NBC Attempting to Close Gap Between ‘Tonight,’ Hollywood

Worried about a growing rift between “The Tonight Show” and the entertainment industry on which it depends for guests, NBC is considering changing the management of television’s premiere late-night series.

At stake is the future of executive producer Helen Kushnick, a longtime associate of “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno.

In an unusual statement, NBC declared late Friday that it is “considering modifications to the show’s management structure.” The statement expressed strong support for Leno but pointedly did not include Kushnick in its praise.

Kushnick, Leno’s former manager, increasingly has drawn criticism since Leno replaced Johnny Carson on the program last May. Some Hollywood managers, agents and publicists have groused privately about what they describe as the high-pressure tactics she is using to secure top-name guests. Her defenders say she is merely doing what talk-show producers--including Carson’s--have always done in the name of competition.

The controversy reached a boiling point last week when talent manager Ken Kragen went public with a charge that Kushnick had told him that one of his clients, country singer Travis Tritt, was being permanently barred from “The Tonight Show” because Kragen refused to cancel an appearance on the rival “Arsenio Hall Show” and deliver him to NBC instead.

Kragen said that Kushnick took further retribution against him by canceling the scheduled appearance of another client, country singer Trisha Yearwood.

At the beginning of the week, Kushnick had declined to comment on Kragen’s allegations when contacted by The Times. On Friday, however, she went on the Howard Stern radio program to refute them and asserted that she is under attack because she is a woman.

NBC sources said that the network’s statement later that day constituted acknowledgment that “The Tonight Show” has a serious problem. NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield and his business-affairs chief, John Agoglia, met with Leno and Kushnick in an effort to resolve it.

None of the parties could be reached for comment Sunday, but a network spokesman said that the situation had not changed over the weekend.

Normally when network executives are unhappy with a producer, they quietly force a change and then announce it publicly as a fait accompli. The fact that NBC went public with the news that it was contemplating a change suggests that Littlefield was anxious to signal Hollywood that he was trying to mend the rift but was still working out the method.

A likely stumbling block: Leno’s loyalty to Kushnick, who had been his manager since 1975 until they took their “Tonight Show” jobs.

In her appearance on Stern’s nationally syndicated radio show, Kushnick denied Kragen’s account of why Tritt and Yearwood were not on “The Tonight Show” and attributed his motivation for making the charges to being part of Hollywood’s male Establishment. “I’ve upset the balance of power,” she said. “They don’t like a woman doing this.”