There was nearly a very different nod to Wicked at the start of this year’s Oscar telecast, according to host Conan O’Brien.
Instead of the duet by the film’s leads, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, the initial plan called for a four-minute spoof video putting O’Brien into many of the year’s top films, including Wicked. “It was the idea that, ‘Oh, Conan’s now going to goof on all the movies,’” O’Brien said on his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. “It starts with me and I’m in Wicked and I’m all green, finishing ‘Defying Gravity’ or one of those songs. And I finish it and then you cut to the next thing, which is Gladiator II and ‘clang, clang, clang’ with swords and you see that I’m a gladiator but then you notice that I’m still green. And then you go on to Conclave and you see people voting with their ballots and one of the hands is still green.”
After he shows up, still green, in Dune: Part Two, O’Brien continued, Javier Bardem breaks the fourth wall and asks O’Brien if he started shooting the parody by putting on the Wicked makeup. “The whole thing was that the dye wouldn’t come off and we had to shoot it in one day,” he said. The “conceptual idea” would have involved characters including Nosferatu “piling on” him for the blunder, O’Brien recalled.
The video bit that did wind up running on Oscar night was a more straightforward riff on a single nominated film, The Substance. A tuxedo-clad O’Brien was shown emerging fully dressed from Demi Moore’s back.
Head writer Mike Sweeney, who joined O’Brien on the podcast, said the green-skinned opening sequence would have lasted about four minutes. “We loved it,” he recalled. “It was hammered out before the fires happened, and even after that we kind of honed it.” Ultimately, the impact of the fires prompted Oscar producers to begin the show with a tribute to Los Angeles as seen in films through the years, with the video montage leading into Grande and Erivo.
The Billy Crystal-esque opening wasn’t the only thing to hit the cutting-room floor, O’Brien and Sweeney said. The Dune sandworm, who popped up in the orchestra playing the harp in a moment reminiscent of O’Brien’s early late-night days, initially was going to command even more screen time.
“There was one idea where the sandworm comes out with an envelope and we were like, ‘No, how are we going to get ….? He’s not going to move!’” O’Brien said. One idea had the sandworm being lowered from the ceiling to talk to O’Brien. “He was going to have lines,” O’Brien said. “Then, it became clear that sandworm needs to be in the orchestra and needs to have gone to the Berklee School of Music.”
While O’Brien and Sweeney both said their dealings with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were pleasant and constructive, they did recall one moment where they crossed a line. It came as a promo for the telecast, in which O’Brien and a 9-foot-tall Oscar statuette are depicted as a domestic couple, was being shaped.
The conceit, O’Brien explained, was “we’re fighting about things couples fight about. At one point, I thought wouldn’t it be great if it’s just on the couch? Let’s lay it on a really big couch and I’ll be vacuuming and say, ‘Could you at least lift your feet? Or could you at least get up and help? Load the dishwasher?’ We wanted to do it and they just said, ‘No, no no, that can’t happen.’”
Sweeney remembered, “whispering” in the room by officials from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the idea was pitched. “One of the people from the Academy came forward and said, ‘Oscar can never be horizontal.’ And that blew my mind. Like, wow, this is like the thigh bone of St. Peter. This is a religious icon.”
Sweeney said the writers also wanted to put an apron on Oscar and show him serving O’Brien leftovers. “They said, ‘No clothing on Oscar,’” he laughed.
The Oscar promo did end up running, albeit without those extra punch-ups.
The process of sifting through countless ideas was complicated not only by the fires in January but also by the death of O’Brien’s mother and father three days apart in December. After regrouping with the writing team, which included a number of longtime collaborators (including Sweeney, who has worked with O’Brien for 30 years), the host embraced the idea that most jokes and ideas wouldn’t keep.
“One of the things you learn … is don’t fall in love with anything because also the times change,” he said. “If something is eight weeks out or nine weeks out, what’s funny now isn’t the story four weeks later. So many of the narratives kept changing.”
