Emmys Are Called Off for a 2nd Time

After watching the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan unfold all morning, producers of the 53rd annual Emmy Awards decided to cancel Sunday’s show--the second such postponement in a month and this time just hours before the ceremony was scheduled to begin.

Even as caterers prepared the post-show dinner, hair stylists primped their star clients and the show’s producers rehearsed the planned closing number, “America the Beautiful,” word leaked out backstage that CBS and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences had called off the broadcast in light of U.S. and British airstrikes.

For all the furious coordination that had gone into the show over the last several weeks, the decision to shut down the Emmys emerged in waves, catching people--even the show’s venerable producer, Don Mischer--off guard.

Indeed, Mischer, who has had to juggle the differing opinions of top producers in Hollywood about whether the Emmys should proceed at all, ultimately found out about the cancellation after NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw announced it to the nation. Mischer then emerged from his trailer in a parking area behind the Shrine Auditorium, where the show was to be held, and relayed the information to comedian Ellen DeGeneres, the host, who was relaxing after finishing rehearsal.

Later, DeGeneres said she was disappointed because she believed the show, after lurching back and forth to find an appropriate tone, had achieved a moving mix of pathos and humor that the world would be deprived of seeing.

“I feel so many different things,” she said. “I’m thinking about those poor, innocent people in Afghanistan.”

Since Sept. 11, issues of propriety and decorum had touched off a unique discussion within an entertainment industry that is often criticized for its self-absorption.

In the weeks since the attacks, movie studios have pulled releases deemed inappropriate for the times, the beginning of the fall television season was postponed, and celebrity in general became a footnote to history. And yet, organizers for an event honoring television dramas and situation comedies and the stars who populate them found a way to continue.

Originally scheduled for Sept. 16, less than a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Emmys were postponed to Oct. 7 and redesigned as a simulcast from New York to accommodate actors who were reluctant to board a plane for an awards show. In this atmosphere, the Emmys--compromised and chastened but emboldened to continue nevertheless--were pitched by academy leaders as nothing less than a retort to the terrorists.

Rescheduling Uncertain

By noon Sunday, that retort was preempted, even beyond anything the TV academy or CBS could conjure.

“There’s a difference between carrying on and doing something that’s inappropriate,” Bryce Zabel, the academy’s chairman-elect, told reporters at the Shrine. “That line was reached this morning. . . . We are not concerned with sending the wrong message. Things have changed. . . . America is visibly at war now.”

Whether the Emmys will be rescheduled is in doubt, but CBS Television President Leslie Moonves said Sunday that there was near unanimity within Hollywood regarding the cancellation.

“I can honestly say that I didn’t speak to one person in the community that was passionate about going on. And I spoke to about 30 that felt this was the right thing to do,” Moonves told reporters gathered backstage at the Shrine.

Moonves said those calls included several from high-profile stars.

“They weren’t being jerks or prima donnas,” he said. “They just didn’t want to come out and participate.”

Emmy planners, led by producer Mischer, a veteran of major television events such as awards shows and the Olympic Games, had taken pains to find a tone to match the mood of the country. Nominees were to show up in business attire, not formal wear, and the annual Governors Ball was renamed the Unity Dinner.

The show was to include a preamble from retired CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and filmed tributes to the rescue workers in New York, including one to police officers from Dennis Franz, who plays a hard-bitten cop on the ABC police drama “NYPD Blue.” The telecast was to have closed with an address from New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the coast-to-coast singing of “America the Beautiful,” with Police Officer Daniel Rodriguez in New York backed up by several hundred singers from USC, Loyola Marymount and Cal State Northridge onstage at the Shrine.

Mischer addressed his crew shortly after 2 p.m. in the auditorium. For them, rehearsal had started at 9 a.m. and continued under a cloud of uncertainty when news emerged half an hour later that U.S. and Britain had begun airstrikes. By 10 a.m., additional uniformed and plainclothes security guards were sent to the area, said Gary Moses, security consultant with Pinkerton Security, which handled the Emmys.

Metal detectors originally scheduled to be operational in the early afternoon were set up quickly so that every person admitted to the compound that morning would be scanned.

Mischer, interviewed just before noon as clips from nominated series played on two giant TV screens in the auditorium, said several taped comedy bits had been excised because of the morning’s events and that Cronkite and Giuliani were rewriting their speeches. But Mischer also indicated that he wanted a telecast that would adjust to breaking news. “If there are news interruptions, I want to air it on the screens,” he said.

By 2 p.m., however, Mischer had a different message to deliver to his staff. “You have all done such an incredible job under circumstances that were unimaginable,” he said. “I think the country and the world really would have been surprised to see how we would do [the show].”

Outside the auditorium, workers began to remove props from the red-carpet area.

Images of War

The Emmys, scheduled to air live on the East Coast at 8 p.m. and three hours later on the West Coast, would have been competing with daybreak in Afghanistan, when the images of war would have changed from the grainy video of night attacks that TV audiences had been witnessing much of the day Sunday.

That apparently factored into the decision by CBS and the academy to again postpone the program, as did a host of other issues.

Although some past breaking news stories have touched off competition within networks between the news and entertainment divisions, CBS News President Andrew Heyward said: “It never got that far because [Moonves] was expressing grave concerns about the Emmys to begin with.”

After Moonves made the decision on the Emmys, Heyward said, CBS News proposed airing a two-hour edition of “60 Minutes” that would include some of the tributes produced for the Emmys.

Neither Zabel nor Moonves would say whether the Emmys would be rescheduled, underscoring the fact that the event is lucrative enough for both the network and the academy to warrant proceeding cautiously. The reluctance to cancel Sunday’s telecast is a sign of the strong commitment to go forward with the event in some form.

But the sentiment Sunday was one of support for CBS’ decision.

“This wasn’t a decision made out of a sense of fear, but rather out of a sense of appropriateness,” said Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Television Entertainment Group. “It would be sad for the entire industry if, at some point in time, the show doesn’t go on.”

Before this year, the Emmys had never been delayed, much less canceled. The event proceeded in 1980, in fact, when a Screen Actors Guild strike resulted in a boycott by most of the high-profile nominees.

It has been equally rare for awards shows to be postponed. The Academy Awards were delayed by one day in 1981 after President Reagan was shot.

As it was, the TV academy’s template for this year’s awards in part followed a script established by the film academy in 1942--the first Academy Awards to follow the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That year, the Oscars banned formal attire and called their ceremony a dinner instead of a banquet.

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Times staff writers Dana Calvo, Greg Braxton, Brian Lowry, Elizabeth Jensen, Gina Piccalo, Louise Roug, Susan King and Ann O’Neill contributed to this report.