Emmy Show’s New Pacemaker

When “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels won his first Emmy Award as a producer in 1976, he walked away from the podium congratulating himself on having thanked everyone connected with his show in his acceptance speech.

When he got back to the “Saturday Night Live” office the morning after, the 15 people he’d forgotten weren’t speaking to him.

“The simplest thing would have been to say ‘Thank you’--then move off,” Michaels lamented.

This year, Michaels is on the other side of the camera as producer of Fox Broadcasting’s 40th Annual Emmy Awards telecast from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. (It airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on KTTV Channel 11.)

In a recent interview at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Michaels said he hopes to persuade this year’s Emmy winners to be as brief and to the point as he should have been.

Last year, Emmy Award show producer Don Ohlmeyer tried to restore glamour to the broadcast by allowing winners to talk as long as they wanted. The result was a show that lasted four hours.

“We’re looking to Lorne to pick up the pace,” Doug Duitsman, president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, said in an earlier conversation. “We’re kind of excited about Lorne; we think he’ll have some interesting surprises.

“That (unlimited speech time) didn’t seem to work; that was Ohlmeyer’s thing. And there are still a lot of people who feel that way--that the show is to watch that emotion, to hear how the stars feel. I just think it adds length to the show.”

Duitsman hopes the combination of a shorter, more entertaining show and the growing audience for the fledgling Fox service will help bring the Emmys out of last year’s ratings doldrums.

Fox outbid the three major networks for the broadcast rights last year and wound up with the lowest-rated Emmy show ever.

“We know we’re not going to be the No. 1-rated show,” Duitsman said. “So all we can do is do the best possible show we can.”

Duitsman said this year’s ratings will be a factor in determining where Emmy telecasts will be broadcast after Fox’s three-year contract expires in 1989.

“I know for a fact that two of the networks want to have it back. I know Fox would probably like to have it back,” he said. He added that, since cable TV became eligible for the awards for the first time this year, several cable channels have expressed interest in airing the show as well.

As for shortening the telecast, Michaels acknowledged that telling people in the industry to curb their penchant for self-congratulation on the Emmys is like asking Cher to wear sensible shoes.

He has no plans to cut off long-winded celebrities with warning lights (as was done on one recent Academy Awards show), buzzers or trap doors.

Rather, he hopes common sense will tell winners that a short thank-you is a good career move.

“People who go on too long do such a disservice to themselves and their careers that no other punishment is necessary,” Michaels said.

“You can’t tell a winner not to say, ‘Jason and Melissa, you can go to sleep now.’ This is their moment,” said Michaels, an amiable 43-year-old with a somewhat bemused look on his face and a dark, shoulder-length mane streaked with gray. “(But) I’d like to tell them, ‘Save (the long speech) for that long profile that hopefully someone will write about you someday.’ ”

For those Emmy nominees who have not yet written their speeches, Michaels offers this advice: If you can’t be brief, be funny.

One way that Michaels plans to cut down the broadcast time is by having fewer presenters, rather than changing the presenting team for each award.

The TV academy also has pared down the number of televised awards from 31 to 29, but still faces a longer list of presentations than are made on the movie industry’s Academy Awards (22).

Michaels has also scrapped last year’s other Ohlmeyer invention: breathy backstage interviews, conducted by actors Phylicia Rashad and Alan Thicke, which became the embarrassment of the evening.

Despite his background as producer of the irreverent “Saturday Night Live” (Michaels created the show in 1975, left it to pursue a motion picture producing career in 1980, and returned as producer in 1985), Michaels has no plans to make the show a sendup of the Emmys.

“There was this whole period in the ‘70s of showing up for the awards in a green tuxedo and sneakers--I don’t want to back to that,” Michaels said. “It (the show) will take itself less seriously, but remain as dignified as possible.

“When I watched the Emmys recently, I was shocked to find that no one says ‘And the envelope please’ anymore. I really liked that.”

Michaels’ modest hopes for his awards show are not too embarrass himself too much and to communicate his respect for the medium it honors.

“I love television. There is good television, and there is bad television,” Michaels said. “Television is such a pervasive medium; the awards are an attempt to get a handle on it.

“The thing I loved most about ‘Saturday Night Live’ was that feeling of simultaneous experience--that Monday morning office thing where you know everybody is talking about the same show. It’s like when we all saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or Jesse Jackson’s speech, or millions of people saw Michael Jackson and all thought he was the best dancer at that moment.”

It was the thrill of television, especially live television, that lured him back to “Saturday Night Live,” he said.

“When I decided to go back to ‘Saturday Night Live,’ people said to me, ‘You can’t do that, somebody who wants to be you does that. And I thought, no-- I want to be me.”