Dick Ebersol
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Duncan "Dick" Ebersol (born July 28, 1947 in Torrington, Connecticut) is an American radio and TV manager. He was protégé of ABC Sports czar Roone Arledge and was a key NBC executive in the launching of Saturday Night Live in 1975 and which he produced from April 1981 to May 1985. He became president of NBC Sports in April 1989. In May 2004, Dick Ebersol was named chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics. He is responsible for all sports programming on the NBC and USA Networks and also manages NBC Universal's involvement with the Olympics.
He has been instrumental in bringing Sunday Night Football to NBC; it replaced ABC's Monday Night Football in the fall of 2006. He has also been instrumental in keeping the contract for University of Notre Dame football for NBC.
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[edit] Early life and career
He received his bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1971, after dropping out in 1968 to work as a researcher at ABC Sports for the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics.
In 1974, after six years at ABC Sports – including stints as Roone Arledge's executive assistant and as a producer on Wide World of Sports and at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics – Ebersol joined NBC as Director of Weekend Late Night Programming. In 1975, Ebersol hired independent producer Lorne Michaels and together they conceived and developed Saturday Night Live. When Ebersol was named NBC's Vice President of Late Night Programming at age 28, he became NBC's first ever vice president under the age of 30. In 1977, Ebersol was named NBC’s Vice President of Comedy, Variety & Event Programming.
[edit] Saturday Night Live
After the disastrous 1980-1981 season (the first without executive producer and SNL creator Lorne Michaels) it looked as if NBC might cancel the show—indeed, many nights NBC aired the sketch comedy show SCTV in its place—but SNL was given one more chance when Dick Ebersol was hired to replace Jean Doumanian. Ebersol was responsible for hiring Lorne Michaels in 1974 (one year prior to SNL's premiere), and now was given the task of saving the once-acclaimed show from cancellation. His first show aired April 11, with host Chevy Chase and an appearance by Al Franken asking viewers to "put "SNL" to sleep." Ebersol desperately wanted to establish a connection to the original cast, and thus allowed Franken's rather disheartening remarks on the air.
[edit] Ebersol Cleans House
In his first week, Ebersol fired Gilbert Gottfried, Ann Risley, and Charles Rocket, replacing them with Robin Duke, Tim Kazurinsky, and Tony Rosato. He would eventually eliminate the rest of the 1980 cast (except for Murphy and Piscopo) at the end of the season (he had wanted to fire Denny Dillon all along, but could not afford a replacement for her). Ebersol originally wanted to bring in John Candy and Catherine O'Hara from SCTV; Candy turned down the offer and Rosato joined instead. O'Hara initially accepted, but she changed her mind after Michael O'Donoghue—SNL's original head writer, who had been brought in to rejuvenate the show—screamed at the cast about the season's poor writing and performances. Robin Duke was added to the cast when O'Hara suggested her instead. Emily Prager and Laurie Metcalf joined as featured players, but they would not be retained after this single episode.
In addition to appearing on the April 11 show, Ebersol had promised Franken and Tom Davis that they could host the next week, with musical guest The Grateful Dead. All through the following week, with a writer's strike looming, Franken and Davis wrote material and mailed it to themselves so that their postmark could be used to prove they did not violate the strike. After seeing copies of the material, Ebersol (never a fan of Franken & Davis') caved to the writer's strike and called off the rest of the season, promising the duo they could host the season premiere that fall. As the summer wound to a close, Ebersol grew more confident in his new cast and decided he didn't need to establish a link to the original cast after all. Franken claims Dick never returned his calls, and Franken and Davis never hosted SNL.
By the fall of 1981, Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy were the only remainders from Doumanian's cast to appear on SNL for the 1981 season. Murphy had rarely been featured during Doumanian's tenure, but became a break-out star under Ebersol, and his soaring popularity helped restore the show's ratings.
[edit] Fresh Talent
In spring 1982, Ebersol travelled to Second City Chicago to scout for more talent. Tired of recently losing key players to NBC (such as Cheers' George Wendt and Hill Street Blues' Betty Thomas), the top brass pointed Ebersol around the corner to the Practical Theatre Company, where he hired Gary Kroeger, Brad Hall and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to join in the fall. Jim Belushi arrived 3 shows into the fall, 1983 season, the delay owing to stage commitments in Chicago.
However, SNL was mostly a two-man show from 1981–1984, with Murphy and Piscopo playing a bulk of the lead characters. All other cast members played supporting roles and were treated with very little patience by the producers. Unlike Lorne Michaels, Dick Ebersol had no problem firing people. Among the first casualties after the 1981 Season were Rosato (who later said that the firing was the best thing to ever happen to him, because the SNL set helped encourage his drug addiction) and Christine Ebersole (no relation to Dick), who got the axe because of her frequent complaints that the women on the show had little airtime and what they did receive cast them in sexist and humiliating lights. Michael O'Donoghue was fired in the middle of the season after writing a sketch comparing Fred Silverman to Adolf Hitler.
[edit] Dick Ebersol's SNL vs. Lorne Michaels' SNL
Indeed, Ebersol ran a much different show than Michaels had in the 1970s. Many of the sketches were built less on "smart" and "revolutionary" comedy that was abundant in the early days and followed a much more "Naivete" approach. This pedestrian shift alienated some fans and the lion's share of writers and cast members. Many writers felt that "Hard Dick" Ebersol cared more about maintaining "absolute control" rather than producing a funny show. His inability to understand humor, and demanding more appearances of recurring characters for cheap laughs, reminded them of an authoritarian dictator in his last days. However, despite these oppositions there was little argument that Ebersol possessed a keen sense of business politics, in other words, a real "kiss-ass", which eventually helped revive a show that would have otherwise died at the hands of a creative and independently thinking producer. However, by the later terms of his tenure, Ebersol was generally handling much of the business aspects and day-to-day production affairs, leaving producer Bob Tischler in charge of most of the creative facets of the show.
[edit] 1984-1985 Season
Upon the departures of Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, Ebersol, having lost his key players, began rebuilding the cast for the 1984 season, enlisting what is in retrospect known as the "All-Star" cast. Along with veteran players Belushi, Gross, Kroeger, and Louis-Dreyfus, Ebersol added somewhat well-known names to the repertory. This new cast included Soap star Billy Crystal; Martin Short, who had made a name for himself as Ed Grimley (a character he would bring to SNL that year) on Canada's SCTV; Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer (who was also a cast member in 1979) from The Credibility Gap and This Is Spinal Tap; Superman III's Pamela Stephenson (Also from the highly successful British sketch comedy series Not The Nine O'Clock News) ; and Rich Hall from HBO's Not Necessarily The News.
[edit] The End of an Era
The 10th season is often remembered for relying heavily on pre-taped content. At the end of the season Ebersol requested to completely revamp the show to include mostly prerecorded segments. Like Michaels at the end of the 1980 season, Ebersol made taking the show off the air for several months to re-cast and rebuild a condition of his return. Another idea was to institute a permanent rotation of hosts (Billy Crystal, Joe Piscopo, and David Letterman) for "a hip Ed Sullivan Show." After briefly canceling the show, NBC decided to continue production only if they could get Lorne Michaels to produce again. Ebersol and Tischler, along with their writing staff and most of the cast, left the show after this season (those who wished to stay—such as Billy Crystal—were eventually not re-hired for 1985), which closed the book on an inconsistent, yet memorable era in SNL history.
[edit] Criticism
He is noted for developing a heavily debated and often criticized style of reporting the Olympics, which under NBC now focuses more on the human interest side of U.S. athletes than on real live reporting of the competitions themselves that are often interrupted by commercial breaks.
In July 1989 Ebersol was named Senior Vice President of NBC News, a position that paralleled the situation of his mentor, Roone Arledge, at ABC. As the executive for The Today Show, Ebersol presided over Jane Pauley's removal from the anchor desk in favor of Deborah Norville. He took the heat for the resulting bad publicity, and was subsequently relieved of his Today Show duties.
Ebersol also presided over high-profile failures for NBC Sports such as the 1992 Summer Olympic Triplecast, The Baseball Network (a joint venture between NBC, ABC, and Major League Baseball which ran from 1994-1995) and the XFL experiment with World Wrestling Entertainment (for whom Ebersol previously teamed-up with for Saturday Night's Main Event during the 1980s) from 2001.
In addition, Ebersol presided over a period during the late 1990s on through the early 2000s where NBC progressively lost the rights to major professional sports like the National Football League (1997), Major League Baseball (2000), and the National Basketball Association (2002). In reaction to NBC losing the rights to the NBA to ABC, Ebersol had this to say:
| “ | The definition of winning has become distorted. If winning the rights to a property brings with it hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, what have you won? When faced with the prospect of heavy financial losses, we have consistently walked away and have done so again. ... We wish the NBA all the best. We have really enjoyed working with them for more than a decade to build the NBA brand. | ” |
[edit] Personal
Ebersol has been married to actress Susan Saint James (McMillan and Wife, Kate & Allie) since 1981; the couple met when Saint James was guest-hosting SNL that same year. The couple has three children -- Charles, Willie, and Teddy (deceased). Saint James also has two children from a previous marriage. Ebersol was briefly married to former Wheel of Fortune hostess Susan Stafford in the 1970s.
[edit] 2004 plane crash
On November 28, 2004, Ebersol was seriously injured in a charter plane crash in Montrose County, Colorado. The pilot of the Bombardier Challenger CL-601 and a flight attendant (Warren Richardson III) were killed. The body of Ebersol's 14-year-old son, Edward "Teddy" Ebersol, was found under the wreckage two days later. The aircraft was departing from Montrose Regional Airport (near the Telluride Ski Area) for South Bend, Indiana, where Charles Ebersol, Dick Ebersol's son who also survived the crash, was a senior at Notre Dame. Dick Ebersol suffered broken ribs, a broken sternum and had fluid in his lungs. Charles Ebersol suffered a broken hand and two breaks in his back. The co-pilot of the aircraft, Eric Wicksell, was in critical condition at a burn unit in Denver. Teddy Ebersol field has recently opened in Boston in memorandium of his son.
NTSB investigators said that the plane had not been de-iced prior to takeoff and that they were investigating other potential factors in the crash. Original eyewitness accounts said that the plane never even got off the ground: running off the runway, skidding across a road and crashing through a fence and into a field where it burst into flames. However, Ebersol himself said that the jet struggled at 20 feet in the air before falling back to the runway and breaking apart.
Ebersol and his surviving family appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on February 2, 2006, to discuss the crash.
[edit] Selected list of shows produced by Ebersol
- Football Night in America
- Friday Night Videos
- Midnight Special
- Later with Bob Costas
- Saturday Night Live
- WWE Saturday Night's Main Event
[edit] Trivia
- Ebersol is the only person other than songwriter Carly Simon to know the name of the subject of Simon's song "You're So Vain." He won the right to know in a charity auction and is sworn to secrecy.
- In 1986, Ebersol had a near mythical encounter with professional wrestler Jake "The Snake" Roberts. It was prior to a taping of Saturday Night's Main Event. Several hours before the show, Ebersol confronted Roberts with a script. Roberts didn't recognize that the man who handed him the script was the executive producer of Saturday Night's Main Event. Roberts found the script to be cornball and not representative of his character, thus he lashed out at Ebersol and told him to take the script and stick it. Some time later, Roberts found himself talking to SNME commentator Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Ventura told Roberts that the script that was handed to him was simply a pretext. Ventura, unlike Roberts, knew who Dick Ebersol was and as soon as Roberts pointed Ebersol (who at this point was talking with World Wrestling Federation chairman and SNME co-host Vince McMahon) to him and quickly left the scene as soon as he recognized Ebersol. Roberts soon found himself confronted by the same man for whom he had chided hours earlier. Ebersol then asked Roberts if he had any better suggestions for Saturday Night's Main Event than what the people at NBC came up with. The end result was a segment involving Roberts being interviewed while taking a shower with his snake.
- Episode 414: "My Lucky Charm" of popular TV series Scrubs is dedicated to Dick Ebersol's deceased son, Teddy Ebersol.
- With his wife Susan Saint James, they are part owner of Litchfield, Connecticut radio station, FM 97.3 WZBG. Also home of popular Litchfield County, Connecticut radio personalities Dale Jones and Amy Ferrarotti.
