‘Brave’ Wins Golden Globe
The Disney/Pixar movie Brave, featuring the voice of Craig Ferguson as Lord MacIntosh has won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Film from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The win is a good sign for the film’s other big nominations this year, including in the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards. Congratulations to everyone who made Brave happen!
At Last Friday’s Taping
Last Friday, Craig & Company taped a series of sketches that will be used during the Late Late Show Super Bowl special on Sunday, February 3rd. In the audience inside Studio 56 at CBS Television City were the RSA’s Christina and Charles, (and, we heard through the grapevine, @Colleen_Byrne) who had a chance to see the segments being prepared. Charles wrote a detailed blog post about their experience in the audience which contains some mild spoilers. If you don’t mind hearing a little bit about what will be in the Super Bowl show, read on the link below. If not, you may want to come back next month and check it out for a behind-the-scenes perspective of a different kind of LLS taping.
Christina and I have attended three tapings of “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson†together. Despite the way it looks on TV, the production is fairly tightly run, and once the show begins they rarely even take the full two or three minutes for commercial breaks before they roll tape again for the next segment.
So our experience on Friday afternoon/evening was quite different.
Christina got an e-mail on Monday from Ryan, one of the 1Iota folks who help coordinate the audiences for shows like Craig Ferguson’s. The e-mail noted there was a special show slated for Friday that would include only Ferguson doing sketches. She put in for the free tickets, and did a little research that helped us find out that they were going to shoot some taped segments for a show that will run after Super Bowl XLVII on Feb. 3.
Much of the pre-show activities were the same as the previous three shows we saw at Television City. We were allowed to park in the adjacent lot, then walked to the sidewalk on Fairfax Avenue where we lined up with about 150 other audience members. I got there a little bit before Christina since I was driving up from Torrance while she took a half-day off of work.
Because it was a Friday, the small snack bar and CBS store adjacent to the area where audience members go through security was closed. It was cold (for Los Angeles) and they kept us in the outdoor holding area for a bit longer than I remember waiting for other shows.
When they let us in the building, we waited in one of three lines upstairs before going into the studio, once again the usual drill. It was when we were seated in the studio that we first saw how different this experience would be.
On the right side of the stage a green screen was set up while at the center was an old leather couch and a 1970s console television set with rabbit ears. At the left, one of what turns out to be two Geoff Petersons was in a leather chair.
Chunky B
Union break. See you in a half hour (or so). So Chunky and his cohort did their best to keep the audience entertained. It reminded me of our experience at “Mike & Molly,†except that having someone to play off of made it flow a little better. But we still had the series of quiz questions and bad singers that we dealt with at the sitcom taping (with the exception of fewer parlor tricks). People will do almost anything for a T-shirt.
When the union break was over, they crew came out and moved the cameras to the green screen, where they started the actual taping with Josh Robert Thompson (the voice of Geoff Peterson) doing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tips on visiting New Orleans. The bit was well-received, but the audience was getting antsy. Where was Craig?
Finally, Craig arrived, ready to do a Sean Connery impression. As usual, he was spot-on, reflecting on past Super Bowl memories, a few of them even rooted in some sort of reality. Midway through taping the various segments, the crew brought Craig a bowl of popcorn, and then he went into one of the cabinets in the living room set and produced a stuffed sheep, which joined him on the couch for the remainder of the bit. They had to stop tape a few times when Craig’s bald cap was coming loose. I suspect difficulties in makeup may have also led to the delays that had stretched our time in the studio past two hours.
After he wrapped up the Connery segment, he asked the crew if Michael Caine was next and then went off stage. After about 10 more minutes of warmup, Craig came back, this time to the green screen, to tape some “Michael Caine in space†for use in the Super Bowl show. This was when the difficulties of the night came into full focus.
Holding a drink in one gloved hand and a cigarette in the other, he asked a crew member for a light. Craig read about three or four of the jokes off the teleprompter before someone told him he had to put the cigarette out because there was not a “special-effects person†on the set. He then read about five or six more before someone else said he could not have the cigarette at all.
This led to a bunch of inside jokes that only the audience would get as he continued to plow through the material on the teleprompter. For the most part it was still funny, but you could tell there was a growing level of frustration as he would say things like “You know what would make this better? A cigarette.†He also made several references to how a comedy bit could possibly make impressionable children want to smoke or speak in an English accent.
After finishing what was in the teleprompter, Craig looked at the staff and asked if he needed to do the ones where he was holding the cigarette again. We could tell he was not pleased with the prospect of having to get in makeup again another day before the show airs to redo the segment, so he and the staff decided it would be better to do it again. Of course, that meant the audience had heard the jokes already once, which proved to be an issue at the “Mike & Molly†taping as well.
The absurdity of the whole thing kept us laughing. We could all feel for the situation he was in as the taping stretched past three hours. He ultimately wrapped up the Michael Caine segment, did a cold open (which we are not sure is for the Super Bowl show) and said it would take too long to get out of makeup for the last bit they had planned, something with Geoff. He thanked the audience for sticking around as long as we did (7:15 p.m.) and left the stage.
It appeared to me that the ill-timed union break probably threw off the entire schedule. Craig probably planned to do the Connery thing first, then the Caine, and the Schwarzenegger segment could have been taped while his makeup was being removed.
While we love the program, and cannot wait for the chance to see another regular show, Christina and I agreed that Friday’s taping was interesting to see, but something we did not need to do again.[/stextbox]
Thank you to Christina and Charles for sharing their story!
Baby It’s Cold Outside
It was very chilly this weekend in much of the southwestern US, with temperatures in some areas reaching the single digits. Even in usually balmy southern California, people woke up to sub-freezing temperatures, as LLS Producer Michael Naidus tweeted:
It’s 31 degrees here in L.A., which I think officially means hell is freezing over.
‘Brave’ Wins Golden Globe
By the way, did we mention that Brave won the Golden Globe Award on Sunday night for Best Animated Film? Here’s the clip:
Video courtesy: Newsforthenation1
This Week’s Guests
Guillermo del Toro
It’s another week of all-new episodes of the Late Late Show, beginning Monday with actress Jenna Elfman and producer Guillermo Del Toro. On Tuesday, Craig chats with actress Lena Dunham and actor Bill Pullman. On Wednesday, watch for actor Don Cheadle and actor DJ Qualls. Actress Kristen Bell and comedian Tom Cotter are in the studio on Thursday. And on Friday, Craig welcomes actress Carrie Fisher and actor Steven Yeun.
Leave it to a rocker at heart like Craig Ferguson to mark the 66th birthday of David Bowie. On Tuesday, Craig tweeted a video of a live performance from the glam rock legend:
If you live in or will be visiting the Los Angeles area on Friday, January 11th, you might want to go to Studio 56 at CBS Television City. There will be no guests that day but the show will be taping several segments to use during Craig’s post-Super Bowl special on February 3rd. Book early to avoid disappointment. There are still plans to tape some segments in New Orleans in early February as well, but there’s no official word yet on when those parts will be taped, or if and when tickets will be made available. We’ll keep you posted.
Every January, the television networks gather for an event called the Winter TV Press Tour, where they talk with reporters from the Television Critics Association about their plans for the coming year. It was NBC’s turn on Monday. Among the big announcements was world the contract for Tonight Show host Jay Leno has been extended beyond 2014. While a specific expiration date was not mentioned, network executives indicated that they were pleased to have Leno, Jimmy Fallon and Carson Daly forming their late-night lineup. The website 
