First Person
Must the Show Go On?
As the 2020 Emmys struggle with coronavirus, we remember the 2001 Emmys that were canceled twice. Here are the lessons learned from 9/11.
Since the Emmy Awards came into existence in 1949, they had never been postponed or canceled until 2001. In that year of 9/11, it happened twice — on my watch.
Sometimes There is No Rule Book
The headlines coming out of the Television Academy’s North Hollywood offices are about an industry and a telecast confronting the change demanded by the coronavirus. They have a network, ABC, and now they have a host, Jimmy Kimmel, who has given one the strangest and most straightforward quotes from a new host, possibly ever.
“I don’t know where we will do this or how we will do this or even why we are doing this, but we are doing it and I am hosting it.”
Strange days indeed as Hollywood’s television industry tries to deal with a huge public event, known for being live and packed with beautiful people talking to each other at close range indoors.
Academy leaders are no doubt listening to a thousand different voices but trying to speak with one. They will get it done, and it’s likely to be good, and definitely memorable. Even if it has to be hosted from Kimmel’s kitchen.
The Emmys faced another existential threat when 9/11 occurred five days before a scheduled telecast. What follows are the lessons we learned during the two months that followed.
I was elected Chairman/CEO of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in August 2001, naively thinking that being the first writer since Rod Serling to hold that post might be what distinguished my term in office. Then, just a month later, 9/11 hit. The Emmy® broadcast was scheduled for September 16th of that year.
A powerfully important decision had to be made immediately by the Television Academy. Was it possible — five days after the worst act of terrorism in history — to imagine a walk down the red carpet with Hollywood celebs? We had to get it right and we had to do so under the pressure of tragic breaking news.
What Do You Think?
Even as my family gathered around the TV to watch those horrific images, Academy leaders were on the phone with our members and in consultation with our network sponsors at CBS. During the phone tag interaction, it was clear that this event had to impact the Emmys® strongly. Even the idea that they might not happen at all was on the table immediately. I asked if there had ever been a year when they had not taken place. The answer was no. Even so, that Tuesday afternoon, after more phone calls and meetings, there was unanimous support to cancel the upcoming show on Sunday.
This would have an incredible financial impact on both CBS and the Academy, but no one at this point even cared. We confirmed that decision to the media with the caveat that there was yet no clarity as to when the ceremony would be re-scheduled. After all, the death toll was mounting in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Nothing seemed to matter but that. Certainly not a TV show where celebrities dressed up and gave each other awards.
Two dates were on the table for a re-scheduled ceremony — the only times that the Shrine Auditorium could be rented again — September 24 and October 7. The network side tended to favor September 24 because the Emmys® have always been like a starting gun for the fall season. The Academy side tended to favor October 7 because the passions of the moment made it seem inconceivable that anyone would be ready for a red carpet in less than two weeks.
In the end, after both sides canvassed the likely attendees, we realized that September 24 would have too many no-shows. October 7 became the date by default. There had also been debate about giving up and not doing them at all. While we all felt that would have been an easy decision, we came to believe that waiting almost a month after the attacks would work.
Fate had other ideas.
Don’t Let the Terrorists Win
In the weeks to come, as the nation struggled to find its footing, we were urged as a people to get back to whatever it was we did before 9/11 because, if we didn’t, then “the terrorists win.” I remember an editorial cartoon of Osama bin Laden in his cave cursing the fact that we re-scheduled the Emmys® and explaining to an underling that this was a defeat for terrorism. If only it were that simple.
The media immediately latched onto the Emmy situation as a barometer of the impact of 9/11 on Hollywood and also as a yardstick to measure whether Hollywood truly understood the nation’s pain. As the Television Academy’s primary spokesman, it became my job to fully understand every facet of what was going on and to brief reporters who were scrambling to cover this breaking sidebar to a monumental story.
Honestly, that time period still seems like a dream. The Los Angeles Times called me “the Ari Fleischer of the entertainment industry,” a comparison to Bush’s press secretary that felt like more of a compliment at the time than it would later seem. All I know is that during those nearly 60 days, I woke up every morning and put on a suit and tie and drove into town to face whatever challenge was coming up. I’d been a CNN correspondent and a local TV news reporter before I became a Hollywood writer/producer, but in those news incarnations I was always the one asking the questions. This time I was answering them as best I could.
My wife Jackie was my constant companion during this period — we’d met back when we were both TV reporters — and she drove me everywhere so I could work the phone, test out talking points with her, and stay on top of events that seemed to break hourly. Being from the media ourselves made it so much easier to understand what they needed and to be responsive.
Even so, there was no real way to prepare for this. Very early in the crisis, it seemed clear that the only way to deal with the media was to be fully transparent and allow them to see and be a part of experiencing the thoughts that were going into the decisions we were making. This had the added benefit that whenever someone asked me a question I didn’t have to rack my brain for the “right” answer. The right answer was always the real answer. Sometimes it was “I don’t know” or “I’ll get back to you.”
The White House Did Not Clear the War with Us
On October 7th, the Sunday morning when the 53rd Emmy® Awards had been re-scheduled to air, I was lacing up my shoes for another run to shake off the nerves that come with knowing you will be speaking before 6,000 people in an audience and 90 million others on their TV sets. But my phone rang and a friend said, “Turn on your TV.”
That day was the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan. So not only did the terrorists not care about show business, neither did the White House. I immediately called CBS’s Les Moonves who was on the golf course that morning (this was over 15 years before his #MeToo downfall), and we both began again to canvass our respective constituencies. Never had either of us had so little time and so few facts to make such an important decision. What we both found out in short order is that if we went ahead with the Emmys® that night we’d have a lot of empty seats. Most actors, producers and writers were concerned about the news and wanted to be home with their families.
We canceled the Emmy Awards a second time.
he global media was already assembled at the Shrine and Moonves, producer Don Mischer and I ended up facing them at an impromptu news conference. Limos were turned around, make-up artists sent home, and the stage-lights turned off. Three-thousand gourmet dinners, already bought and paid for, were donated to the homeless shelters that day in an act of charity that felt like it matched the national mood that still prevailed — the one that said we were all in this together.
A Party Nobody Wants to Come To
The next day, I appeared on Politically Incorrect with none other than Joan Rivers and Congressman John Conyers, and had Bill Maher berate me for not having the guts to just go through with the show. Maher was on a tear at the time, having just gotten in hot water for saying it was “cowardly” to lob cruise missiles at terrorists in comparison to the courage it must have taken them to commit suicide in an airliner bomb. But the truth is, he was just as wrong about the Emmys. At such a sensitive time, it made no sense to throw a party that nobody wanted to come to. Had we done the Emmys the night America went to war to avenge 9/11, it might have dealt a fatal blow to the ceremony, making those of us behind it look hopelessly out of touch.
Every night for those two months my mind raced while falling asleep. For better or worse, a national media that was on fire to cover the rippling cultural consequences of 9/11 found the Emmy® postponements to be the perfect example of the Hollywood impact. The whole world, it turned out now, was watching. We had to get it right.
That was the question of the moment. Given two postponements, was it time to just admit defeat and say that 2001 was going to be the year the Emmys never happened? The one year in the record books with the asterisk by it?
There were voices that argued that the whole thing had gotten out of hand. They had a point. Even as the leader of the TV Academy, it seemed obvious to me that no awards show really is worthy of the kind of attention this one was getting. That realization was also the answer. This wasn’t about an awards show any more. Even though none of us could 100 percent put our finger on what it was all about, we knew it had to happen.
We picked a new date, a month away, November 4th. We would do these Emmys on that day even if no one came. I started telling reporters that if nobody showed up, I would stick all the Emmy® statuettes in a rented Suburban and drive them from house to house and give them to the winners.
What You Need is a Good Dressing Down
The reality of those turbulent days was trying to define what was “appropriate” and what “tone” meant in an entertainment landscape reeling from the impact the attacks had on its on-air and in-theater product. During this time, there was a constant daily drill to talk to as many people as possible — Academy governors, network executives, rank-and-file showbiz types and reporters — all to gauge what the way forward should be.
Many adjustments were made. One key change was downgrading the dress code from formal, ditching the evening gowns and tuxedos in favor of business attire. We re-named the Governor’s Ball the “Unity Ball” and and asked all the studios and networks to cancel their own parties. The idea was that everyone stay together and hang out as a community for the evening, rather than breaking up for separate events.
After two no-shows, we lost the Shrine Auditorium over a scheduling conflict. Moonves and I discussed doing the Emmys in a military hangar up near Oxnard where service men and women scheduled to ship out to Afghanistan could sit with celebrities. We got a lot of pushback from agents, managers and celebrities and it never happened. Two showrunners called me personally to say that if we went ahead with this plan they would not come even though they were nominated. Although national unity was very much on people’s minds, there just wasn’t a desire to mix it up in this way. So we picked the more traditional venue of the smaller Shubert Theater in Century City and made do.
We didn’t just lose the Shrine Auditorium during our on-again-off-again ceremony. We also lost our producer, Don Mischer, who had to leave to produce the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics that were coming up. We also lost our script in that after each postponement it had to be ripped up and started over because the mood of the country and of Hollywood was changing day-by-day.
A good example is the Saturday Night Live when Mayor Giuliani appeared on the September 29 season premiere and said it was okay to be funny again. We figured that if the Mayor of New York City was giving us the thumbs up to make people laugh, we should take his advice. By the way, the first attempt at a re-scheduled Emmys would have aired just a week after this memorable SNL show were it not for the Afghanistan invasion.
The September 16 Emmys had been canceled. The October 7 Emmys had been canceled. The November 4 Emmys were pretty much our last chance and we knew it.
Safer at the Emmys Than Your Own Bathtub
There is a great tendency in a crisis to protect the thing that seems most precious to you — the information only you know. Often the advice, even from PR professionals, is to hold that close and keep the media from knowing what you know. I think this is misinformed.
While I’m not saying you have to open up completely for inspection, you need to be candid enough about your process to inspire confidence. A specific example for this was the security precautions that were being taken for the Emmys.
We could state that security was beefed up as never before, yes, but we could not say that there were snipers on roofs, nor disclose the numbers and locations of metal detectors and non-uniformed police presence. Even so, I did discuss the process we were following to ensure our guests safety and it was no exaggeration when I told the press that people who attended the Emmys® would be safer in the theater that night than they would in their own bathtub.
For weeks, I’d been discussing these precautions with our security team and had made a point in interviews that there would be no sneaking in and no exceptions. Then, on the way in that day, I discovered I’d left my own tickets at home. We had to turn around and go get them — all the way back to the Conejo Valley, adding another forty minutes to our trip. This became fodder for red carpet interviews because they showed that even the guy in charge had to follow the rules he’d helped put in place.
Third Time’s the Charm
A Night to Remember
The November 4th telecast was funnier than the September 16th broadcast could ever have been and funnier than we would have allowed the October 7th broadcast to be.
Remember host Ellen DeGeneres welcoming us to the 53rd, 54th and 55th Emmy Awards, then casting herself as the Taliban’s worst nightmare, wondering if there was anything that could bug them more than a lesbian woman in a pantsuit surrounded by Jews?
Her tone was perfect and her timing spot on. I loved it when she said of the terrorists who had attacked us just two months earlier:
“They can’t take away our creativity, our striving for excellence, our joy,” she said. “Only network executives can do that.”
Traditionally, the Academy chairman speaks for a couple of minutes and, charitably, it’s not a show highlight. But on the 9/11 Emmys I felt a higher standard, amplified by the fact that I was the first writer to hold the position since Rod Serling.
“Terrorism doesn’t stop with shattered glass and shattered lives. It aims to crush the spirit of the survivors. To have given up (on the Emmys) would have been more than a postponement or a cancellation, it would have been a defeat. That’s because for 52 years previously — through war and peace, through assassinations and civil unrest — the Emmys have been awarded on television. Like baseball and Broadway, we are an American tradition.”
I honestly don’t recall the details about the winners and losers that night, the kind of stuff you’d ordinarily focus on. I do remember that Bradley Whitford was a mensch, Eric McCormack won his first Emmy, and how glad we were to have waited and still done the show, because they and the other winners deserved their moments.
But mostly I remember watching the audience as Phil Driscoll’s trumpet solo of “God Bless America” opened the show and, later, as Barbra Streisand’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” ended it, and seeing people with tears in their eyes, squeezing hands with their significant others. Producer Gary Smith felt that if we opened and closed with the proper emotionality that viewers would cut us the slack to do a more traditional show in-between. He was right.
Finally, there’s the memory of being interviewed on The Today Show before the show actually aired. Matt Lauer (also in his pre #MeToo days) asked if it bothered me that the Emmys had ended up programmed against the seventh game of an incredibly exciting World Series between the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks — pointing out that we were likely to get creamed in the ratings. I wasn’t at all bothered, I told him.
“As it turns out, the Emmys and the World Series are two live events that are going on in the United States on the same night less than two months after 9/11. They are the proof we‘ve been looking for that life could go on.
The irony about 2001, seen from the perspective of 2020, is that today the idea is to save the show by not showing up at all.
