Conan's Big Adventure

By PAUL BROWNFIELD

Nov. 8, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Conan O’Brien, who is tall and pale, is standing next to Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is short and at the moment very well-lit. O’Brien has arrived on the set of Gellar’s hit television show, the WB’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” to ask the actress out on a date. “Did you tell security you were coming?” is how the starlet greets him, and that’s pretty much the highlight of their conversation. No, she doesn’t want to go to a tanning booth. Or hit the mall. Or go bowling.

NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” originates this week from the cradle of show biz, taping on Johnny Carson’s old stage in Burbank. It’s the first such road trip in the New York-based talk show’s six-plus seasons on the air.

In one sketch, O’Brien tracks down actresses he’s interviewed on “Late Night,” mistaking talk-show chemistry for the real thing. In addition to Gellar, he corners former James Bond girl Famke Janssen in her room at the Chateau Marmont and finds Gina Gershon at a premiere of “The Insider.”

On his show, O’Brien flirts with actresses with what he calls a “mixture of confidence and an Irish Catholic fear of women”--a goofy awkwardness that is now considered part of his quirky appeal.

“I learned how to flirt with women by watching old Bob Hope movies,” says O’Brien, who is 36 and single. “I learned how to growl at them, say self-deprecating things. I owe a lot to Bob Hope.”

How much O’Brien owes NBC is a much longer and more complicated discussion. It’s also a little boring by now. And yet, O’Brien knows that it will always be an inseparable part of his story. The running joke is that when O’Brien comes up with a cure for cancer the headline will read: “Conan Cures Cancer After Rocky Start.”

It’s as if you can’t spin his story any other way: Tall fellow with buoyant hair inherits 12:35 a.m. NBC talk-show slot from the icon David Letterman. He endures a year or two as a zoo exhibit for those at NBC who either don’t get him or would like to see him fail. They renew his contract at monthlong, and then 13-week intervals, telling him to knock off the comedy. O’Brien gives in, but at the same time he doesn’t, and people--many of them college students--begin to sense a funny show with a point of view. It’s sillier than Letterman, a departure from Dave’s “found” humor and dry, ironic distance. This one has kilted warriors and ostriches bringing O’Brien his list of guests for upcoming shows.

“Late Night,” when the dust settles, becomes a nice little profit-making venture for NBC, with advertisers eager to capture the young viewers O’Brien delivers.

O’Brien, say those close to him, has maintained remarkable perspective through it all and deserves what he’s getting now. In April 1997, O’Brien got his first multiyear contract, signed to “Late Night” through 2002. For his fifth-anniversary show last year, NBC gave him an hour of prime time. And in June, O’Brien signed a deal to develop comedies for NBC, an arrangement not unlike the pact between Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, and CBS.

“Late Night’s” guest list this week further adds to the sense that Hollywood is giving O’Brien his very own talk-show bar mitzvah. Ben Affleck is coming, and so is Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Lisa Kudrow.

“When I pitched [taking the show on the road] this time, I made the point of saying this isn’t about ratings,” says “Late Night” producer Jeff Ross, whose show averages 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research, a decent number of viewers for a late-night show but small by prime-time standards.”This is more about the show surpassing the point of legitimacy.”

Several years ago, “Late Night” wanted to do a week’s worth of shows in Boston, O’Brien’s hometown. The trip made a lot of creative sense (O’Brien went to Harvard, and Boston is full of the show’s core college-aged audience), but NBC didn’t want to fork over the travel costs.

“They put that money toward ‘SeaQuest,’ ” O’Brien says, referring to the underwater adventure series with the bloated budget that ran on NBC in the mid-1990s. “They said no to our Boston trip and bought [series star] Roy Scheider two more outfits.”

L.A. does offer fresh material. Somewhat inevitably, O’Brien and sidekick Andy Richter “go Hollywood.” They get headshots made, they pitch a TV show to producer Aaron Spelling (something called “Woman Island”), they drive around town in a Humvee, they visit a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. In the last segment, Dr. Lawrence Birnbaum suggests shaving off the bulb at the end of O’Brien’s nose. “I don’t want to waste it,” O’Brien says of the flesh. “Can you use it in soup?”

Earlier, sitting in a van outside, Richter, a former Chicago improv performer who is leaving “Late Night” next spring, talked about his next project, a co-starring role in the film “Dr. T and the Women,” directed by Robert Altman.

“I play one of Richard Gere’s hunting buddies,” Richter said, and indeed, it isn’t hard to imagine him in the woods, dressed in hunting plaid, his dry delivery and lumpy aspect a nice comic foil to Gere. Like O’Brien, Richter outlived the skeptics at NBC and became more than talk-show furniture. Engaged in staring contests or dressed in black, shining flashlights in their eyes and making predictions about the year 2000, O’Brien and Richter became a viable comedy team.

“I don’t think it’s fair to foist a new person on [the audience],” O’Brien says later, asked if there are plans to find a new sidekick. “What I’m a little reluctant to do is, if it happened naturally with Andy, is to then say, ‘All right, Andy will leave on a Friday. On Tuesday, a sardonic, dry Nordic guy named William will be sitting there. . . . You come back on Tuesday, there shouldn’t be anybody there. I think you should go through a period of being honest about it.”

While Richter is leaving, O’Brien is beginning to put together the pieces of his production company. As a fledgling executive producer with an inside track at NBC, his timing is excellent; there are holes emerging all over the network’s once-vaunted lineup of prime-time comedies, and O’Brien, a former writer on “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” brings to development both relationships with emerging comedic talent and his own experiences inside writers’ rooms. That said, O’Brien was hesitant to commit himself to the development merry-go-round.

“What I was careful to make sure happen was that this just be a mechanism that was in place if we had an idea,” O’Brien says. “I was very careful to tell the network I don’t want to take anything from you up front. We’re just going to have this mechanism so that if I have a great idea, or if one of our writers has a good idea and wants to develop it through me, we will do it for NBC. But Job One is the late-night show. This is what I have the big passion for.”

That show keeps getting the kind of kudos that might build his 12:35 audience, if only the show weren’t on at, well, 12:35. Accepting the award for writing on a variety series at this year’s Emmys, comedian Chris Rock, host of HBO’s “The Chris Rock Show,” said: “Conan has the best show. So Conan, you should’ve gotten it--but I’m gonna take it.”

“Conan figured out a way to keep the show strange and still make it easy for the audience to get to know him,” says Robert Smigel, “Late Night’s” first head writer and the voice behind one of the show’s most popular characters, a vitriolic hand puppet named Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. “He walked into the job knowing that a lot of these guys have reputations for losing their minds. He’s always been a very social guy.”

Of course, the show people now champion isn’t all that different in tone from the one they once dismissed. In the beginning, for instance, “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” had a neighbor. He appeared onstage in his own front yard, wanting to shoot the breeze with the guy next door--a guy who just happened to be doing a talk show in front of millions of people.

“Letterman had done irony brilliantly, so we thought, ‘What’s the next thing?’ ” O’Brien says. “We decided the next thing is silliness. The next thing is using actors. The show should have a neighbor. He lived in a different reality.”

He didn’t live there very long, jettisoned from the neighborhood in the days when it appeared that O’Brien himself wouldn’t be far behind.

* “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” airs weeknights at 12:35 a.m. on NBC. The first L.A.-based program airs Tuesday night.