Jay Leno appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” this morning to tell his side of the story in the recent late-night war.
Leno’s been castigated for appearing unfeeling, disingenuous and even manipulative throughout the brouhaha. The biggest mistake he made during the last month was to portray himself as a victim in the whole affair, but he used much of the same language Thursday (he spoke of being “fired” twice). On Winfrey’s show he did admit to telling a “white lie” in 2004, when the transition was first announced.
When asked by Winfrey what his reaction was when NBC executives came to him in 2004 and asked him to step aside in five years so that Conan O’Brien could take over “The Tonight Show,” he was “devastated,” he said.
“It broke my heart. It really did I was devastated,” Leno said. “This was the job that I had always wanted and this was the only job that ever mattered in show business — to me. It’s the job every comic aspires to. It was just like, why?”
What follows is a transcript of much of what Leno said on Winfrey’s show. A shorter summary of the hourlong Leno interview is here.
“I’m not a person who carries my emotions on my sleeve,” he added. “But you know something, I’m happy with what I had. [‘The Tonight Show’] was a tremendous success up to that point.”
What had he planned to do when the five years was up, Winfrey asked?
“Well, I did tell a white lie on the air,” Leno said. “I said, ‘I’m going to retire.'” It was just maybe easier that way.” He added that he “assumed” in 2004 he’d get another job on a different network. But to go to another network would have been “a lot of work,” he said.
Did he feel disrespected by NBC executives, Oprah asked.
“Oh yeah. I most certainly did,” he answered.
As for his 10 p.m. show, which was not a success, Leno said, “Well, I chose to do it. So I take full responsibility.”
Is there a part of you that hates to say goodbye to television, Oprah asked.
“I did it because it’s an interesting challenge,” he replied.
Were he and Conan friends?
“Yes,” Leno said. “We talked many times” after those transition talks in 2004.
As for competing in the prime-time arena, it was difficult, Leno said, especially given that other networks banned their actors from going on Leno’s new show.
“It’s a lot more competitive. If I’m in late night, I know I’m competing with Dave [Letterman] every night. … We could book against [other late-night shows]. To book [guests] against the ‘CSI’ evil twin episode, that’s going to be very hard to do.”
“Why do you think the show failed?” Oprah asked.
“I think the show failed because it was basically a late-night talk show at 10 o’clock. You’re competing with dramas that are $3 to $6 million an episode,” Leno said.
Was his prime-time show given enough time?
“I was given enough time. It didn’t work,” Leno said. “It’s a TV show that got canceled. I am actually surprised that this got this much attention.”
“America has taken sides,” Oprah said. “And a lot of people are not on your side. And they’re not on your side because they think that you have been selfish in this. Do you see in any way how you’ve been selfish? They think that you took the job away from Conan.”
Leno: “It all comes down to numbers in show business. This is almost the perfect storm of bad things happening. You have two hit shows — ‘Tonight Show’ No. 1 and Conan No. 1. You move them both to another situation. And what are the odds that both would do extremely poorly? If Conan’s numbers had been a little bit higher, it wouldn’t even be an issue. But in show business, there’s always somebody waiting in the wings. Being me.”
“I never expected this to happen. People think you’re behind the scenes, pulling strings,” he added. “There’s no strings to pull. I have a show that’s been canceled. So why would I have any power to go, ‘Oh, I want that.'”
NBC came to him and talked about the ratings for Conan and Leno both being down. He said he asked to be let out of the contract for his prime-time show — “maybe a day” after his prime-time show got canceled. He said he was told by NBC that he was still a “valuable asset.”
“You fired me twice. How valuable can I be?” was his response, he said.
“OK, stop right there. Why didn’t you then just say, ‘You fired me twice, I’m out of here, guys?’ Because that seems like the ultimate in disrespect to me,” Oprah said.
“My show was not winning its time period. That’s a perfectly valid reason to go, ‘Pack your bags,” Leno said.
NBC executives assured him that they were “75 percent sure” Conan would go for the revised plan, which would have had Leno doing a 30-minute show at 11:30 p.m. ET.
Oprah asked Leno if he thought about thinking about the half-hour show and consulting Conan before agreeing to the new plan.
“It wasn’t my place to call Conan,” Leno said. “They made this offer to me. And I said, ‘Do you think Conan will go for this?’ And they said, ‘We’ll ask him tomorrow.’ ‘OK, let me know what happens.’ And then thing you know, I guess Conan had his article in the paper and that was that.”
Oprah: “Conan said he thought it would be destructive to the franchise, and…”
Leno: “Well, if you look at where the [Conan ‘Tonight Show’] ratings were [long pause], it was already destructive to the franchise.”
He talked about when Jimmy Kimmel came on his show and delivered a cutting commentary on the mess Leno was in.
“Yeah, I got sucker punched,” Leno said. “It’s my show, I could have edited it. But I said, ‘No, no, put it out there.’ I walked into it.”
Oprah: “Did you know he was going that far?”
Leno: “No, I didn’t. But when you get sucker punched, you just get right back up again. You don’t whine or complain — ‘Oh, I’m going to take that out, he said something bad about me.’ That’s all right.”
Oprah asked if he’d talked to Conan, or if he’d wanted to “pick up the phone.”
They hadn’t talked, Leno said. He had wanted to call but “it didn’t seem appropriate.”
Oprah: “Why?”
Leno: “I don’t know. I think, let things cool down and maybe we’ll talk.”
Oprah: “Were any of the things that he said about you hurtful?”
Leno: “No, they were jokes. And that’s OK.”
Oprah: “So jokes don’t hurt you?”
Leno: “It’s what we do, you know. It’s like being a fighter and say, ‘When you got punched in the head, did it hurt?’ Well, yeah, but you’re a fighter. That’s what you do.”
Oprah: “So when you, in the privacy of your own thoughts, your own home, you go home with Mavis at the end of the day — you didn’t say, ‘You know, I thought that was kind of rotten. I thought that went a little too far.'”
Leno: “Well, you know the odd thing is, it’s all your conscience. If you think you played a role in it somehow, then you get a guilty conscience and you feel bad. But nowhere in my wildest dreams did I think they’d ask me to go back. It just didn’t seem logical.”
By going back to “The Tonight Show,” did he ever think that he was “taking away Conan’s dream?”
Leno: “No. Because, again, this is an affiliate decision. Affiliates felt that the ratings were low. This was the first time in the 60-year history of ‘The Tonight Show’ that ‘The Tonight Show’ would have lost money. And that’s what it comes down to. It’s really just a matter of dollars and cents. If the numbers had been there, they wouldn’t have asked me. And they only asked me after Conan turned down moving [‘The Tonight Show’] back half an hour.”
Oprah: “No part of you thought, ‘Enough already. I’ve done it.'”
Leno: “You know, if you’re a gunfighter, you like to die in the street.”
He compared his wish to hang on to the ‘Tonight Show’ to Oprah’s long run as host of her own syndicated run (she’s said she’ll end that run next year). Leno said neither of them was “going anywhere.”
Oprah: “I’m asking you this question as somebody who has made the decision that for this show, ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ as it is — done with that. Twenty-five years. Done with that.”
Leno: “We’ll see.”
Oprah: “You don’t believe that?”
Leno: “I believe you believe it.”
Oprah said it had been challenging to come to grips with who she is “without a television show.” “This is the real question here … Who are you without a television show?” she asked.
Leno: I am a standup comedian who happens to have a television show. This is the thing people have asked me for years, and I always tell them, I live on the money I make as a standup comedian” and he saves the rest.
How will he rebuild the “Tonight Show” audience?
Leno: “You find out what the elements are that worked on the show and you try to bring those elements to it. It’s really the idea of servicing the audience. The reason I work a lot on the road is, you tell a joke — if a joke works in Boston and Oklahoma City and Des Moines Iowa and L.A., it’ll work on TV.”
It’s a matter of finding “that fine balance” between gentle zingers and more pointed humor, he said.
Oprah: “Talking about fine balance, do you think your fellow comedians lost that balance and maybe you did too, because David Letterman called you, I think, the ‘big jawed’ Leno [who] should just walk away, and you hit back by talking about his infidelity?”
Leno: “Well, I did a joke about that, yes.”
Oprah: “Even the audience went, ‘Ooooh!'”
Leno: “But it was a good joke. Did you laugh when you heard it?”
Oprah: “No, I did not. I did not laugh. You know what, I thought that was beneath you, actually.”
Leno: “But how many jokes like that have I done? I did one joke in the middle of the week and I never did another one. I had a cheap shot thrown at me, I threw one cheap shot back and I moved on.”
Oprah: “So you thought one cheap shot deserves another?”
Leno: “Yeah, it’s OK.”
Oprah: “Do you feel you’re being unfairly portrayed by the media?”
Leno: “Yeah, I think so. But I think you have to look for a bad guy. I mean, I think it’s funny that they have a picture of me and Roman Polanski. Somehow these are quite similar. You have a TV show, he had sex with a 13-year old girl with Quaaludes. Yeah, that’s about equal.”
Leno had been seen as the good guy, but now he’s seen as the bad guy, Oprah said. Did he think that was unfair?
Leno: “Yeah, I think it’s a little unfair. And I’m going to work hard to rehabilitate that image.”
So what comes next?
Leno: “I hope Conan gets a job somewhere else. I hope he gets on at Fox or somewhere. And we all compete together. And it raises the level of interest. And you know what happens, the best one wins. Maybe I’ll get my butt kicked, maybe we’ll win.”
Oprah: “Did your gut ever tell you that the right thing to do would have been to say no to NBC’s offer to go back?”
Leno: “No.”
A bit later, Oprah asked if NBC could have handled the situation better.
Leno: “Anything they did would have been better than this.,,, If they had come in and shot everybody. It would have been ‘Oh, people were murdered,’ but at least it would have been a two-day story. NBC could not have handled it worse. From 2004 onward, this whole thing was a huge mess.”
He thought his prime-time show might get cut down to two or three days a week, but he asserted again that it never occurred to him that he’d be asked to host “The Tonight Show” once more.
Leno on Conan’s last show: “Great show. Good performer and good comic and a good guy. There’s no animosity there.”
“Do you feel it’s going to be humbling to go back?”
Leno: “Yeah, I think we have our work cut out for us. There’s a lot of damage control that has to be done. The only way you can fix these things is to try and do good shows, not be bitter. Not be angry or upset about whatever.”
Was he embarrassed by what happened?
Leno: “Yeah, it’s hugely embarrassing. Not that I’m glad my parents are gone, I don’t mean it that way, but I’m like, the last one left, so I don’t have to explain to the relatives how all this works.”
As for how he felt or how his “heartbreak” showed itself in his life, Leno said, “I always thought, ‘You’re doing the right thing.’ I always felt I was doing the right thing. How can you do the right thing and just have it go so wrong? Maybe I’m not doing the right thing, I would think. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. This many people are angry and upset over a television show. I mean, I had a show. My show got canceled. They weren’t happy with the other guy’s show. They said, ‘We want you to go back,’ and I said, ‘OK.’ And this seemed to make a lot of people really upset. And I go, ‘Well, who wouldn’t take that job though? Who wouldn’t do that?’ It was really agonizing. I would spend a lot of time just thinking about it, going, ‘I think I’m a good guy. Am I a good guy? Maybe I’m one of these guys who thinks I see everything with rose-colored glasses and the world is falling around you.’ Yeah, it was a real agonizing time.
Oprah: “Did you ever ask yourself, Well, am I being selfish?”
Leno: “Sure, yeah, you ask yourself that every day.
Oprah: “And your answer was…is?”
Leno: “I don’t think so. I mean, I like the job, I like all that goes with it. I fight for the people who work here. I fight to keep the jobs here. OK, is that selfish? Maybe it is, because it’s self-aggrandizing, maybe because it’s pumping me up.”
Oprah asked if celebrities would still come on his show.
Leno: “I think they will. I don’t know why they would refuse. Based on what?”
Leno said that the controversy had helped him understand what other public figures go through when they’re in the news. He asked if the situation had affected Oprah’s perception of him.
Oprah: “One of the reasons I wanted to do the interview is because I’m really surprised that so many people are against you. Because I think that people don’t understand how television works. I could understand people thinking that you were selfish if you owned the show and controlled the show. It’s a little surprising to me that people think you stole the show when in fact it wasn’t your show to steal. It’s owned by NBC.”
Oprah: “Is there a part of you that feels that you should have just retired?”
Leno: “To me, being retired seemed like the selfish thing to do. You walk out and say to the 170 other people who work here, ‘Listen, I don’t want to get my reputation ruined, I don’t want anyone talking bad about me. I’ve got enough money, I’m going to leave. You people can all fend for yourself.’ … As long as I’m working, they’re working. That seems to make sense to me. Is it a little selfish in that I still like being on TV? Oh sure. But the minute you can’t do your job, they tap you on the shoulder and tell you to leave.”
Oprah: “Did you feel bad for Conan at any point?”
Leno: “I did. I felt really bad for Conan. I think it’s unfair but TV is not fair. I thought it was unfair for me.”
Oprah: “You felt bad for Conan, but you don’t think you were the reason” for the situation?
Leno: “No, I wasn’t the reason. The reason was the ratings.”
Oprah: “Do you have regrets?”
Leno: “Oh yeah, I do have regrets. I have regrets that it wasn’t handled better. I’m just not sure what I could have done differently.”
Oprah: “Lots of people say you could have walked away.”
Leno: “But by walking away, that is an ego decision. That is me going, ‘Goodbye everybody, I’m fed up with this. You all fend for yourselves. Good luck finding jobs. I’m out of here.’ That’s the ego decision.
Why not just retire and do as Conan did and get his staff healthy severance package, Oprah asked?
Leno: “Could have done that, but I didn’t. They offered me my old job back.”
What’s the bigger lesson in all this, Oprah asked.
Leno: “The key is not to be bitter and I think Conan said it best when he said, ‘Don’t be cynical.'”
He’d love to have Conan on his show some time, Leno added.
Via: Chicago Tribune.com
(CB)
