Conan!!!— On a chilly Thursday night in late January, four weeks from his last show as host of “Late Night,” Conan O’Brien was strumming a guitar behind his beat-up desk in his cluttered office at Rockefeller Center, figuring out how to say goodbye. After 16 years and 2,725 shows, O’Brien would be moving, along with almost all his staff, to Universal City in California to take over “The Tonight Show.” He’d had time to ponder his farewell. In 2004, when O’Brien’s contract was up and other networks were aggressively wooing him, NBC promised him their flagship. “But they wanted me to wait five years to be the host of ‘The Tonight Show,’ ” O’Brien told me. “And in 2004, 2009 sounded absurdly far away. I thought that in 2009, we’d be flying around with jet packs and our dinners would be in pill form. It was like being given a car when you’re 11 years old and being told, When you’re 16, you get to drive it. So I put my blinders on, and I went back to work. And, then, two years ago, I began to feel the barometric pressure changing. When it was a year away, I sat bolt upright in my bed. And now… ” O’Brien’s voice trailed off as 3 of his 15 writers arrived for their weekly meeting. “And now, we’re stuck between two worlds. We’re putting on a show here while we’re imagining another show there.”
O’Brien began playing “Dazed and Confused” on an unplugged aqua blue electric guitar as his staff assembled. When he’s not on camera in a sleek suit and tie, O’Brien nearly always wears a uniform of jeans, T-shirt and V-neck sweater in various shades of blue, brown or gray. He is skyscraper-tall, with most of his length in his legs, and his red hair rises above his forehead in an elongating airborne pouf. Because of his pale skin, freckles and college-dorm wardrobe, O’Brien, who is 46, looks boyish, but his off-camera manner is almost scholarly. He was the president of The Harvard Lampoon for two years and started his professional career as a writer for shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons.” O’Brien’s approach to comedy and television is analytical and exact. There’s a split in his psyche: he can be goofy, but he obsesses over the nuances of that goofiness. He’s constantly trying to puzzle out how best to be funny five nights a week for an audience of millions.
He learned on the job. In the early days of his show, O’Brien, who had almost no experience as a performer and was plucked from obscurity by Lorne Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night Live,” was constantly at risk of cancellation. At one low point in 1994, NBC threatened to put him on a week-to-week contract. “There were so many doubters the first year,” says Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Universal. “They said Conan jumped around too much in front of the camera, that he was too smart, too East Coast, too sophisticated, too young and even too tall to be successful. But Conan proved everybody wrong. We learned that you underestimate Conan at your own peril.”
Within a year, O’Brien began to work out a kind of comedic formula for “Late Night.” In addition to the usual glittering array of guests, the show combined the lewd and wacky (regulars included a masturbating bear and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) with more elegant, narrative-driven short films (which are called remotes) in which O’Brien left the studio and reported on, say, a historic baseball league or a station in Houston that refused to carry his show at its normal hour. The apotheosis of the “Late Night” remotes centered on the realization in 2006 that O’Brien bears a striking resemblance to the (female) president of Finland. “We took the show to Helsinki for five days,” O’Brien recalled, “where we were embraced like a national treasure.” After that first year, his audience, which was largely young and male (a coveted demographic), grew steadily, and, for the last 15 seasons, “Late Night” beat all competitors. “Lorne always says, ‘The longer you’re there is the longer you’re there,’ ” says Jeff Ross, an executive producer of “Late Night.” “Meaning, if you can weather the storms — and we had major storms — over time other shows will disappear and you will start to seem like part of the family.”
O’Brien’s office was a living scrapbook of his show. Leftover props (a Hillary Clinton can opener, a Bill Clinton corkscrew) leaned against caricatures of Conan sent in by fans. There were framed photos on the walls (his wife, Liza Powel O’Brien; their two children;Johnny Carson). Above a shelf full of awards for writing hung a large cork bulletin board. The board, which was once devoted to blue index cards denoting guests and comedy bits scheduled for “Late Night,” had been colonized by a battalion of yellow index cards, on which were written ideas for “The Tonight Show.” The suggestions, most of them for remotes, offered glimpses of a new mentality: “Conan as car valet,” “Conan as Mexican-wrestling star,” “Conan cleans pools,” “Conan goes canoeing on the Los Angeles River.” Most of the ideas utilized the notion of O’Brien as an outsider, alien to the ways of Hollywood. “Conan takes a cheerful spin on the ‘Psycho’ set,” read one card; “Conan tries to be a stunt man,” suggested another. “Conan has 2,318 dollars and tries to get in on the California bailout.”
“None of those ideas are certain yet,” O’Brien explained, as the rest of his writers piled into his office. “It’s Darwinian on the board and Darwinian in our meetings. What I learned about this show when we were struggling is that ideas have to fight for survival.” But before the new show could begin, “Late Night” needed a send-off, a proper ending. The head writer, Mike Sweeney, and his team of guys in their 30s and 40s (there were no women on the writing staff) were sprawled around the room on a beat-up sofa and stained chairs. Some were sitting on the carpeted floor. “We have to remember that we’re not going off the air forever,” O’Brien said, playing the guitar.
Source via - Can Conan O’Brien’s Brand of Humor Work on ‘The Tonight Show’? - NYTimes.com
Click here to enjoy the convenience of home delivery of The Times for 50% off.
Bands On TV This Week
7/6 - Conor Oberst And The Mystic Valley Band on Late Show with David Letterman[CBS]
7/6 - Death Cab For Cutie on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien[NBC]
7/6 - No Doubt (rerun) on Jimmy Kimmel Live[ABC]
7/7 - Rob Thomas on Late Show with David Letterman[CBS]
7/7 - Andrew Bird on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien[NBC]
7/7 - Ben Harper (rerun) on Jimmy Kimmel Live[ABC]
7/10 - Ray LaMontagne on Late Show with David Letterman[CBS]
The Top 5 Most Embarassing Moments in Late-Night
As a former insomniac, late-night TV was always a great alternative to actually laying my head down on a pillow and closing my eyes. I don’t get to watch much of it anymore, so I thought I’d compile this handy list of some of the most fantastic crashes in late night history. Not like I enjoy indulging in the embarrassment of others, I’m usually the first one reaching for the remote, cringing in that “I-can’t-watch-this-go-on!” sort of way.
But who remembers PG-13 Jennifer Garner pre-scripted-interviews and lamewads pitching their latest shit flick with no antics? Nobody. We remember this stuff:
5. Gwenyth Paltrow’s Shiny Legs. Pretty embarrassing. Especially the fact that she had to be mopped up in between takes. Next time try Kors by Michael Kors leg sheen stick, darling, and not fish oil capsules.
4. Mary Kate Olsen: Jet-Lag edition. “Sigh. Yeah. I’m good. Yeah. I’m a millionaire. Umm, yeah, I’m 22. Sorry. I just got off a plane.” It really fails around 2:10. I can appreciate that you’re tired, you little cretin, but this is honestly more bland than that wafer-thin communion bread I used to get at catholic church on Sundays, before I was, you know. On the fiery path to hell.
3. Tom Green gets legitimatley pissed after some dick chainsaws his desk. A truly painful moment in late night history! I’ve been a fan of Green’s since his Local Channel 13 stuff in Ottawa, and I’ve never seen him get truly pissed with a guest. Some “hardcore rock-and-roll” guy comes running out with a chainsaw and carves up Tom’s desk. Tom, who obviously had no idea that was going to happen, refuses to play polite with this airhead, and tells him he’s gotta pay for a replacement desk. The guy bumbles on and Tom turns to his producer and asks: “What should I do here? Should I act like this is cool to come out and wreck people’s stuff and then be nice to him? I’m gonna pretend that I’m not pissed off at you.” Ahh, Canadians. Polite to the death.
2. Joaquin Phoenix + Valium = This. I actually think Letterman is incredibly rude to him here. He’s a talented actor, he’s obviously going through some sort of bizarre phase, but come on, he was raised by cult-followers for parents, he’s obviously not kickin’ it down the beaten bath. David gets some cheap jokes in, Phoenix handles it fairly well. I half expected him to get up and punch him in the face like he did to some guy who heckled him at a ‘rap’ show of his.
1. Crispin Glover almost kicks David Letterman in the face. That isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is everything. Watching this clip will make you cringe so hard, your face just might stick that way. I have tried to figure out if it’s anxiety, drugs, a mental disorder, or just plain being nervous on television, but it might be a mixture of all of those things. Letterman’s classic line: “Paul, is this the first time you’ve seen another guy drown?” Oh, and an update on Glover - he’s currently producing a movie which he describes as “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home.” And they say people never change.
