A story suitable for the CIA...
I loved reading this from Entertainment Weekly, as I hope you do, too.
Rivals can always be professional...if they choose to.
Den
David Letterman joined late-night rival Jay Leno as well as Oprah Winfrey in a 10 second Super Bowl commercial.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- CBS offered 'The Late Show' another 10-second spot in the Super Bowl
- To top the last one, Letterman got the idea of including Jay Leno
- In order to pull it off, Leno had to be flown in wearing a disguise
- 'Late Show' producer: if you have the opportunity to do something funny, you should
RELATED TOPICS
(EW.com) -- EW talked to "The Late Show" executive producer Rob Burnett about David Letterman's surprising decision to include Jay Leno in a promotional spot during the Super Bowl.
Entertainment Weekly: Why did you decide to do this?
Rob Burnett: Well, the 10 seconds we did with Dave and Oprah for the Super Bowl in 2007 went pretty well and CBS came back and said we got 10 seconds again for this one. Nothing is more simultaneously exhilarating and fear-inducing than hearing you have 10 seconds in the Super Bowl.
We were banging heads together. How do we come close to topping the last one? Then Dave got this idea. My first call was to Oprah -- she got it right away -- and then I called [CBS Corp. Chairman] Les Moonves to make sure he was OK with Jay being on CBS.
I have to give Les credit ... he got it immediately. And then I called [Leno's executive producer] Debbie Vickers ... who said, 'Dave and Jay, in the same room?' She laughed for a good minute and said Jay would want to call. I hung up, and two minutes later it was Jay. He said 'This is the way show business should be.' Debbie then cleared it with NBC Entertainment Chairman Jeff Gaspin and NBC-Universal CEO Jeff Zucker.
Entertainment Weekly: How did you manage to pull it off without the press catching wind of it?
Burnett: We began having logistical meetings that would make the CIA proud.
We had to figure out a way to keep it a surprise. NBC arranged to have Jay fly on the NBC jet at 7:30 in morning on February 2 and he was at the Teterboro Airport [in New Jersey] at 3:30 p.m. We snuck him through the front door on Broadway.
Jay wore a disguise ...a hooded sweatshirt, dark sunglasses and a mustache. Fifteen minutes later, Oprah arrived ... but not in a disguise. We shot it in the balcony of the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Entertainment Weekly: What was it like when Leno and Letterman first saw each other?
Burnett: It was great, very professional, very cordial.
We shot it in 25 minutes, and it went really, really well. It felt like one of those things where you wake up and say, "I had the strangest dream." There was no frostiness. We were focused on trying to execute the joke. It would have been a more taxing event had it been us all going out to dinner. If anything was awkward, it was how it wasn't awkward.
It's interesting... there was a lot of internal conversation about whether this was a good thing to be doing from a PR standpoint. Are we rehabilitating Jay's image?
Dave has a simple edict:If it's funny, we do it. When CBS says it needs 10 seconds, it's incumbent upon you to do the funniest bit you can do. Then we learned we had another five seconds. That may not sound like a really big deal but let's face it ... that's someone's college education [given how much the typical per-second spot goes for during the Super Bowl], so we were really thrilled about that.
Entertainment Weekly: You and Dave must have realized you had the potential to upstage the Super Bowl.
Burnett: Well, that's not our problem! [He laughs].
I've been asked the question more than once about all these advertisers who spent millions of dollars on their ads. My response is: They had a year, millions of dollars, and 30 seconds! We had one week, no money, and 15 seconds.
The bottom line is, if you're a comedian and you have the chance to do something funny in front of 100 million people, you should do it.
It has my vote for best ad: simple, clean and funny. I'm going to vote against the Super Bowl ad campaigns in general, though, the event is beginning to be more about the ads than the game. What happened to the days when the dull moments were filled with insightful commentary and historical clips of great games? Did I miss that because there was so much advertising and so little football that I kept wandering off to do other things? Too many ads, too many special effects superimposed on the field, soon we'll have virtual beer bottle characters running actual plays.
Posted by: JimmyTH | February 08, 2010 at 12:57 PM