H-e-e-e-e-r-e’s Rosie

NEW YORK —  It’s a blue kind of day in the offices of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.” Most of the blues are just fine.

Executive producer Daniel Kellison wears a blue Oxford shirt and blue jeans, setting the tone for his three dozen minions, about 80% of them women, who favor the faded-jeans look as well. It is four weeks before the first broadcast of the weekday syndicated variety show, and most of the names in the many calendar-gridded charts around the Rockefeller Center office are marked in blue. Blue is the “unconfirmed guest” color. Interspersed are a few names in black marker.

“Black is confirmed,” explained head booker Jeffry Culbreth. “But blue is OK right now. They don’t know us just yet. They will. I’m not worried.”

But what is blue, blue and more blue--which is not so good--is the first try at a set for the show. This set, which no one who tunes in to the first “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” Monday (to be seen in the Los Angeles area at 3 p.m. on KNBC-TV Channel 4) will ever see, was just plain, well, too blue.

“It’s a daytime show and you can’t make it look like nighttime,” said director Bob McKinnon, talking about the blue audience chairs, blue host chair, blue drop curtains, blue carpets and blue floor tiles on that first set. “Blue goes much darker on camera than it does to the eye. It’s a technical thing that happens. . . . Anyhow, it won’t be that blue. The floor won’t be that color. The intensity won’t be that blue. If we do, it will have a psychological effect on people watching in the daytime.”

“The Rosie O’Donnell Show”--all of it, not just its set--was carefully designed not to make anyone blue. No new daytime talk show wants to alienate its potential audience. There are only so many viewers to go around with the glut of channels spewing forth from your cable box. While it will be one of a fusillade of syndicated shows you will be implored to watch this year to replace departed ones such as those hosted by Phil Donahue and Danny Bonaduce, “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” has been predicted by some experts to have the best shot at success.

As it builds toward its Monday premiere, its producers have allowed periodic peeks at how a show of this sort goes from conception to your screen.

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By last winter, it seemed like every last officeholder or pundit with a spare opinion had come down against filth and bad taste on what is known in the syndicated TV trade as “the talk genre.” The permutations of personal travesties from “Stripper Cheerleaders” to “My Mother Is a Transvestite Hooker” became fodder for do-good spokespeople wanting to clean up the daytime airwaves. The public finally seemed somewhat aghast as well, as ratings even for long-standing popular players such as Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera dropped and some hosts promised to clean up their video acts.

Into this breach rode Rosie O’Donnell, or, more properly, her 1-year-old adopted son, Parker. In the early ‘90s, O’Donnell had transferred her tough-but-lovable stand-up act into a set of well-received movie notices (“A League of Their Own,” “Sleepless in Seattle”) and a host of talk-show appearances. But as a 34-year-old single mom, she wanted more of Parker and less of the road.

“I did one movie since [Parker] arrived [‘Harriet the Spy,’ opening July 3] and, during those 23 days I was in Toronto, I saw him an average of 40 minutes a day,” she said, perched in her eighth-floor office overlooking Rockefeller Center, two days before her first of five practice shows. Parker is sleeping behind a door that reads “PARKER,” each letter a clown in various bright plaids. “That’s not the kind of parent I want to be. I want to be hands-on and put him to bed at night, be there when he takes his first step, goes to kindergarten, the whole thing.”

She guest-hosted for Kathie Lee Gifford on “Live With Regis & Kathie Lee” one week and was hooked. If she could sell someone on the idea of doing her own chat-’em-up show, she could stay in New York, close to her family’s Long Island home. Not only that, she could have relative banker’s hours. In by 8. Out by 1. Do a little writing at home. Cuddle with Parker.

Enter Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions, a division of Warner Bros., who was on the lookout for possible daytime syndicated hits. The studio distributes “Jenny Jones,” one of the more successful if controversial so-called “trash talk” shows, and “Extra,” a flashy entertainment news half-hour.

“She could have done a sitcom in New York,” Paratore said. “She could have done a late-night talk show too. But she said, ‘I want to do a daytime talk show.’ And we wanted to be a part of it.”

By Thanksgiving, O’Donnell and Warner had a deal. Warner was happy with having a name to promote. O’Donnell was satisfied that Warner had money and clout to get her vision off the ground.

That vision was like one of those sequences on a TV sitcom where a filmy haze comes up and you are transported to the past--in this case, to the O’Donnell household in the early 1970s:

Here little Rosie is bounding home from school, loudly singing a Broadway show tune.

“It was 3 or 4 in the afternoon, right before when my mother would cook dinner, when we watched it. Watched Merv Griffin,” said O’Donnell, sitting in an easy chair near Parker’s blue-green portable crib in her office. “I remember watching the comedians and the singers with my grandmother and mother after school. I also remember the feeling that no one was nervous. A lot of late-night talk shows, everybody seems so nervous. You never saw anybody on Merv Griffin appearing nervous. It appeared everyone was his friend and nobody felt in dangerous territory.”

Warner and Paratore bought O’Donnell as the Merv Griffin of the ‘90s. No “Transsexual Chippendales” or “Vegetarian Prostitutes.” Just a fast monologue, three guests and a quick little surprise or two. Within weeks, Paratore had most of the major markets signed up, sight-unseen, just on O’Donnell’s name and a format.

At the same time, Warner decided to start the show in June, rather than the more traditional September premiere. The company was producing “Carnie,” a trash-talker hosted by singer Carnie Wilson, that had become a dog in the ratings. Rather than keep the unwatched “Carnie” going all summer, Warner decided to give “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” an early start.

“No. 1, the history of talk-variety is that it is a slower build,” said Paratore, meaning that audiences take longer to warm to this softer-edged format. “No. 2, some things are going to work and some things aren’t going to work, so it gives us a television version of an off-Broadway run. We hit Broadway in the fall. Thirdly, we will get a bigger bang from our marketing dollar in June, when we’re not competing against the flood of the network and syndicated [fall] season.”

Yet that presented a whole new set of problems. A production crew had to be hired, offices found and a show mounted in a desperately short time. Unfortunately, this is never as easy as in the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland-let’s-put-on-a-show-kids scenario. The hardest hire would be the new executive producer. After all, there hadn’t been a successful one of these desk-and-couch daytime variety shows for nearly a generation.

Daniel Kellison remembers watching “The Mike Douglas Show,” which aired out of the Philadelphia studios of KYW-TV in the 1970s and early 1980s. Well, vaguely, anyway.

“I think I was 9 years old when Mike Douglas was on,” said Kellison, whose office, no playpen included, always has the door open, which means he has a grand look down the newly carpeted, block-long hallway leading down to Studio 8G, where “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” originates. “I saw it through the vantage point of a third-grader with cinnamon toast and chocolate milk.”

Kellison was a 31-year-old segment producer on “Late Show With David Letterman” when Paratore asked him to come out to his Los Angeles home. O’Donnell, who had worked with Kellison when she came on Letterman--he had induced her to sing “Oklahoma” to Dave--had recommended him to Warner Bros. for the top job on her proposed show. He jetted out over a weekend, hoping to avoid having Letterman, who is a stickler for loyalty, find out about the pitch. On the way back to New York, he was seated next to actress Teri Garr, a Letterman fave.

“I said I was out there visiting a friend. I’m in first-class, out for the weekend, visiting a friend,” said Kellison. “She looked very suspicious and I told her what was going on. She kept it under her hat.”

Kellison knew he didn’t have time to waste, so he scampered over to the Museum of Television & Radio in Manhattan to look at some old “Mike Douglas” tapes, just to see what he might be getting into.

“It was unbelievable. It was so much fun to watch,” he said, recounting one show in which Milton Berle came on to promote his autobiography while Richard Pryor was guest-hosting with Douglas. “[Berle] is talking about getting this starlet pregnant in the 1930s and not knowing what to do. Pryor breaks out laughing. Berle gets frustrated and they have this screaming match on this show. It was great.”

Kellison was the unseen face behind several of “Late Show’s” more inventive stunts. He got writer-in-hiding Salman Rushdie to deliver a Top 10 list to Letterman when the show was in London. Peter O’Toole rode on stage on a camel that he later fed a Heineken at Kellison’s request. Most outrageous of all, he persuaded Drew Barrymore to dance on Letterman’s desk and pull up her shirt, “flashing” Dave her bare breasts.

Kellison knew upon arrival at “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” that he would have to simmer down a little bit. After all, daytime talk is a 25- to 54-year-old woman’s thing, while Letterman appeals to younger men. As testament, a month before the first show, booker Culbreth confirmed “Grace Under Fire” star Brett Butler as a guest for the premiere show and Kellison proclaimed her perfect.

“She speaks to real America. She speaks to a female audience,” he said.

Oops! Two weeks later, Butler begged off the “Rosie” premiere. It seems the woman who was going to speak to “real America” had decided to take a monthlong vacation in Europe. “Hopefully we’ll get her on her way back,” Kellison said.

So off went Butler’s name in black on the calendar-grid guest boards and on went that of “ER” hunk George Clooney’s.

“Still, that’s not bad. Not bad at all,” he said.

Audiences for TV shows are not that hard to come by in New York. If you can’t have your own 15 minutes of fame, it’s almost the same in this city ogling someone else’s.

“There’s a higher concentration of people, access to a mass transit system and a huge flow of tourists on an ongoing basis,” said Paratore. “If you try to do it in Los Angeles, you end up on a tourist level competing with the sitcoms. So if I brought my family into town, they’d want to see a taping of ‘Friends.’ Then the locals are just jaded and freeway-fatigued. It’s something about being a spread-out city where most people aren’t from the place, which feeds into the psychology.”

Even so, the “Rosie” crew thought it would be nice to give away little prizes to some of the audience members during the first practice show on May 16. Since it would never air, they couldn’t please themselves waving to their Aunt Irmas, so a few trinkets would have to do--silly items such as a rabbit leash and fish-flavored water for cats.

Except that Kellison heard some grumbling from the seats behind his producer stand (which lies hidden from the viewers at home between the cameras and the studio audience). Apparently, in typical New York fashion, what was free and unexpected wasn’t quite good enough for some folks. But the quick-witted executive producer decided to make lemonade out of those lemon gifts. To end the show, he brought down a half-dozen guests who wanted a different gift and had O’Donnell do an impromptu bit with them doing a mass exchange.

“If there was a mistake I learned in that first practice show, it was that I had the writers do too many of what we call ‘desk pieces,’ where Rosie would deliver some jokes at her desk,” head writer Randy Cohen said a day after the practice run. “When we did that audience thing, I thought, ‘Yes! That’s why we’re here.’ We’re creating a more intimate show and she’s great with the audience. It wasn’t like the desk pieces weren’t funny. But we’re there not to have our bright little words said. We’re there to create an arena where Rosie will thrive.”

Kellison was able to recruit a slew of well-hewn behind-the-scenes talent in the weeks preceding the show’s premiere.

Culbreth had been a booker on the “Today” show and “Now With Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric” at NBC and the syndicated “Day & Date.” Director McKinnon was looking for a later wake-up call than he had had over the last nine years, the first seven on “Good Morning America,” and the last two as director of “Today.”

Cohen pleaded with Kellison, with whom he had worked at “Late Show,” to create a head-writer’s job and put him in it. Kellison said he thought Cohen would be too hip for the new show, but Cohen persisted, coming up with 100 mainstream ideas, and he was in. Cohen also asked if he could work two afternoons from home to take care of his young daughter.

“This is an unbelievably family-friendly show,” Cohen said. “I was reluctant in the end to take the job because I know these shows can have you work long, long hours. ‘Letterman’ was such a guys’ world. But many of the people here are women. They are aware that people have lives. Already, at times, my situation may have inconvenienced Rosie, but she’s been great about it.”

John McDaniel played keyboards for Patti LuPone and was the musical director for “Grease” when O’Donnell played the show on Broadway. He’s now the composer and musical director for the show, leading a five-piece band.

“It’s an exciting time right now, having the chance to give birth to what the show is going to be,” said McDaniel, at his baby grand, scratching out the show’s theme song less than a week before it had to be recorded behind an animated show opening. “We hope people will start singing it. In their sleep.”

Slowly but surely, Culbreth, with the help of Kellison and O’Donnell herself, starts convincing publicists that their clients will be comfortable with O’Donnell. Sarah Jessica Parker, now on Broadway with “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” confirms for Day 2; Fran Drescher, the Queens-native “Nanny” star, is in for Day 3; Matthew Broderick, Parker’s co-star, is in black on the board for Day 4. Merv Griffin himself says he may make a quick appearance; Bette Midler, who was Culbreth’s first “get” on “Now,” is in blue on the board: a possible.

Four weeks before the premiere, though, O’Donnell was lamenting that Julie Andrews, who had just refused her Tony nomination when the rest of the “Victor/Victoria” cast was snubbed, said she wouldn’t do “Rosie.”

“Disappointed me. I’m her egregiously overlooked talk show,” said O’Donnell, who said she wants people like Andrews not to fear her version of TV talk.

“I think that comfortable, sort of friendly feeling isn’t around that much in the talk show genre,” O’Donnell said. “So many times, a guest will come out and Jay Leno will say, sarcastically, ‘That’s a nice shirt. Where did you get that shirt?’ Every time I see that, I think that Johnny Carson would never have done that.

“I’m hoping the celebrities will think this is a safe environment. I’m hoping to get them in and make them look good,” she said.

Meanwhile, the set is getting de-blued. Kathleen Akers, Letterman’s set designer, makes the tile floor a gray mosaic. She changes the backdrop curtain and puts antique touches all around the set to give it a Broadway theater feel.

Cohen and McDaniel finalize the theme song, suggested by the animated, story-line opening of Drescher’s “The Nanny.”

“Movies. Sure, she can do it. Broadway. Gave it a try,” it starts, with a fast-paced New York beat. And a New York ending: “The subway’s divine at a quarter to nine. It’s ‘The Rosie O’Donnell Show.’ ”

“I grew up here so I love it here,” O’Donnell said. “When people recognize you on the street, it’s, ‘How ya doin’, Rosie?’ and it’s over. In L.A., it’s, ‘You know, my brother was a grip on your movie and I’ve written a script that I got sold to Paramount. Would you mind reading . . . ?’ Yuck. It just never ends.”

Tinkering here and tweaking there went on down to the wire with “The Rosie O”Donnell Show.” It was determined, for instance, that a studio audience member, instead of a regular staffer, would announce the guest lineup at the beginning of the show each day.

That guest lineup changed a bit as well. Kellison decided that the initial practice shows, which had three guests each, needed a faster pace. So for the time being, each show will have four guests. And there was the usual juggling of the guests. Sarah Jessica Parker has moved to Day 4 with Gloria Estefan; Matthew Broderick is out. Joan Lunden and the cast of Broadway’s “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk” are booked for Day 2. Raquel Welch and Nathan Lane are scheduled for Day 5.

Still, Kellison and O’Donnell were comfortable enough to spend last weekend in Washington at the Stand for Children rally, O’Donnell being a strong believer in children’s rights. From his Washington hotel, Kellison appeared unperturbed as the premiere drew closer.

“For weeks, I’ve been looking for the disaster, but it’s never come,” he said. “The biggest change we made after doing the practice shows was changing from three guests a show to four, just to make the pace better. But nothing has really gone wrong. No one hates each other. The staff has just plugged along.”

The “Rosie” staff knows its Golden Ticket has to be O’Donnell herself. If viewers end up turning her off, they all could be joining other syndicated crews in the TV trash-heap. And the star? She’s making no predictions.

“You’ve just got to do it to do it. Like the Lotto. You’ve got to be in it to win it,” said O’Donnell, repeating the slogan of the New York Lottery. “Right now, we’re lucky. We’re at least in it.”