Onstage at the Reagan Library with Dick Ebersol

About to begin. At this time, please turn off all electronic devices. Please refrain from using flash photography during the program. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dick Ebersol.

Good evening. Welcome to the Reagan Library. I'm Melissa Giller, the chief marketing officer for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Thank you for joining us this evening. Before we begin, will you please join me in honoring the men and women who defend our freedom around the world by standing and joining me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. So we are about to get started, but I would be remiss if I didn't first acknowledge that we have... with his wife Lauren. So thank you all for being here.

So here at the Reagan Library, we have welcomed governors and senators, heads of state, Supreme Court justices, authors, and commentators. But tonight, we welcome a living legend. Few have done more to shape American pop culture of the past half century than Dick Ebersol. His productions have made us laugh, they've given us something to cheer for, and depending on your football team, they may have made you cry. You probably know him best from the world of sports, the NBC executive who through the years has brought us the Olympics, Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA... Ebersol, he was the co-creator of Saturday Night Live, and two nights ago they had their 48th season debut. Dick, we know you've had a special affection for President Reagan, and you might not have known it for some of those SNL impressions they did of him, but those were decades ago, so we're going to assume that came from Lorne Michaels. This evening, you will regale us with some incredible stories, and I promise I'm not going to ruin them here. But I know one that you're responsible for was likely one of Ronald Reagan's most favorite post-presidential memories, maybe his whole career. I'm not going to spoil it. Maybe you guys will share it with everyone tonight. And I believe that's what you call on TV a tease. Tonight, we're not going to be the ones... your collection this evening. We are extraordinarily grateful that you've chosen your time to be with us. And maybe, just maybe, you'll set a new all-time viewership record on the Reagan Library YouTube channel. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the author of 'From Saturday Night to Sunday Night,' the great Dick Ebersol, sitting in conversation with his son Charlie.

I was fortunate enough that in my real early teens, really early teens, to win an American Field Service scholarship to go all expenses paid and live with a family in Normandy, which is a spectacular area of France, very beautiful. And the place that I would live with this French family was midway between Omaha Beach and Paris. And I didn't want to go because I wanted to stay and be part of my high school basketball team, small town basketball team, go on to win the state championship... Prix of not the Grand Prix of 24 hours alone, 24 hours of the mall. And I was probably the only French, non-French person out of six or seven hundred thousand people who was looking for the Wide World of Sports crew. Wide World of Sports had only been on the air a little less than a year, but I found them and I got hired to go for coffee, go for ice cream, go for cigarettes, a real gopher job. And I did a good job of it, I guess. And when it was over, they said, 'Hey, you know, we do a lot of events in the eastern United States. It would be a gopher on college football or Monday Night Football. You could do all these different things.' And so I dropped out of Yale at the height of the Vietnam War. Fortunately, my parents were on the first extended vacation of their working lives... weeks later. I was pretty convincing, telling him I knew what I wanted my life to be. I wanted to be a television sports producer, and he went along with it. And I had a wonderful, wonderful education primarily from Roone Arledge. He was the head of ABC Sports, and one of the many, many lucky breaks of my career. He saw me as somebody who had great potential as a storyteller. My French didn't hurt because we were about to do so many advance events in France, including the Olympics at about a couple months hence. And my life just went from there. I did get to Yale, but I worked it out with a history... rights at that point in time. So for example, I was going to Yale. I would on Fridays or Thursdays late travel all the way across the country usually to be set up because we would usually have a Laker game on the West Coast, or often maybe back in the east in Boston or New York. But all that went on, and I really had this incredible education before I knew it. And Arledge kept putting me on more and more stuff, and then finally got the great idea of making me the first ever Olympic researcher, which meant for the best part of the next two years, I traveled through much of the world getting to know the great athletes and writing... myself. And that went, you know, but the next thing I knew, they offered me a full-time job and I dropped out of Yale and didn't get drafted. And a blessed career in sports television began.

So to give some sense of how different professional sports were at this period, when you would go cover games, particularly in Boston, before the game you had a producer who would take you out onto the court. Oh yeah, before the game would start and you guys would play games of HORSE, right? And it led to probably one of the great friendships of your life. Why don't you tell that story?

Because I want to get to the next story. You know, in a different way, you're right, you're right, you're right. I've never heard these stories before, so I'm hearing them all for the first time with you guys. So, sometime later, I am... no, you're fired. Yeah, wait, wait, wait, wait, we're gonna get there. I promise we're gonna get there. I got... co-creating Saturday Night Live and WWE and Saturday Night's Main Event, which we're going to cover all of that. But one of the things that I find particularly interesting is the jobs that you had the wherewithal and confidence to turn down, right? And one of them was actually 20 years before you actually took the job. It was during that period, you're in your mid-20s, and somebody gets in their head that you're ready to take on a big job. And I think that's a great anecdote for you to tell.

So then you grow up a full two and a half years later, yeah, and NBC comes back and they say we've got a different idea. And this time, for some reason, you decide you are ready.

Fred just didn't like Dick Ebersol.

In your infinite wisdom, with this newfound money, you purchase a hunter green Porsche convertible. Yeah. And you decide that you're going to do what? See whether or not I can drive from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I lived, to the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco, and do it in less than... I'll be lying if I said the exact what, would in five, four hours? Four hours, yeah, to the front of that hotel. Conservatively, for anyone who's wondering, an eight-hour drive if you're in a helicopter. I was really, really tearing it up. Yes. And so you're ripping along. I'm ripping along, and nobody's... no rooms are coming up behind me or anything like... impersonate a Volkswagen horn. But imagine, and I look over, and this big smile, the most gorgeous smile you've ever known, and you can only imagine the cackle in this voice, in this man's voice, which I couldn't hear it all at that highest speed, but it was Bill Russell, who had figured out that I was in my Porsche. So he's motioning to me, we pull over to the side of Route 5. Stand there with all these cars flying by and everything like that, and it's just the beginning of this real expansion of what would become one of the great professional relationships of my life. And last summer, not this summer but last summer, I stayed for a couple of months, and God, it was so special. And then we saw some more of them in the last months, but he went to his funeral what, two months ago now? About right, yeah. He, Bill, had taken the engine out of a Volkswagen, which owned Porsche, and then put a Porsche engine in the VW Bug, and he had just picked it up in LA eight hours before. And he had removed the front seats so that he could fit in a VW Bug, and you couldn't see who it was. And he too was attempting to break this mythical impossible record at the same time.

So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I think there are some people here who would like to hear Susan. So she... might have them like five years ago, and Bob Costas played Ralph Edwards from the old 'This Is Your Life.' And all of these various people were... wait, wait, please, I'm sorry, you're going to go into two anecdotes you have to tell properly and in the context. Story: my mom is phenomenal, and I owe her a lot. I'd say life. I had something to do with it. Yeah, yeah, you were allegedly involved. So backing up for a second, because so 1981, you've been independent producing, etc., and you get a call from... challenging run except for Eddie. Okay, so that was the punchline. So you go to NBC and you arrange for a closed circuit broadcast of the rehearsals. And so I got to see, over the space of two weekends, a ton of Eddie Murphy. And what I really wanted to learn, not only in Eddie's case but Piscopo and one other person, how good were they really, or how bad were the writers writing? And you can't really tell that if you're not there. Anyway, I quickly... what? They miked you to look at me. I realize there's really something here, not just his skill set, but properly produced, I can do three sketches in the first half hour of every show and probably three more in the next half hour, and that will take the ratings like this because the show is just terrible all the time. But if I put all the very best stuff with Eddie, who I now completely believed in and realized he could improv with people, and I mean we'd have so much good stuff. And I did that. The show came back on the air, did great ratings for quite some period of time. But then Brandon started, as it says in the book, he conjured up another miracle for Dick.

There's a writer strike that's never been... that's true. California, and you go away and you come back and you do one episode, excuse me, you do two episodes of the show. And in the third episode back, the way SNL works is they do the live show Saturday night, that's the name, and then Sunday night the new host for that week comes, and the executive producer for the show meets the new host and says, 'Hi, how are you? It's going to be a nightmare week, but it'll be fun, don't worry about it.' And that's the introduction. And you go to the Berkshire Hotel in New York City, and you knock on the door. The love of my life is on the other side, and she opens the door, and she's as... I promise, and Hollywood testing shows that he was a pretty good byproduct of that relationship, as was brother number two, son number two, Willie, who is a gifted writer among other things. Willie does all of the work and then I take all of the credit. It's a balancing act that I have come to feel is perfect. So maybe one of the greatest deals, certainly of your career, was you decide... Night Videos, which are both big hits. But you, someone says to you, 'You've got to go meet this guy.' And you say, 'My agent says you've got to go, gotta go meet this guy.' And he goes, 'You're nuts.' And you run into David Letterman in the hallway and I say, 'Marty,' that was the name of my agent and also David's at the time. I said, 'You won't believe what idiocy Marty's trying to sell me. He's trying to sell me on going into business with Vince McMahon.' I met Vince McMahon within a week. It was love at first sight. I was crazy about the guy. I still am. I think he's unbelievably talented and... wife and said, 'You know, somebody here screwed up. Must be you or Vince, because I got a check for $136,000. It says hats and shirts, t-shirts.' I said, 'What the hell is that all about? We don't have any deal for that stuff. We're partners. Anything we ever get, we split down the middle.' And that's the McMahons. And I love the McMahons. And Susie, within a year of that time, co-hosted the second WrestleMania ever. She did the color for events. Her knowledge of wrestling came from having watched one episode the week before. Most of the issues, at least the issues that Willie and I talked to our therapists about, got to do with Hulk having provided... Dad is doing SNL, Saturday Night's Main Event with the WWE, Friday Night Videos, and my mom is doing 'Kate & Allie.' And for anyone who knows New York City at all, 'Kate & Allie' is in the Ed Sullivan Theater, which is where David Letterman now does his show, and SNL is at 30 Rock, which are about six blocks apart. And so my dad would work at night and my mom would work during the day. And so during the day, I'd be with my dad, and then he would drop me off at the Ed Sullivan Theater where my mom would be doing her show, and he would go over to SNL, and then we'd go and have dinner at SNL and go home. And it went on this sort of like loop. And come to the end of the 80s, my mom having now had my two siblings, which naturally after I had arrived... right, and you're gonna go live in the mountains of Colorado. Tell you right, Colorado. My father the lumberjack would have been an exciting part of the book, to say the least. But you get another phone call from Brandon. Yeah. And he wants me to come back and take over Saturday Night Live. No, no, no, no, I did okay. Now he wants you to run NBC Sports. Oh, he wants me to come back. 17 years earlier you'd turned down. Now it's 1989 and you decide, well, I'll take it this time. So you take over NBC, and the first week on the job, I take David Stern to breakfast. There you go. And I felt at the time, I don't know, I saw a... they had the rights to the NBA, and they put the finals on at midnight. And I took David Stern to breakfast. I said, 'No more finals at midnight. In fact, I'm going to find a way to put you on prime time every week during the basketball season.' And that's why the NBA, all of a sudden, went from being on in the middle of the night on CBS to, on NBC, the last game of the weekend which started like six on Sunday and went till nine o'clock on Sunday night. Now suddenly their ratings were in the top five or six shows of the week. And the guy at CBS was on his way into unemployment, which he will deserve. So his name, by the way, was Neil Pilson, and he really was a... fortunately, this isn't because I've streamed on YouTube right now. We did, we did not check them out. Nobody went through their pockets. No, no, we haven't signed the releases yet. Don't worry. Okay, backing up for a second. So you sit down at dinner, but this is what I want to cover in this question. You knew that David wanted storytelling and he wanted stars. But the other thing you understood is that he wanted to be... one of the things that Melissa said that I think is important is to talk about your impact on pop culture. And prior to your meeting with David, you went to DC and you made a discovery that really altered the shape of the NBA in ways that people didn't fully appreciate. And I want you to tell a little bit about that story, because I think that will start to speak to how... with being able to produce programming that was appropriate for kids. And I knew that no network sports department was necessarily going to get a free pass from the FCC on putting NBA programming on Saturday mornings. So I went down and met with the main officers of the FCC at the time, and I said, 'This is how I want to do the show. This is how we will concentrate on areas of education. You can put people there to work with us so you can be happy with that. And at the same time, the NBA will be able to exhibit their young stars, not just on prime time games and stuff like that, but this is stuff that kids can watch on Saturday morning.' They said yes. And when I tell that to David Stern, he... of any kind, forget sports or movies or anything, got to be there. You've got to put yourself in front of people, and you've got to really work to develop what you want to say, to give these people some sense of buy-in from the beginning, that they're going to have somebody who really is going to work his ass off or her ass off for them. And I ended up with the most important relationship that NBC Sports had had in ages, other than the NFL. And I would say even today, Adam Silver, who was David's deputy, has been the commissioner now for at least 10, 12 years, right? There, he says that what I say is all true, that that... still Jordan, still at the drop of a hat, we'll talk about how I got all of them to buy in and be part of the way of selling that league, besides their games, but their availability to go out and do things with kids, all of which they were great at. And it became this thing that the people who worked for me, the people who worked for David, about 40 strong, would have lunch for several hours, I'd say probably four or five every Thursday, in either his offices or mine, and we'd go through item by item what we hope to put in front of the American public as the priorities we wanted them to know about the NBA and its players. And really, you know, I'd go anywhere for Shaquille O'Neal. I think he's an unbelievable human being. I feel the same way about Charles Barkley, and so do you. You have a particularly close relationship with them. But again, you got to go do all this stuff, and I did it. That show, 'NBA Inside Stuff,' which was hosted by Ahmad Rashad. The other funny story: Ahmad was an NFL player. And after convincing Congress that this was a kids' show and getting them to agree, he had to have convinced David Stern that the face of the NBA show should be a football player, not a basketball player. David looked up at me and said, 'So who do you think is going to host the show?' I said, 'Ahmad Rashad.' He said, 'He's not going to do this on a basketball game.' And I said, 'Well, apparently he is.' And they looked at me... book, that's one of my favorite stories. And it's a story that the person about whom the story is told tells a very funny version of it too. So I look forward to your version.