Conan O'Brien in Cuba; TV viewing advice; graphic novelist Ed Brubaker

You know what, I could clean up. I could do very well. I also think I would be a very popular salsa singer and rumba dancer, so I have so many career opportunities in Cuba that I no longer fear for my career here in America.

It's huge. At this point when you've been doing it as long as I've been doing it, the primary objective is to challenge yourself and to find ways to surprise yourself a little bit — see if there's something you can do with the form that you haven't done before. At this point, you're just competing with yourself. I’ve always felt like I just want to push the envelope. I want to try things and that gets harder to do as you're around longer. The minute we realized, Hey maybe we can get into Cuba and be the first late night talk show to be there in like 50 years and maybe find some stuff and have an adventure, it was thrilling. The whole thing was thrilling from the planning stage to actually doing it. 

We didn't actually tell them. We sort of kept it on the down low. Then we told one guy, pretty much, that we were thinking about doing it and he said that sounds cool. We decided if we told too many people, either A) it'll get out, or B) someone will give us a really good reason why we can't or a legal reason why we can’t. So we decided better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.  

That's a good question. There are certainly advantages to being on Turner because they let us do pretty much anything we want to. I don't think Turner has ever said, Hey, we'd rather you didn't do that. I like to think we show common sense. But they've been terrific partners in that they literally let us do anything we want to. I don't know if we could have done this at NBC. I think we may have been able to do it, but certainly it would have been a little trickier in terms of keeping it secret, because it's a much bigger bureaucracy. 

Well, it was important to me that there be no snarkiness. I wanted this to be completely devoid of that. I think one of the advantages of my comedy fitting in a situation like this is I like to make fun of myself a lot, especially in remote segments. I like the joke to be on me. So I wanted it to be sweet, I wanted it to be really funny and have belly laughs in it. We very much went in with a feeling of, We're going into another culture, and we want to respect that culture and all I want to do is try and make these people laugh. I didn't want to do comedy where I'm making fun of something in their society, that's just rude. I wanted to go in  sort of as a good ambassador, but also see if I could get them to laugh at my idiocy. Maybe that's the common language we all speak: whatever our differences, most people find me ridiculous. 

They really did. What's good is that the key to something like this is just go with it, you can't be in control. I get there, I wander around, I'm with a camera crew, the government in no way — I don't think they are aware we were there — stopped us from doing anything. We tried to see as much of Havana and film as much as possible. So what really played [is], I'm a very physical comedian so that's kind of a universal language. Whenever I'm trying to dance or trying to sing or trying to speak Spanish to them, they're laughing already. I tried to dive into their culture, I tried to make Cuban cigars at an authentic Cuban cigar factory where they hand make them. I get the help of these different women to try and show me how to do it and that ends disastrously, but they're laughing. I go to a rum museum and that goes disastrously because I'm an Irish guy who really shouldn't be drinking that much rum at 11 in the morning. But they're all laughing at me, so I think that is the value of what we were doing. We saw so much, we were there four days, but we shot pretty much continuously. I think I meet about 150 different people, and we somehow managed to get it all into the special, which is nice. 

The people who knew me there are tourists from other parts of the world. There aren't a lot of Americans there, but there are mostly Canadians, and Canadians are well aware of me [and] my show, they've been watching it for years. As far as Cubans and the Cuban people, they didn't know [me]. There's a segment where I walk along the ocean front and I'm showing young people, these young couples and kids who are all sitting on the sea wall, I'm showing them my show on a tablet and I'm trying to tell them this is what I do. Of course, it's just clips of me acting like an ass on television. I get a great variety of reactions from them laughing and saying, Sure, that could be good, to just staring at it and thinking, OK do we really want to be involved with this country? So that was the best I could do was tell them I'm a comedy star. I actually did tell a number of them that I'm the biggest star in America. 

When you grow up in our culture and you're in our culture constantly — most of the capitalist countries around the world — you forget how much advertising you see everywhere. We're just so inundated with advertising we don't even notice it. When you go to Havana one of the first things that struck me was the music and the people and it's so colorful. In a state-run economy there are no ads anywhere. You might see some propaganda, but even not that so much. You walk through central Havana, you see these beautiful old — I mean they're dilapidated, some of them are practically in ruins, but they're beautiful — colonial, art deco, neoclassical buildings, and what you notice is [you're] not being bombarded with signs. We address that at one point in the show, we try and imagine a Cuba, what it will look like in five years after it’s opened up to American commerce, and it's kind of bittersweet. It's going to be a bunch of Outback Steakhouses and Lululemons. I'm going to get very zen on you for a minute, but whenever you gain something you also lose something, and I think that that's going to be a complicated process for Cuba. 

It's always about running your own race. So many of these shows are so completely different from mine. I think, to the outside world, whenever they think about late night they envision us all looking at each other's shows and trying to outwit each other. I don't know what other guys do, but for me nothing could be further from the truth. I just try to challenge myself and make myself happy and try to do a good show on my terms every day. I’ve been in this since 1993, and it's constantly been in flux. Now is a particularly chaotic time, but I've seen this happen like five different times. 

When I came on the air, Arsenio [Hall] was on the air and Chevy Chase was on the air. Shows have come, shows have gone, and my philosophy has always been just keep my freak flag flying, just do my Conan thing — whatever the hell that is — the best that I can possibly do it. And I just think about my body of work. I haven't given it that much thought, to be honest with you, about who's doing what. It seems like pretty much everybody's carved out their own niche at this point and it seems like we're past the day [when] it used to be that big Letterman/Leno feud for about five years and people acted like it was Ali and Foreman going at each other. And you don't get that sense anymore, because everybody's show is so different and it seems like people have realized in the modern era, OK, there's 750,000 little pods of entertainment and I can get them all 15 different ways, so it's very hard to create that this person versus that person environment. 

I think he's figured it out. I went on his show [last week] and his whole thing is this attitude of, I want to get out on top kind of thing. And I said, "What if farmers had that attitude? What if farmers said, Hey, I had a really good crop so I'm shutting it down now"? The point is to realize your best work and then do another 15 years. I don't think he's going to listen to me. I think he's going. 

I think [being able to] leverage my time in show business, the fact that I have a show and get to places that I may not be able to get to otherwise and do things. There are these scenes in Cuba where I'm in a white linen suit and I'm dancing in a parade in the middle of the street and everyone around me is dancing and clapping and it's transcendent. I can't believe I get to do that. That's something I'd have trouble imagining I'd be able to do back when I was sitting in my small room writing "Simpsons" scripts on the Fox lot in 1991. I could never have dreamed that I would get to do this. So my goal now is to challenge myself as much as possible and just try to have fun and do things that are new to me. When I'm doing that I feel like I'm 19-years-old — and I have the sexual prowess of a 19-year-old. 



Conan in Cuba airs Wednesday, March 4 on TBS at 11 p.m. (ET/PT)

I agree there are a lot of murder, crime, bleak-centric shows on TV right now, but there are a couple of gems that have a more upbeat attitude. "Jane The Virgin" airs on the CW [network] and it's sort of a telenovela, but it's also really charming and sweet and earnest. In terms of characters who have very respectable values, the show is a lot about decency and respect and loyalty and honesty. Our heroine, Jane, is one of those sorts of characters with the most integrity on TV right now. She's also funny and fun to be around and fun to watch. The show's not like a lecture on family values or something. In terms of characters who prioritize love and family, I think you're going to be hard pressed to find a show with a better focus on that than "Jane the Virgin."

If we're looking for a family of supportive characters, "Bob's Burgers" is my favorite on TV right now. It's about a family [that] really loves each other. My favorite part is the relationship between the siblings. They're all very strange in their own ways, but they're all a team. Usually on sitcoms the kids are at each others throats, or one is this kind of kid and the other is the opposite. On "Bob's Burgers," everyone just falls under the umbrella of weird individuals with particular passions and everyone takes each other's passions pretty seriously. 

I think of Hollywood as kind of the last American gold rush at that time, especially during the Depression and the war and the post-war era. You had the Depression — everything was bad but everyone wanted to make movies and go see the movies. From reading about it, there were hundreds of people just getting off buses in Hollywood thinking they were going to be a movie star. So it's like "Deadwood" or something, but with a lot more glamour and sex and drugs and alcohol and secrets. A lot more secrets that's for sure. 

Yeah, it couldn't be that debauched now because of social media [laughs.] In a way — because of fixers like Eddie Mannix — they were able to actually control the media a lot more. At the time when movie stars started becoming a thing, our media was so different and our country was so conservative in a lot of ways that a movie star getting divorced would be a huge scandal that could have ruined their career. So in the early days of Hollywood there was trying to control the press and trying to control the public image of these peoples. That's one of the things that really drew me to writing about the era — the masks that everyone had to wear, not just the actors but then everybody. 

You know, those blackouts you wake up from in 1947 during the blacklist [laughs.] Yeah, that was my way into this story. We would come [to L.A.] when I was a kid to my uncle and aunt's house and we would go to Universal Studios in the '70s and I would be looking at my uncle's shelves of screenplays. He had leather-bound volumes of all these screenplays. So I always knew that he had this exciting life in the movies, but I always got the sense that my uncle was really bitter about it all. When I got older and asked my dad about it, he said, "Well, you know, most of his friends had their lives destroyed." And he started telling me about it. It's weird because my dad was very conservative, but because this had happened to someone he knew, he was much more anti-blacklist than a lot of people were at that time. 

It all kind of grew from various seeds, and I wanted to do something different than I'd done before. I had finished a big horror story and had done a lot of crime stories before that and I wanted to do kind of an epic noir that would have some meta connotations to it. I felt like comics could really do that. It's meticulously researched. I hired a research assistant to collate this huge photo file for us. It's got thousands and thousands of photos all categorized by neighborhood, real people, movie stars, movie premieres, cool restaurants... 

Yeah, exactly! When I started working with the research assistant and telling her what we needed and stuff, it was because I wanted to live in that era. When I'm working on the scripts, I'm listening to old '40s music... 

Right now I'm listening to some anthologies of greatest hits 'cause I wanna think about what people were actually listening to on the radio, as opposed to what is the best stuff of that time — stuff like "Darn That Dream" and, you know, "When You Wish Upon A Star" was a huge song. 

Yeah 

Yeah. This is actually the best selling thing we've ever done. We have this deal at Image [Comics] where we can do anything we wanna do for the next five years. We don't have to tell them about it or pitch them anything. It's kind of like having an overall deal at a studio, but everything's already green lit. No one in comics has ever had a deal like that before. But Sean and I have been working together for 15 years. 

Yeah. We had a big track record. So I [told] the publisher, "Just let us do whatever we want," and they were totally down with it. So the first thing I thought was, What do I want to do that I would be hard-pressed to sell a comic book publisher on? And I thought, Well, a bunch of people in the '40s standing around and talking. And lo and behold, there's nothing else like it on the shelves — and people like it. 

Yeah, it's very influenced by [Raymond] Chandler's idea of what a murder mystery should be. "Who cares whodunnit?" is what he said. It was more about writing about the journey of the people that are caught in the ripple of this murder mystery. And for me, like what you just said, it's the beginning of the end of the studio system, the beginning of the blacklist is happening. All these things are colliding at this one point in history. And having that one personal connection to it had made me always interested in that. But then stepping and looking at it from today, I see a lot of parallels to what's going on in the world today. You see the studios always gobbling each other up. I work in film and TV. I know for a fact that it would be a lot easier if the studio system were reinstated for the studios. They would be able to just sort of tell people what they're doing instead of asking them or instead of trying to give them a cut of the profit. It [would be] like, Here's your contract, and that's it. 

I don't really talk about that stuff with them until I'm done with it because on another project that's been in development on-and-off for years at different studios, after the first issue came out, we had so much interest in it. I was on the phone with movie people all the time, and it kind of affected the way I was doing the end of the story 'cause I kept thinking, Am I doing the right one that Hollywood will want? So now, if someone huge calls up and [says], "I love this book. I want it" — and this has happened before a few times — I'll just say, "Well, let's get together and talk. I'm not gonna tell you how the story ends or any of that stuff, but I wanna see what you're into about it. And then let me finish it and we'll sit down and talk and I won't sell it to anyone first." But that's Hollywood for you.