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By Bill Brioux -- Toronto Sun -- February 8, 2004 As he prepares to bring his show to T.O., O'Brien meets The Sun in New York NEW YORK -- "Toronto in February ... that's good television." It is mere days before Conan O'Brien takes his Late Night talk show to Canada and the host keeps pushing the Toronto button. During the studio audience warmup for last Wednesday's show, he makes reference to his upcoming "gay Toronto wedding." Professorial Inside The Actor's Studio host James Lipton comes out during the opening act and does a skit extolling the virtues of the city. A poster of the CN Tower and the SkyDome sits on an easel behind him; it is quickly replaced with a poster of Akron, Ohio. Inside the narrow and surprisingly small Studio 6A, the same fabled TV shrine where Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and David Letterman all hosted their New York-based late-night talk shows (their pictures hang on the wall of the set, along with Tonight Show pioneer Steve Allen), it feels like Toronto in February. The place is a giant refrigerator, with air conditioners left over from the Letterman days still set near the freezing mark (although the hot studio lights bring the temperature up to the mid-teens). To get the same effect in the Elgin Theatre, the historic Toronto venue where O'Brien will tape four shows beginning Tuesday of this week (airing at 12:35 a.m. on NBC and The New VR), they'll simply have to leave the doors open. The cool air never chills the party crowd who have come to see O'Brien. A few fans come from as far away as Belgium. Some of the 188 people in the studio audience have waited six months for tickets. A 15-year-old from Long Island who snuck in (you're supposed to be at least 16 to attend a taping) never misses the show. He was four when Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels shocked the TV world in 1993 by naming the then 30-year-old Simpsons and SNL writer and occasional improv player to step into David Letterman's giant shoes and host Late Night With Conan O'Brien. Now 40, O'Brien acknowledges that you could see the fear in his eyes that first season or so. He looked like he was sweating out those 13-week renewals. Now, despite the steady self-deprecating humour, there's a swagger to go along with the leap and the twist that starts every show. "I used to watch Carson and think, 'That's the job to have,' " says O'Brien. Now people are saying the same thing about him. He owns his post-midnight time period. Has for years. And despite ever-increasing competition, his lead keeps widening. His boss, NBC entertainment president Jeff Zucker, calls it the most wonderful story in show business. Not that it seems to have gone to his head. In some ways, O'Brien never stopped being the college student who once edited the Harvard Lampoon. His messy office looks like it was decorated in Early Frat House, circa 1980. Behind his desk still stands a four-foot tall green plastic pickle. It's right where Letterman producer Rob Burnett left it 11 years ago as a gesture of comic continuity when O'Brien took over Dave's old Late Night digs. A student of American presidents at Harvard, there is a black and yellow Lego bust of Lincoln here and a replica of the Eisenhower mug that sits on his Late Night desk there. A couple of bottles of champagne, sent by wellwishers at the birth of his daughter 3 1/2 months ago, stand behind him. Somewhere under the clutter sits a microwave. At the back of the office is a beat-up old couch where the 6-foot-5 O'Brien stretches to grab 15 minutes of shuteye before most shows. There is one significant upgrade. Like so many other proud husbands and fathers, he has the hospital shot on the wallpaper of his computer screen showing his wife, Liza, and newborn daughter, Neve. It is after the show, and O'Brien has scrubbed and changed and finished a brief post-show meeting with executive producer Jeff Ross. It is the best time to talk to him; he's relaxed, triumphant and feeling pumped about taking his show across the border, a first for an American late-night talk show. He pushes a button on his desk and the door to his office swings closed. Cool. Has your life changed dramatically since the birth of your daughter? It makes you become an adult overnight. Is that a bad thing for a comedian? No, no, it's not. It's almost as if I've reserved this part of my life, that hour that I'm doing this show, to almost do whatever I want. In a good way, it almost makes this show more of an escape for me. I love my family and wife and daughter, I'm really excited about it all, but ... A lot of people who see me at rehearsal are kind of surprised. I sort of crank myself up and worry about stuff. The way I like to do it is worry, worry, worry, worry, and when they say, "Here he is, Conan O'Brien," that's when you stop worrying. You did everything you could. And once it starts, there's this freedom. I think that's why I'm so happy on the air. The worrying is over. You can't do anything anymore. It's like the term paper is handed in at that point. Tonight on the show when you arm-wrestled the biker dude from American Chopper, it looked pretty silly and spontaneous. Did you know you were going to do that heading into the segment? I like our prepared comedy but the American Chopper segment was the best segment of the night. I knew he was into arm wrestling going in but we hadn't discussed it. I just went for it. The show seems to work best when you draw the audience into "Conan's World." You can't do it all the time. It's like everything else. There are times when you're this pleasant, quippy person and then you see an opportunity where you can create. It's almost like I become a cartoon character and they all have to join my cartoon world. The kid sitting next to me said it seems some nights you save the best for last. From the beginning we always tried to make this show where it's not safe to turn it off. Sometimes our best comedy is in Act Three. Most nights, you're looking for anything. Someone told me that Johnny Carson once broke into a card trick spontaneously on the air. In the commercial break, the guest said, "Wow, that was really cool." And Johnny said, "When you have a job like this, you eventually use everything you've got." When you think about it, tonight was my 1,851st hour. You're out there so much, you do find that you're squeezing stuff out of every part of your life. Do you see taking the show to Toronto as a creative shot in the arm? So many people say to me, "So what does this Toronto thing mean?" The most important thing that everyone's overlooking is that this could be fun. We're leaving the country. We're going to a city where an American late-night show has never gone before. We're going to have a lot of people from that country come and do the show and that could be fun. It's exhilarating. It's good for us. We're at the point, after 10 years, when you're looking for the next big thing. Shooting the remotes was really fun. Although the weather had to be tough. Weren't you shooting scenes in a snowstorm in Niagara Falls? A blizzard, no less. Of the three days we were shooting, it was snowing constantly the whole time. That's okay, inclement weather looks funny on camera. People just like to see me in difficult situations. "Oh, look, Conan's out there and he's in a blizzard." The third day we were there it was gorgeous. That was the day, of course, we shot inside (the Lakeshore Lions Arena) with the Maple Leafs. I hear you go a few rounds with Leafs tough guy Tie Domi. Do you think you can take him? When I just shook his hand to say, "Goodbye, thanks for all your help," my heart stopped for a few minutes. Those guys have big mitts, don't they? Yeah. There are a couple of moments where he and I mix it up a little bit and it's all in good fun, but even in that situation I felt like I was in a car crash. But I'll tell you this: They were really nice guys. Tie was really funny. Afterward he invited me to come to a Leafs game and sit in his box. I don't know when we're going to do this -- there are all these responsibilities, come and meet the prime minister -- but I'd love to get to a Leafs game. He even gave me his home phone number. I'm going to start calling him late at night and just taunt him. "You're going down, Domi." Are you surprised that the Canadian press is making such a big deal of your visit? Whenever I meet anyone from another country who sees my show it just blows me away. I never think this is going into people's homes. I always just see it as a show for the studio audience, something that's contained in a relatively small concrete box, where I let people soak in my essence, as disgusting as that sounds, for an hour. So there's something exciting about going to this new city and being in this really cool theatre. Are you bringing Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the Masturbating Bear, Jewish Frankenstein and your other stock characters along for the trip? I don't want to give anything away, but we have applied for a passport for Triumph. Also, I wanted this to be one of those shows where you're very aware that you're in a new city. We cut a new opening for the show that's just Toronto. Do you deliberately steer away from jokes, more toward ensemble comedy, with all of these characters? We always wanted the show to have a Pee-wee's Playhouse feel to it. A lot of physical comedy that everyone can respond to. Jokes are great. Don't get me wrong, you need jokes. But what I really like are great, funny situations. I always thought that Dave's great innovation was bringing real people, the people who work for him, into the show. My inclination is to use performers. Get an old prospector in there. Jewish Frankenstein. That's the type of shows I always liked. Do you miss your old sidekick, Andy Richter? Yeah. I think the show changed after he left. I used to just kill time with Andy. I felt it always had a real, quirky charm to it. In some ways it made us structure the show better and more aggressively. We frontload the show more now. For me, personally, it was really fun to be out there with this guy who really made me laugh. "What was the deal with Kenny Rogers tonight?" Not to single out Kenny Rogers or anything, but, "Did you smell that?" You guys were pretty tight off-screen as well. It's always been life or death with me. That's one thing that my wife has always said, "People have no idea how intense you really are." If the show is less than good I'm not happy. Andy would go, "Shut up. It was fine." We were peers. He would slap me around a little. It was sexual. It was erotic. I chose to look at it in the positive way. He was on the show for almost seven years and he gave me his best. I realized later that it was too much to ask Andy Richter to sit on my couch his whole life. Before your daughter was born, did you worry it might be impossible to have a baby at home and also devote all you must to this show? It's a talk show. Yeah, it's not an easy job, but there are heart surgeons with kids. Colin Powell has kids. If I was a corporate lawyer in a big firm I'd be having to work weekends and not come home a lot. You jut gotta suck it up and make it work. Maybe I'll work smarter. Plus there's all this new material you can use. Yeah, I want to exploit these kids. Have you had a chance to talk to Dave about fatherhood? Not really. I sent him a note. He sent me a note back. He's always been very cordial to me. I'm sure he doesn't want to, like, go out and grab a chili dog with me or anything. That's probably his worst nightmare. When I talk to Dave or Jay we do sometimes talk about what it's like to fill an hour a night. It's a very specific thing and every now and then, when I get to talk to one of these people, it's nice to commiserate. It's probably the way astronauts talk. Who else can you relate to? One of the few conversations I had with Dave, I said to him, "Don't you hate it when they take forever to sit down because they're just acknowledging the applause?" And he just looked at me and said, "Yes!" The late-night scene is so competitive. Do you look at the other shows? Do you change things to stay ahead? From my point of view, what other people are doing doesn't matter. There's a great quote from the Civil War. The Union generals were all terrified of General Lee. He was everywhere, he was magical. Finally, General Grant shows up. Grant just said, "I don't care what he's going to do, I just worry about what I'm going to do." Basically, "Screw what General Lee's up to." In a similar way, I like making late-night TV into a way of unifying our warring states. Now I'm going to end slavery in Canada. QUESTIONED AT THE BORDER O'Brien scored an impressive seven out of 10 on The Sun's Know Your Neighbour To The North Quiz. Not a bad score -- for us to poop on! See if you can top the talk show host. QUESTIONS WHEN was the last time the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup? a)1972 b) 1967 c) 1942 WHICH of the following stars were born in Canada? a) Kiefer Sutherland b) Matthew Perry c) Robert Goulet d) Mike Myers TRUE or false: Canada is an old Indian word meaning "meeting place." DOUGHNUT king Tim Horton was: a) a former prime minister b) an ex-Leafs defenceman c) a former Toronto police chief TORONTO is home to the longest street in the world. Name it. NAME the long-running Canadian TV show about a guy who rounds up logs on the coastline for a living. NAME one Canadian-made movie. WHICH province is known as "The Rock"? WHAT Canadian rock band outsold The Beatles in 1970? WHO would you rather sleep with? a) Celine Dion b) Alanis Morissette c) Sarah McLachlan d) Anne Murray ANSWERS 1. O'Brien correctly picked the date that haunts every Leaf fan: 1967. 2. O'Brien, like most Canadians, guessed that they were all born in Canada. In fact, none were. (Myers and Sutherland, for example, were born in the UK). "However, all of them were conceived at the top of the CN Tower," O'Brien said. 3. The answer is true, although O'Brien insisted it's actually an old Indian word meaning, "low crime rate. Even hundreds of years ago, very little crime." 4. O'Brien knew Horton was an ex-Leafs defenceman and even knew that he died tragically in an auto accident. 5. O'Brien correctly identified Yonge Street. "You gotta put in that I did very well at this." 6. Before the question was half-finished, O'Brien shouted out The Beachcombers. "I became hooked on The Beachcombers when I was in Vancouver in 1985," he said. 7. Like most Canadians, O'Brien couldn't come up with a single Canadian-made film. "Can I say The Mike Myers Story starring Carrot Top?" 8. O'Brien guessed P.E.I. -- right region, wrong answer. It's Newfoundland. 9. O'Brien knew it was The Guess Who. "C'mon, that's pretty good. No Sugar Tonight." 10. On the all-important who-would-you-sleep-with question, O'Brien correctly answered, "f) Shania Twain." Beauty, eh! |