online website help:
 

NMH Magazine : Fall 2004

Wonder Boys

They were friends at NMH 

by Adam Orth 

now Dan Kellison ’82 produces cutting-edge TV comedy shows and Josh Selig ’82 creates sunny programs for the preschool set.

How did two guys from the same class end up on opposite coasts doing similar-but-different television work? (PS: They still get together for dinner now and then.)

Daniel Kellison When Daniel Kellison ’82 started attending New York University, he dreamed of being a playwright. But he didn’t let that get in the way of a great career in comedy television. Perhaps the first hint of what lay in store surfaced during his freshman year at NYU. Kellison landed a part-time job on Miami Vice keeping screaming female fans away from actor Don Johnson’s trailer. More low-level, part-time production work for television followed, including sleeping and eating in a car to guard parking spaces. Then he became a bartender at Sardi’s, a fabled New York restaurant known for drawing big names in movies and television.

It was all fun, but four years passed and not much changed. Kellison was still in college and getting worried. Was he destined to end up a failed writer spending too much time in a bar? Faced with that image, he realized television work could be more than a diversion. “It was one of those hit-on-the-head-with-a-hammer moments,” says Kellison. “Self-doubt is a great motivator.”

He applied for—and got—a coveted internship on Late Night with David Letterman. After two back-to-back internships, he applied for the job of talent researcher. The sample research Kellison did impressed the executive producer, who nevertheless warned him that an experienced researcher for the Today show would likely get the job.

Kellison wrote a letter asking: “Which do you want, some worn-out old researcher who’s never moved from the job he’s been doing for seven years, or a young hungry guy with something to prove?’

He got the job.

Still in college, he continued to juggle Letterman and bartending until he graduated two years later in 1990 with a degree in dramatic writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He worked his way up to segment producer and was with the show eight years, then turned his experience into a career as an executive producer. First he launched the Rosie O’Donnell Show in 1996. Kellison was nominated for an Emmy but didn’t click with O’Donnell. He left within a year to work on a new talk show with Quincy Jones called Vibe and an ABC special on magician David Blaine.

Then, thanks to introductions from Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, Kellison met two men at a rock concert who remain his close friends and partners to this day: comedians Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel. They hung out the entire day together and got along great, and at the end Kimmel asked if Kellison wanted to have lunch. It was at that lunch they discussed their first program idea, The Man Show.

Thus Jackhole Productions was born. Carolla and Kimmel are the talent in front of the camera; Kellison is the organizer who works behind the scenes. The name—one of several words Carolla and Kimmel once used on the radio to get past obscenity laws—has grown to represent quirky, improbable comedy hits.

The Man Show debuted in 1999, drawing more than two million viewers to Comedy Central at the height of its popularity. The show featured audiences drinking beer while cheering on the scantily clad Juggie Dance Squad. Each show closed with footage of girls jumping on trampolines. Despite the show’s reputation for belittling women, that wasn’t the intent, insists Kellison. “It was never misogynistic or mean-spirited. The premise was that guys are chumps, and when left to their own devices, they invariably fall prey to their own worst inclinations.”

Feeling the show had run its course, Kellison, Kimmel, and Carolla left it in 2003. Comedy Central tried another year without them but pulled the plug this year.

Crank Yankers, which elevated crank phone calls to an art form, debuted on Comedy Central in 2002, with Kellison as cocreator and executive producer. On the show, puppets act out actual crank calls made on unsuspecting victims (who, before the show airs, sometimes send in pictures to ensure the puppets look like them). Among the show’s fans are Dustin Hoffman, Justin Timberlake, Barry Manilow, and Richard Pryor. When rap singer Eminem won an Academy Award for best original song, he didn’t bother to show up. The next week, however, he was on the phone setting up his appearance on Crank Yankers. Kellison remains as executive producer, while his brother, Rob Anderson ’94, now coproduces the show with Kimmel’s younger brother.

Then there’s Windy City Heat, a two-hour Comedy Central special on one of the most elaborate pranks ever: the making of a major motion picture—from casting to final shot—that didn’t exist. Only the male lead, who was set up over a seven-year period, wasn’t in on the hoax. The movie recently won a best film award at the Just for Laughs film festival in Montreal, which last year gave the award to American Splendor. This is a rare achievement for Jackhole.

“Our shows are generally more about making people laugh than winning awards,” says Kellison.

That might explain the ending of a Super Bowl special the partners did last year for MTV. It involved slinging Wee Man, a professional stunt midget, 80 yards across a football field, over the goal posts, and into a pool of nacho cheese. Kellison describes it as “the crowning moment of a very difficult producing job.”

He admits to some concerns about how his career will be viewed at his old boarding school. “I worry that people at NMH are going to read this and say, ‘All the work we did and look what happened!’”

Raised in Brattleboro, Vermont, he was one of four children his parents sent to Northfield Mount Hermon. “I was a whirling dervish—totally unharnessed, frenetic energy,” he recalls. “At most schools I probably would have been lost in the shuffle, but teachers at NMH helped me learn to focus. They zeroed in on my raw abilities and were able to see something there.”

Here he was more goofball than class prankster. The one prank call he made went horribly awry when the girl who answered the phone recognized his voice. The school helped him develop a healthy skepticism, which he put to use as an editorial writer for the student newspaper—and which later served him well as producer for celebrity-deflater Letterman.

Last season, Kellison was busy launching Jimmy Kimmel Live, a direct challenge to Letterman in the late-night talk show wars. Now in its second season, Jimmy Kimmel must do without Kellison, who bowed out after the first year to work on a slew of new programs, including more shows for MTV, Comedy Central, ABC, and a talk show vehicle for Carolla. Having escaped the talk-show grind—230 shows and about 700 guests a year—he may soon be jumping in again headfirst.

Now living in Santa Monica, Californa, Kellison sets aside free time for his five-year-old daughter, Chloe. Meanwhile, he’s written a television script that’s making the rounds. It’s about a group of 22-year-olds who don’t know what to do with their lives.

If it sells, he’ll be the television equivalent of a playwright.

 

Josh Selig Juggling balls, knives, and torches while cracking jokes as a New York City street performer taught Josh Selig ’82 the value of minimalism. Quick, simple gags made it more likely he’d catch the attention of passersby. That was back in his college days, when he was attending Sarah Lawrence.

Now 40, Selig is still committed to simplicity, in his personal life and as a creator of children’s television programming.

“You learn to only carry that which you need,” says Selig.

“If you don’t really need it, then maybe you don’t really want it.”

A winner of ten Emmy awards for writing, Selig has his own company, Little Airplane Productions. Formed in 1999, the company owes its existence to an “aha” moment Selig had in 1997 while watching puppeteers audition without puppets. Their goal was to demonstrate how well they could synchronize their hand movements with their voices, but Selig was struck by something else: the range of emotions some puppeteers achieved once their hands were no longer hidden in a fabric puppet. He wondered if a puppet represented by a bare hand would have appeal.

When the fledgling children’s network Noggin called, looking for fresh ideas to catch preschoolers’ attention, Selig got his chance to find out. During a vacation with his girlfriend in Costa Rica, the two of them teamed up to take pitch photos of his new creation: Oobi, a four-year-old consisting of a hand with two round eyeballs affixed to its knuckles. The photos showed Oobi under a waterfall, on the beach, smelling a flower.

The producers loved it, and the show Oobi! was born. Simple and spare, it nevertheless made for captivating viewing. Parents were charmed; children spontaneously created their own Oobis with their hands. After initially showing it in one- to three-minute segments, Noggin ordered up longer segments; Oobi! began its second season in the extended format this September. The show explores themes dear to preschoolers: family, friendships, birthdays, discoveries. It won a gold award from the Parents’ Choice Foundation in 2001 and a silver award in 2004.

“When I watch a lot of kids’ TV, sometimes it looks like a giant candy store, or soda machine with all different flavors,” says Selig. “Somehow, for me, Oobi! is very pure; it’s more like rainwater than a big spectacle.”

While educational themes are woven into most children’s programming, the challenge lies in blending them smoothly into the story. Selig strives for productions that don’t hit kids over the head with talk about virtues or values. “You don’t feel the hand of the educator; it’s a much subtler process,” he says.

As for his own education, Selig sees NMH as critical to his becoming the man he is today. From his teachers, particularly David Rowland in theater and Tom Geilfuss in English, he learned the value of a life focused on creative work. Under their guidance, he began to realize his own potential as a writer. At NMH he also learned juggling as an independent study in physical education. In a roundabout way, that led to his first big break: writing for Sesame Street on the Public Broadcasting Service.

No, Sesame Street wasn’t looking for jugglers. But it was looking for writers who knew how to be funny in a simple and direct way, and Selig had picked up that skill as a New York street performer. He also had a slight advantage going into the interview: he’d performed on Sesame Street as a child. Still, the competition was fierce: at the time, the show auditioned roughly 100 people a year and hired one.

Selig worked for Sesame Street from 1988 to 2002, first as writer and then as a filmmaker. It was at Sesame Street that he won his ten Emmy Awards. He also traveled extensively, helping such countries as Finland, Germany, Egypt, South America, and China set up their own version of the show. The most challenging of these was a joint project with Israel and Palestine that took six months. His account of that historic collaboration ran in the New York Times. Now joined by Jordan, this program just finished its second season.

Selig left Sesame Street when Little Airplane Productions hit its stride. His company’s success with Oobi! created new opportunities, and his writing credits landed him a job as head writer for Little Bill, a Peabody Award-winning series created by Bill Cosby.

Little Airplane went on to develop Paz the Penguin for Discovery Kids, make films for BB’s Music Time for Playhouse Disney, and the second season of Engie Benjy for Granada Kids, a United Kingdom-based production company with its own network for children’s programming. And let’s not forget Linny the Guinea Pig, an animated short-form series on the children’s network Nickelodeon Jr. Set to the music of Tchaikovsky, it chronicles the adventures of a space-roving guinea pig in a series that’s unencumbered by dialogue.

Headquartered in New York City, where Selig also lives, Little Airplane’s 25-person staff is now working on new shows for Nick Jr. and Playhouse Disney. One is set to launch in October, another by December, and a third will come out next year. All of Little Airplane’s creative energy targets preschoolers, an audience that so delights Selig he’d rather switch careers than produce shows for any other age group.

“I think human beings peak at about age four,” he says. “The average four-year-old is more creative and more interesting, and probably has a better sense of humor than the average forty-year-old—this one included.”

While society tends to underrate preschoolers, Selig sees them as complex, rapidly developing humans who can offer guidance on living fully to those willing to pay attention. “A lot of the formality of adulthood is missing in young kids, and integrity and honesty are very present,” he said. “There’s a goodness to them that is certainly within all adults, but sometimes it’s harder to get to.”

Selig’s memories of being a four-year-old are more vivid than his memories of being a teenager. This guides his creative efforts and also motivates him to create characters, such as Oobi’s grandfather Grampu, who respect and listen to young children. He hopes parents will see his programming and come to share the respect and delight he feels for preschoolers.