Article first published as Stephen Battaglio on From Yesterday to TODAY on Technorati.

From Yesterday to Today

In 2012, the U.S. national TV broadcast network NBC will celebrate that Today, its morning news and talk show, first went on the air 60 years ago in January of 1952. Indeed, NBC’s celebration started a little early in mid-November, with the release of From Yesterday to Today: Six Decades of America’s Favorite Morning Show, a book written by Stephen Battaglio (TV Guide‘s business editor) and published by Running Press. Battaglio, who was granted access to the TODAY show’s archives in order to fully document the rich history of the show, was kind enough to take part in a recent email interview about his 272-page book. The book features a variety of information and photos covering the show’s 60-year history as well as an introduction by current Today show host Matt Lauer.

Did NBC give you full access to its show archives?

Yes. We were able to use their photos. I was able to review past episodes of Today – a lot of fun – and interviews with the personalities that NBC News producers had done over the years. I combined that with my own research and reporting on the show done over my career as a journalist covering the TV industry. I also did a few dozen fresh interviews with the current and past Today producers and cast members.

Personally I think an entire book could be devoted to Pat Weaver, a very important figure in NBC’s history. While I am sure you were already well aware of his role in Today’s formation, I was wondering if there were things you learned about him that you did not know.

Pat Weaver wrote his autobiography a few years ago and always appeared on the Today anniversary shows. He has never been shy about recounting his role as a television pioneer. I think the enduring key to his brilliance was his understanding that live television with personalities who provide a connection and companionship to the viewer could survive the technological changes we’ve seen in television. Sixty years after he created Today, people still want to get up in the morning and have someone they like tell them that the world is still there.

No other morning show ever had a chimpanzee for a host. But I am curious if, in researching the book, did you find there was another host during the show’s history that surprised you?

The chimp, J. Fred Muggs, was not a host. But his arrival saved the program, which was almost cancelled in its first year. I think the surprising aspect of the hosts is that they all possessed distinctive personalities, interesting quirks and diverse backgrounds. They did not all come out of the same mold. That made them fun to write about.

A morning TV news show of this kind had not been attempted before the TODAY show. Are you surprised, despite the trail he blazed in new TV content, that Dave Garroway is far from a household name?

For nine years, few people logged as many hours on television as Dave Garroway. But it was live television. There were no repeats that ran in perpetuity like I Love Lucy. He was not an actor who appeared in classic films that still run on cable TV. He has been dead for 30 years and his career had faded 20 years before that. When you’re not on the air, it’s easy to fade from the public memory. But I think this book will remind or reveal to readers that he was a unique talent and a very unusual guy.

When did the Today show stop having the host doing commercials (a practice done as shown in this photo of Hugh Downs)?

In the mid 1970s, NBC News wanted Tom Brokaw to host Today. He was the White House reporter at the time, and he did not want to do commercials. He thought it would hurt his reputation as a hard news journalist. When he was approached a second time he was told that he would not have to “hold the can” as they used to say, and he signed on.

Given her long history in TV, some people may not realize how pivotal Barbara Walters was to the show, how much do you delve into that?

The book goes into great detail about how Barbara Walters paved the way for women in TV journalism and helped define the skills that every morning program personality needed to have to succeed – the ability to comfortably do hard news and softer entertainment segments. She also had a deep affection for Today, and I don’t think she has ever gotten over leaving NBC.

Not every author can have the full current Today show lineup promoting the book with a signing, how great was that?

What I liked most about it is that it allowed me to experience close up what I wrote in the book. The people on Today understand how much the program means to the viewers and how it’s really important part of their lives. It’s a very intimate relationship unlike any other in television.

A hat tip for Yahoo’s The Set, for making me aware of this bit, that at first I could not remember watching. Now if I could only find the scene where Penny fell forward with a podium (on Happy Endings season finale), while saying: “I’m going down!”

Particularly judging from the above clip, Dave seemed in rare form.

I give NBC credit for having Gervais back this year, but I doubt they’ll bring him back next year. I hope I am wrong, thought.

Everything Explained Through Flowcharts

As part of my day job, I periodically have to create flowcharts. None of my flowcharts, however, are as amusing or engaging as the ones that appear in Doogie Horner‘s brand new book, Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, which goes on sale today (October 26) from Harper Paperbacks. Here’s a snippet of what the book offers: “What if all of life’s greatest mysteries could be explained through ingeniously designed flowcharts? The afterlife, the quickest way to gain a supernatural power, even the ultimate guide for things to say during sex, all broken down into charts even your sixth grade English teacher (the one who made you do all those brainstorming diagrams) would be impressed by. Fortunately for humanity, comedian and graphic designer Doogie Horner has done just that” with this new book. You may recognize Horner from his recent appearance on NBC’s America’s Got Talent where he was the only comedian in the show’s final 48 contestants. My apologies to Horner for a typo in one of the questions (I meant to type “designing book covers” and inexplicably typed “designing comic books”), but fortunately enough Horner answered my “mistake” question (delightfully I might add) and my “proper” question (equally as delightfully). To get an idea of the flowcharts, here a few excerpted pages on superpowers and fears.

Tim O’Shea: You concede at one point in the book that this book required a great deal of research. Which of the features required the most research or was the most absurd to research?

Doogie Horner: Yeah, I tried to ground all the charts in solid research. So even charts like Alien Sex, where I’m obviously talking about 100% make believe, I researched depictions of aliens in television, film, and of course the numerous nutball testimonials.

Designer Paint Names required a ton of research, and I probably got a little carried away with that one. After I handed in the sixth page of paint name charts, my editor said, “If you hand in one more page of paint names, I will murder you.” WWF Finishing Moves was challenging as well, because even after I figured out what moves to include, I then had to find video or photos of each wrestler executing the move so I could diagram them accurately. However the Heroes and Villains chart definitely required the most research, because I had to find out how many people each hero and villain had killed in each of their films, and that covered 48 characters in 187 films. The numbers still aren’t 100% accurate for that chart, because I found different sources citing different numbers, and there were some kills that were ambiguous (for instance when Chuck Norris just mows down a whole crowd of bad guys with a machine gun), but I tried to be as accurate as possible. I had to use an equation to figure out Godzilla‘s kill count.

O’Shea: This is the editor in my asking this question–how the hell do you proofread complicated diagrams like the ones that run in this book?

Horner: Proofreading was definitely difficult. Luckily, my spelling is inpeckuble.

O’Shea: On the stand-up comedy diagram, what’s the inspiration for the ventriloquism/”I’m not a racist, my dummy is.”

Horner: It’s not uncommon for ventriloquists to pretend to be shocked by the things their dummy says—”Now Mr. Skittles, you shouldn’t call that lady fat!”—and it allows them to get away with saying stuff, through their puppet, that they probably couldn’t just say themselves without seeming like a jerk. Achmed the dead terrorist is a good example.

O’Shea: Newton’s Personal Coat of Arms, was that something you wanted to include in the book from the start?

Horner: No, although when I realized I could include it I got very excited. I love putting stuff like that into the book, facts that are so bizarre they seem like they must be made up. But Isaac Newton‘s coat of arms really did look like a pirate flag. That entire essay about Evil Twins, I was very excited to discover that the relationship between Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton conformed so closely to the evil twin archetype. I didn’t have to embellish the truth at all—Newton and Leibniz really were similar, even inventing infinitesimal calculus separately at the same time; Newton really was a pessimist and Leibniz an optimist, and Newton did try to destroy Leibniz professionally, as all evil twins do; and Newton’s third law does seem to support the existence of evil twins. That was the only leap I made.

O’Shea: When you write lines like “which religion offers the best afterlife”–are you looking to tick folks off on some level with some of the topics?

Horner: No, I tried very hard with the Afterlife charts not to offend anyone or make any jokes. Those charts are pretty serious, and as accurate as I could make them under the circumstances. It was difficult to find theologians willing to offer constructive feedback, because most religions shy away from that kind of black-and-white, oversimplified depiction of their faith, which I completely understand. The purpose of those charts was not to make fun of religion, but to explore an interesting and important topic. It’s fun to chart donuts and cat names and silly stuff like that, but I wanted to chart something important too; I considered charting the meaning of life, but what does that mean? It’s too broad a subject. So I narrowed it down to religion, and from there narrowed it again to the afterlife. Charts are usually more interesting when they’re more specific.

O’Shea: Any chance you would be interested in doing another volume of charts, or are you all charted out?

Horner: I would definitely be interested in doing another volume. When I started the book I made a list of around 200 subjects I wanted to chart, and I was only able to fit 40 into the book. There are always more things to chart!

O’Shea: When did you realize the art of zeppelin warfare was both noble and worth demystifying

Horner: When or how? I think zeppelins are noble because they’re so dignified and impressive. They’re massive, but they float with composure and poise. I wondered why people stopped using them, so I did some research and discovered how fragile and inefficient they actually are. But they’re still badass. Even though they’re not used in the real world anymore, they’ve certainly persisted in fiction and peoples’ imaginations.

O’Shea: In addition to your stand-up comedy work, as well as your writing career, you are also a successful book cover designer. How long have you been designing comic books?

Horner: I don’t design comic books, I design regular books, although I wouldn’t mind designing comics! I love comic books. You’re probably confused because you’ve seen the cover I did for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? That’s my most well-known cover, certainly. I’ve been designing books for about ten years.

O’Shea: As a successful book cover designer, how did you develop an eye for that type of design and are there certain designers that influence your approach?

Horner: There are certainly specific designers that I like—Peter Mendelsund, Paul Sahre, Art Chantry—but there isn’t any one person who’s influenced my design more than others. I try to not have a style, and just do whatever is best for the book, whatever communicates its content in a quick, accurate, and hopefully memorable fashion. With my chart design I keep the design and the visual vocabulary as limited as possible, to highlight the content and make the layout easy to read.

It was nice to see them devote a good chunk of time to Newman’s comedic sense. My fondest memory was of Newman’s gig doing the news segments on David Letterman’s first daytime talk show for NBC. Clearly his career involved far more important phases than that, but for me, Letterman’s show was when I first really noticed Newman.

Hulu has links to a few more Newman clips, including Tom Brokaw and John Chancellor’s tribute to Newman upon his retirement in 1984.

The basic concept of the Please Subscribe documentary (“Please Subscribe follows YouTube celebrites David Choi, Happy Slip, Daxflame, and Tay Zonday as they discuss how online media and YouTube has affected each of their lives and the face of entertainment.“) sparked my interest fairly quickly. The documentary, made by CJ Wallis and the Soska Sisters, hopes to play at several film festivals in the near to long term.  I recently conducted an email interview with Wallis. In addition to this documentary, according to Wallis: “I recently directed/edited/conceived the forthcoming Sarah Slean music video and am currently in development on my debut feature film, Frank Flood.  The girls are getting a ton of attention for Dead Hooker In A Trunk and are currently in development on two scripts. I also have some original music under the label Elective, which is also going rather well.”

Tim O’Shea: When you contacted the four YouTube celebrities featured in Please Subscribe, did any of them need convincing to be involved in the documentary?

CJ Wallis: The only real person that needed a little bit of a nudge was Daxflame, and is mainly because he is actually represented by one of the bigger agencies in Los Angeles, so there was a bit of looking into one another and the project before they could commit to it. He is also a bit gunshy as his YouTube experience with the public hasn’t necessarily been as positive as the other four.

O’Shea: How did you arrive on picking those four folks in particular?

Wallis: David Choi was where the entire project sort of started. One very late evening in 2008 I think, the Twins and I stumbled across David’s high energy DuckTales video and it shattered us. It is long and repetitive and I think everyone involved ran out of ideas and energy midway through, but that’s what made it amazing. I had featured David’s “YouTube Love Song” on the viral section of a youth tv show I used to direct/produce on and somehow David’s videos kept finding their way in front of me.

Early November 2009, the three of us were re-watching the videos and the idea came up about doing a documentary about these people. A casual internet search into the matter launched the project instantly as David was due to appear in Canada in under two weeks for the first time and play a show in our hometown of Vancouver – saving us the plane tickets, hotels and rentals elsewhere. We e-mailed him and he got back to us and was instantly onboard.

The second day of filming with David, we were driving someplace and in his usual humble manner quietly offered “i could prolly get you tay zonday…if you want…” and suddenly we had Tay Zonday.

O’Shea: Logistically what was the biggest challenge in doing the documentary?

Wallis: As with most filmmakers at whatever level of success we are at currently, it was money. During the time the documentary was coming to life, the girls and I had recently finished their debut feature length film, Dead Hooker In A Trunk, that was also primarily paid out of our own pockets so when Please Subscribe happened, the credit cards were already very much full and there wasn’t a ton left to draw from.

Daxflame needed to be flown to us because it is too dangerous for him to show his house and where he lives which is something we explore in the documentary. Tay Zonday lives in Hollywood, so we begged and pleaded and found our way down there thanks to sympathetic family members etc etc.

While already in Los Angeles (with no immediate chance of coming back within our timeline) we had a YouTube personality that was tied strongly to Daxflame’s story choose not to be involved. We learned they were involved in a previous documentary that is famous (in the wrong way) within the Youtube community and we suddenly needed a fourth subject. David suggested we message Happyslip, who we also enjoy, and she happened to be in LA for a day or two and she graciously gave up her free time on the trip to be involved. It saved the day a thousand times over.

All interviews or filmmakers tend to say things like this, but in all sincerity: all four of these people have rapidly become lifelong friends to the three of us. And the people surrounding them in their lives that we met are no different. Alot of people in this industry, in my experience, tend to only ask you a question so that they can eventually just answer it themselves back at you, so it is rare to find so many people at once who are so endlessly selfless, generous and kind. We stay in regular contact with David’s friends Peter and Sam and are planning to see them all in the middle of July. There is mumblings of shooting a music video for David while we are down there.

O’Shea: A great deal of your recent work has been for feature film, short film and music videos, was working on a documentary a form of returning to your roots of producing for local TV programming in Canada?

Wallis: Actually, it was more of a return to the way I learned filmmaking. My friend Jeff and I would always have a camera on us and would film friends and random events, either together or separately, and then cut them up into fully polished/structured mini documentaries with sound cues and intricate sequences and pass them around to our friends – as they usually could be enjoyed out of context. Those things allowed for a lot of experimentation and mistakes and were always fun to cut up.

So this is sort of the same deal in a way. We got our friends together, shot a bunch of stuff with an idea of where we were going, and now we have to sit here and sort it all out all the surprises and left turns that were thrown at us along the way. It’s wonderfully loose and fun compared to working on a feature or short but, as the film is in it’s second major overhaul now in as many months, it can also be a curse because there isn’t that structure or safety net of having a pre-written scene to work from to know when you’re finished. Obviously everything is up to us how it’s presented and that’s where the pressure and self-doubt can creep back in and infect the fun. You always feel like something can be cut or timed a little better.

O’Shea: Given your own musical background, did you find it easier to interview the musicians featured in Please Subscribe?

Wallis: I wouldn’t say it helped in interviewing them, but it did help with the bonding sides of things off camera. I think there was only one technical question I asked to any of them and it was to Tay, something about the structure or key of Chocolate Rain and he shrugged a “it’s a counterpointed song in Eflat.” It just wasn’t something that ended up being talked much about.

O’Shea: You are collaborating with Twisted Twins Productions on this documentary, how do your differing approaches toward this kind of work serve to compliment each other’s skillset? How did you and the Twisted Twins divvy up the work on this documentary?

Wallis: The girls and I have been working together on things for the last 3 years now, I think so everything is sort of blurred or second nature as far as official job titles go when we are on a project or set. And despite the fact that they make the crotch driven boy movies in the house and I make more mopey dramatic things, we have similar tastes so it’s not that difficult for us to mesh on things outside our comfort zones…

For Please Subscribe I was on camera and location sound so we’d figure out the nice areas we’d want to shoot and when I’d be setting something up on the camera, the girls would be putting the LAVs on our subjects as well as producing or acting as the AD’s and keeping everyone in good conversation and happy. Everyone did a bit of everything. I do all of the post production work for our stuff, so when it gets to that stage, the three of us huddle around our make-shift studio in the apartment and it gets done.

O’Shea: Not surprisingly, you’re using YouTube to promote the documentary–what’s been the response from folks at YouTube?

Wallis: David sent me an e-mail one day that he had sent the official trailer for the doc we posted to his main contact with the YouTube higher-ups. They got back to me that they all loved it and it was a hit virally within their head offices and there was talk of featuring our video on the main page of the site. There were a lot of questions about what we were going to do with it and if we were planning to release it on YouTube. I said we were planning to go the conventional route of festivals into a home video sale but would be interested in hearing what they had to offer (as they have recently started their film rental program) and I didn’t anything back and stopped getting responses from them. They recently celebrated their 5th anniversary where they got each of their celebrities and made little documentary-esque videos about each. The one they made for Tay, shot on the Canon 7d I imagine, that is pretty close to our trailer which was a bit frustrating/demotivating at first but could also just be a big coincidence…

O’Shea: Is it too early to discuss how many festivals you’re going to submit Please Subscribe for consideration?

Wallis: We had a goal of a major film festival in mind that had a hard deadline about a month after we finished filming. A cut of the film was slapped together quickly and we got it in in time but was, admittedly, a bit too scattered and not a proper representation of the footage we have. As a director, you always want to take the home run shot of submitting to a Cannes or Sundance wherever but the reality of the situation is, or what I think our thinking has evolved into over the last year or so with ‘Hooker’ as well, is get it any and everywhere that will have you.

The audience and responses may grow a bit slower but at least your putting yourself and your work in front of audiences rather than submitting to three or four major festivals and sitting on a project for a year or so waiting around, which is what happened with my short Last Flowers. The smaller and mid-level festivals I’ve gone to have been some of the best film experiences of my life and there is so much else going on with the major festivals that have nothing to do with the movies themselves, I think all I can suggest is save your entry fees for someplace that looks a bit more warm and inviting.

O’Shea: Sidebar question, as a fellow fan of Conan O’Brien–how frustrating was it for you to see NBC bail on him as host of The Tonight Show so quickly?

Wallis: Despite the lives being affected, it made for great fued TV. I sort of had a soft spot for Jimmy Kimmel that has grown substantially since he called Leno out on his show. On a selfish level, when I go to LA, I’ve always gone to tapings of things (game shows, late night shows, anything) just to watch the chaos or see how shows vary the way the crew operates and functions etc and with Conan in LA, I was finally able to go to tapings of something I actually enjoy. And as we speak, Leno’s ratings as worse than what Conan’s were when they dismissed him. I assume the TBS show in November will shoot in LA still, but that doesn’t help us on our July trip, heh. He got a big chunk of money – it’s not the Tonight Show but I’m sure it helped take the sting off it. And the Tonight Show hasn’t really been the Tonight Show since May 1992 and they just chased their best chance at getting it back.

Here’s a snippet of the show, just to hopefully spark your interest.

Added bonus, every week the show’s producers offer best of quotes from the episode. Here’s this week’s batch.

If you’re TBS, you want to get O’Brien marketing his brand on TBS ASAP. But NBC has a clause preventing him from appearing on TV until June. What do you in the interim? This.

Well played, TBS. And I can’t wait for November.

And in the meantime, I will check out Lopez Tonight, because of the classy way Lopez viewed gaining O’Brien as an opportunity and happily offered his 11 PM time slot (committing to midnight).

Speaking of Lopez, he did a great bit last night acknowledging O’Brien and even “interviewing” Coco. Good stuff.