I'll always remember October 7, 2001 but not the way you might think. It was a Sunday morning and we were about to do the Emmy Awards that day. As the newly elected chairman/CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, I'd already been involved -- as my first challenge in office -- with the first cancelation ever of an Emmy broadcast. When the September 11 attacks happened, it had been a no-brainer to immediately postpone the planned September 16 show. I was putting on my running shoes, about to go for a quick spin to settle the nerves in anticipation of speaking to a worldwide audience of 90-million people that day, when the phone rang. The voice on the other end said, "Turn on your TV."
Bryce Zabel, ATAS CEO; Les Moonves, CBS President; Don Mischer, Emmy Producer (Photo by Mathew Imaging, Craig Mathew)
I turned on the TV in my home office and it was immediately apparent that America was at war in Afghanistan and that the Emmys probably weren't going to happen that day either. That photo above is the news conference that would be held hours later to postpone the Emmy Awards a second time! Even though I've been a CNN correspondent, this was the largest group of cameras I'd ever seen in a single location. The rule of thumb, of course, is that if you come to cover a story and the story's not happening, cover the reasons the story isn't happening and that story becomes your new story.
That morning we went through the motions or, as they like to call it, we did our "due diligence" and called nominees, agents, managers, network executives, everybody we could think of. It became clear that not only was the nation's attention focused on the beginning of war, post 9/11, but the very people we would expect to come to the Emmys were having grave doubts. They did not want to be seen as thinking that getting an award was as important as an issue of life-or-death.
So we gave over three-thousand gourmet dinners to homeless shelters, told the limo drivers not to come, asked the stars to put their tuxes and gowns back in the closets and told the media we'd think about what our future plans were.
The next day I appeared as a guest on "Politically Incorrect" and got in an argument with Bill Mahrer who said we should have just done them anyway. My feeling was (and is) that you don't want to be the host of a party that nobody wants to come to and that having the Emmys that day would have done serious damage to the Academy.
As it turned out, the third time was the charm. We did the Emmys on November 4, 2001 with Ellen DeGeneres hosting and going up against the seventh game of an exciting World Series. The whole show probably gets an asterisk in the history books.
Eight years later, I've been out of the Academy for years, moving on with my life, and a thousand nominees have come and gone. The war in Afghanistan is still with us.
Let's be glad that President Obama and his team are practicing their "due diligence" even as we speak.
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