Wednesday night viewers of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon were witness to the brief return of Conan O’Brien to NBC. O’Brien, temporarily back in New York, is prepping for a week-long run of his TBS show at the Beacon Theater, starting on October 31.

While barely two minutes in length, the short visit made for a great TV moment, along the lines of Paul Newman’s “Where the hell are the singing cats?” bit (shown in this YouTube clip at the 6:55 mark) from David Letterman’s first CBS show back in 1993. Wednesday night’s Conan appearance clearly took the audience by surprise. But he and Fallon were savvy enough to interact for so brief a time, it did not become awkward for the audience.

The visit ended with Conan retrieving Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, from behind one of Jimmy’s sofa cushions. Judging by the comments section at the TeamCoco blog many Conan fans hope that this is a sign that Triumph might be returning to the show’s comedic team. (Oddly enough, TeamCoco fans seemed divided on the fact that Conan had grown a beard again while on vacation).

When Conan left NBC in early 2010, NBC forbid Conan from using certain characters (The Masturbating Bear, for example) in his post-NBC creative pursuits, as the network claimed intellectual ownership of characters and sketches developed as part of the show. In terms of intellectual property, however, there is some question if NBC actually owned Triumph, given that the character was developed by Robert Smigel.

Back when I saw Conan in the final Atlanta stop of his 2010 Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, I was surprised to see a taped Triumph bit, as well as a Walker, Texas Ranger clip montage (though the Lever was renamed the Chuck Norris, Rural Policeman Handle). Of course, this was not on television. But I still hold out hope (along with many other Conan fans) that the physical retrieval of Triumph might be a precursor to his comedic return on Conan. Time will tell.

Ironbound describes itself as “Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, and Jeremy Newberger are Ironbound Films. Headquartered in an old inn on the Hudson River opposite West Point, Ironbound crafts video for theaters, television, museums, and the web.”

Here’s a preview:

The blog, Nothing But the Doc, noted that the project “will feature interviews with Sally Jesse Raphael, Chris Elliott, Al Sharpton and Pat Buchanan”. Some sites say it will be ready in 2011, others say 2012. Either way, given how much Downey fascinated me many years ago, I would be curious to hear the perspective from his former friends and associates.

David Susskind: A Televised Life

Very rarely a great interview opportunity lands in my comments section. Such was the case when Stephen Battaglio, author of David Susskind: A Televised Life, posted a comment in a recent Susskind post of mine. From there, I contacted Battaglio and he agreed to do an email interview about  the book (here’s its official description): “David Susskind was the first TV producer to become a TV star. His freewheeling discussion program, Open End, later known as The David Susskind Show, brought the turbulent issues of the 1960s and the wild and often wacky social trends of the 1970s into the nation’s living rooms at a time when viewing choices were scant. Susskind grilled everyone from a Mafia hit man to transsexuals to a famously hilarious Mel Brooks. His legendary interview with Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War inflamed both the political and media establishments and would have made his name if nothing else did … David Susskind: A Televised Life is as much a chronicle of a glamorous time in the entertainment industry as it is a biography of one of its most colorful, important and influential players.” My thanks to Battaglio for an immensely enjoyable and insightful discussion about Susskind.

Tim O’Shea: This book grew out of a piece you wrote for the NY Times back in 2001, what motivated you to grow it into a book?

Stephen Battaglio: I had wanted to write a book about the history of television. When I researched the story about Susskind, I realized that he was a great vehicle to tell the story of the medium in its early years. What I didn’t realize until I researched the book, was that his personal story was so dramatic. I think it will surprise readers who thought they knew him.

O’Shea: You interviewed more than 150 of his peers–among them were there any that really surprised you in terms of the insight or clarity they provided?

Battaglio: People’s perspectives on Susskind depended on their relationship to him. Some were jealous or resented him for taking credit on projects he didn’t have much to do with – which is the nature or producers. But people who worked at his production company, Talent Associates, loved the experience. He was an exciting guy to be around. He encouraged risk-taking.

O’Shea: Were any of them reticent to discuss him, but warmed to opening up after you gained their trust?

Battaglio: Jean Kennedy, the woman who produced his talk show for 28 years. She was always very protective of Susskind and it took more than a year to get her to cooperate with me. Her health was failing as well. When she finally decided to talk with me it was only over the phone, even though she lived close by in Manhattan. Her memory on the early years wasn’t great, but her insights and voice were really vital to the story. She died in 2009 on December 19 – which is Susskind’s birthday. I’m sad that she never got to read the book.

O’Shea: As noted by this New Yorker review, Susskind’s talk show was never a serious money maker, but yet he still did it. Why was he so dedicated to the show for so many years.

Battaglio: Today, there are hundreds of channels and talk shows. During Susskind’s era, there were only a few and he had one of them. It was a platform to promote himself, his projects and satisfy his own curiosity about the world. Performing on the air came easy to him. It was another way to distinguish himself from other producers.

O’Shea: Of course, as your book reveals, he was more than a talk show host. As you note, he “fought the network practice of blacklisting, exposed audiences to provocative subject matter and introduced great actors such as Sir Laurence Olivier to TV. Two of his landmark network series, East Side/West Side and N.Y.P.D., shattered the casting color barrier…” In researching his career, which was the riskier gamble for him, bucking blacklisting or the crossing the casting color barrier?

Battaglio: If conservative sponsors such as DuPont and Armstrong learned that Susskind was using blacklisted writers on the shows he produced for them, they would have dropped him fast and that would have been the end of Talent Associates. In 1964, Susskind had a series canceled – East Side/West Side - because southern CBS affiliates were dropping the show due to the casting of Cicely Tyson and the show’s focus on urban issues involving black Americans. I report in the book that he could have had the show renewed if he fired Cicely Tyson. The failure of that show didn’t stop him from casting Robert Hooks in N.Y.P.D., a cop drama for ABC. By that time, the networks knew they had to give black performers more opportunities.

O’Shea: This recent New York Times review observed that Susskind’s professional and personal relationship with women was complicated. That’s not to say he did not promote and advance the careers of some women. How hard was it to grasp his attitude toward women overall?

Battaglio: Everyone who worked with him knew he was a compulsive womanizer. But he liked the company of women and saw women as an untapped resource of talent. He could hire them, pay them less and get great value out of them because they were grateful for the opportunity. Having a lot of women work for him and being a womanizer created an interesting set of office politics, which evolved over time. It makes for some interesting stories in the book.

O’Shea: How hard was it to gain substantial access to Susskind’s personal papers? Can you share some of the highlights of insight you gained from his papers?

Battaglio: Susskind had been donating his papers to the University of Wisconsin since the mid-1960s. The archive is open and other writers have used it for research. But no one had ever gone through it as thoroughly as I did with an understanding of what was in there. His appointment books and phone logs provided leads on stories that I was able to piece together or draw out of interview subjects.

Correspondence helped substantiate a lot of things I was told about his company, but there wasn’t a huge amount of it. The papers did give you a sense of the creative process at Talent Associates. There were a lot of wild proposals for shows that never got made. My favorite was for an interactive show called The National Sex Test.

O’Shea: I know Hulu airs some of Susskind’s old shows online, but do you think there’ll ever be a point where some of it will be released on DVD?

Battaglio: I doubt it. Susskind’s children control the rights to the shows. If they could have made money by restoring the shows and putting them out on DVD, it would have happened by now. I was told that Historic Films, which licenses the show for stock footage, was going to make digital downloads available at some point, but I don’t know where that stands.

O’Shea: In researching his talk show and the shows he produced, are there any in particular that grew to rank among your favorite?

Battaglio: The famous Jewish Sons show with Mel Brooks and David Steinberg is still funny 40 years later, and the back-story is told in detail in the book. The George C. Scott-Cicely Tyson series East Side/West Side has some truly amazing moments, especially when they shot out on the streets of New York in the 1960s. I’ve seen the powerful episode Who Do You Kill? – with James Earl Jones and Diana Sands as the couple whose baby dies from a rat bite – at least a dozen times, and I’d watch it again. A 1959 TV special, A Moon and Sixpence, with Sir Laurence Olivier, is also brilliant.

O’Shea: After spending so much time on a subject like Susskind, do you walk away from the process sick of the subject or with a deeper respect for him (or a mixture of both)?

Battaglio: I have written the first and what will probably be the only biography of Susskind, so I am linked to him for the rest of my life. But I really enjoyed living in his world during the four years I worked on the book. The people who’ve read the book who knew him said I succeeded in capturing his spirit and understanding his flaws. I’m still promoting the book with public appearances and radio interviews and probably will be for a while, since there will be a paperback edition later in the year. So he’s going to be in my head for a long time.

O’Shea: I was astounded to learn that Susskind worked with Scorsese, Altman and Pekinpah–how much are you able to delve into those three?

Battaglio: Susskind never worked directly with Sam Peckinpah, but his company, Talent Associates, developed Straw Dogs, which was produced by Susskind’s partner at the time, Dan Melnick. The project changed the course of his company, as told in the book. Martin Scorsese directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and the book tells how Susskind, the producer of the film, was banned from the set. Both films are covered in a chapter about how the movie business was changing during the 1970s, and the difficulty that Susskind had in adapting to it. Feature films were problematic for Susskind throughout his career even though he was involved in some very good ones (Edge of the City, A Raisin In the Sun, All the Way Home, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Lovers and Other Strangers, Fort Apache The Bronx).

I listed Buffalo Bill and the Indians in the appendix, but it was really not a Susskind film even though he is credited as executive producer. What happened was Susskind teamed with Paul Newman and his producing partner John Foreman to buy the play Indians by Arthur Kopit, for around $500,000, a staggering amount of money in 1969. The property languished for several years as Susskind was unable to get a decent screenplay written. He eventually got Dino De Laurentiis to take over the property and kept an executive producer credit. Once Robert Altman was hired to direct, he really took over every creative aspect of the production.

O’Shea: Not everyone has a blurb of endorsement from Kurt Andersen, how did that come to pass?

Battaglio: I worked for Kurt when he co-founded a media news Web site called Inside.com. I was very proud to have his name on the cover of the book.

O’Shea: Looking at the current talk show landscape, do you think there’s anyone close to doing what Susskind did with the medium?

Battaglio: There is a little bit of Susskind in quite a few of today’s hosts.

Charlie Rose is seen as the successor to Susskind’s style of doing serious lengthy chats with a variety of guests. Oprah Winfrey uses her talk show to promote her productions and topics and ideas that generally interest her. The confrontations you see on cable news shows really grew out of the kind of panels Susskind put together for his shows. There will never be anyone like him again. But in some ways, he’s never really left us.

I really hope “Don’t be a hooch!” becomes a popular phrase.

I wonder if Larry King could become the Tony Randall for this incarnation of Conan’s show.

Understandably the Late Show is not allowing folks to embed this web exclusive content, but I am able to embed Dave’s 2010 Halloween costume sketch instead. This sketch is one of those rare ones that Letterman does every year where he gets to work with kids. I love when Letterman works with kids.

Hellraisers

Some people like to raise hell, some people like to document the hellraising. Fortunately for this interview, writer Robert Sellers is a member of the latter group. Sellers is the author of Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed, as well as Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson and An A-Z of Hellraisers: A Comprehensive Compendium of Outrageous Insobriety. In this email interview we discuss both books and more. My thanks to Sellers for his time, as well as John Karle of St. Martin’s Press for helping to arrange the interview.

Tim O’Shea: Would you say with the 24/7 news cycle mixed with the fact PR people can no longer sweep heavy drinking under the table as easily, is the era of celebrity hellraising done to a certain extent?

Robert Sellers: I think so. Our hellraisers were lucky in that their misbehaviour was only witnessed by a select few, so tales of their debauchery have become almost mythologized. Today celebrities’ every involuntary movement is recorded on some tosser’s mobile phone and then put on You Tube in a time span that’s shorter than their dick.

O’Shea: What attracted you to documenting the partying ways of these four actors (Burton, O’Toole, Harris & Reed) in particular?

Sellers: These guy’s bad behaviour was laced with a bit of style and humour. Take the time O’Toole was refused a drink after hours so he simply pulled out his cheque book and bought the pub. There was a jaw dropping audacity about their pranks and a twinkle in their eyes that made the public forgive them almost anything, which you just don’t have with today’s celebrity yobs. Also, back in those wilder and better days drinking was very much a macho culture; a chap could hold his booze and all of these hellraisers could drink each other under the table. Today it’s almost a prerequisite to appear everywhere completely out of your head and hopeless. The new breed of bad boy is not terribly sophisticated. Burton et al could always turn on the charm, pissed or not; this new lot can hardly string a sentence together.

O’Shea: In recounting O’Toole & Harris’ era of carousing, did you delve into the latter period of their lives when they recounted the tales on TV, I’m thinking of some of their respective appearances on David Letterman (and other talk shows) in the 1990s.

Sellers: Part of the hellraisers charm was the fact that none of them were ashamed of their drinking, indeed flaunted it and played up their image on the talk shows you mention. They enjoyed relating their tales of epic drinking and the audience lapped it up. These guys drank for the sheer pleasure of it and didn’t give a damn about the consequences. Ok, so in-between the misbehaving and the boozing marriage vows were trampled in the dirt, teeth punched out of the faces of total strangers and the odd police cell occupied overnight, but it was all done with panache and nearly always for the sake of having a good time.

O’Shea: Some folks theorize that Reed exaggerated his level of drinking as part an act for talk show appearances, while others maintain it was not an act at all. Which side of the fence do you fall on in that discussion? I was really struck by Amanda Donohoe’s interview on Parkinson a few years back where she admitted it annoyed her how drunk he could get and still be a great actor, was that a sentiment described by many of his fellow actors?

Sellers: Reed was a binge drinker, he could go without for some considerable time but when he drank it was like the battle of Culloden. Some of his famous ‘drunk’ chat show appearances were staged; sadly by that time he’d created a persona for himself that he felt obliged constantly to live up to. The public wanted him to get into fights and get drunk and do all the things you read in the papers. There was nobody better in the world at playing the public clown than Oliver Reed. He was also a consummate professional and wouldn’t drink during shooting, but got absolutely hammered afterwards, but always arrived on set word perfect and on time the next morning. Sadly at the end of his career this professionalism, shall we say, slipped a bit.

O’Shea: One of the reviews of your book (quoted at your publisher’s site) partially described the book as “Equal parts funny and appalling”. Do you hope that readers come away with that kind of reaction or do you hope they’re more entertained, than appalled?

Sellers: I approached this book purely as a journalist, I love these guys but I never had an agenda, I didn’t want to moralise or think, shouldn’t this behaviour be condemned, rather than glorified. The book has had an amazing reaction, both for and against. My publisher did send me a letter they’d received from a recovering alcoholic who told me he’d been to Alcoholics Anonymous and to doctors and nothing had worked, but after reading my book decided to quit booze. I’m quite proud of that.

O’Shea: How much of this book as well as your more recent book, Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson, involved interviewing associates of the actors?

Sellers: I tried to speak to as many people as possible who both knew these bad boys and also worked with them. For me the best part of researching these books was to authenticate some of the more outlandish or plain bizarre stories that one has read or come across about these hellraisers and thought, boy that can’t have happened, and then to interview someone who says, no that did happen, because I was there. It was nice to legitimise some of those legendary tales.

O’Shea: When writing about these various actors, did it give you a new level of respect for their films or less respect?

Sellers: More respect, I guess, though I was a huge fan of them before. It does make me realise that people like Burton, Nicholson etc, we won’t see their like again, nor will we ever get to experience that level of filmmaking again; the 60s and 70s were a real golden age for cinema. These guys are legends pure and simple, and the marvellous thing is, they knew it. I talked with the actor Robert Hardy recently, who knew Burton at Oxford University and was a friend his whole life. I asked, ‘Did Burton know how much of a legend he was.’ Hardy answered by recalling for me an incident when Burton walked up to him and said, ‘Remember Robert, we are the myth makers.’

O’Shea: In the A to Z of Hellraisers you cover such folks as “Winston Churchill to Keith Moon, George Best to Ernest Hemingway, Wild Bill Hickok to Sam Peckinpah, Ozzy Osbourne to Errol Flynn” Can you give an example of one of the more absurd Peckinpah stories you uncovered?

Sellers: Wow, where do you start! I love the fact that making Major Dundee in Mexico he frequented whorehouses paid for out of the film’s budget. His director’s chair had a special holder for his tumbler of booze and on Pat Garrett he had a PA follow him everywhere with a tray of vodka, lime slices and various mixers. By the time of The Killer Elite he’d started taking cocaine and would just disappear for days on end. As its star James Caan observed, ‘Sam, he couldn’t give a fuck less.’

O’Shea: After covering all these hellraisers, are you ready to take a break from them? What’s the next book that you are writing?

Sellers: I think I’ve pretty much exhausted this particular seam, though I’ve had great fun with it and I’m very happy that so many people have enjoyed reading them. The book I’m working on at the moment focuses on that incredible explosion of talent that occurred in British film and theatre in the late 50s and early 60s when a group of largely working class actors like Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Richard Harris, smashed through middle class barriers and almost singlehandedly changed the cultural landscape of Britain. It’s called Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down and comes out in the UK next May.