Jimmy Kimmel transcript

MICHAEL EISNER:
So, Jimmy, I appreciate you coming here to Spago in Beverly Hills to talk to me. And I'm excited because you are one of a par-- part of the group-- how do I say this? I'm out of Disney but--

JIMMY KIMMEL:
What?

MICHAEL EISNER:
I know, it's depressing.

JIMMY KIMMEL:
I didn't know-- I wouldn't have come if I'd known this.

MICHAEL EISNER:
I know. One of the last things that I was kind of responsible for was approving the Jimmy Kimmel Live show going on the air. And--

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Yes.

MICHAEL EISNER:
It's now become very successful. It's the only late night show that went up 13-- 17 percent. Almost two million viewers every night. It's had this great evolution. You've become a household word and-- around America. And it's evolved. And it's great.

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I think you may be-- you may be nicer than the reality. But-- yeah, we're doing alright. I think it gets a little better each month and--

MICHAEL EISNER:
The opening monologues--

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Uh-huh (AFFIRM)?

MICHAEL EISNER:
Which is the place that most people, like, connect are fantastic. You're now doing all this stuff inside and outside the studio. You're commenting-- on society through looking at what's going on in television. It's pretty clever.

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. You know, it's hard-- it's hard to do it differently, as you know and-- because it's been done for so long and so we look for a lot of ways to do things differently. And some of those things were, I guess, mistakes. But-- I think we've come to a point-- well, hopefully I'll look back at this time and I'll say, oh, that was terrible but--

MICHAEL EISNER:
You think getting the audience loaded on the first night was not--

JIMMY KIMMEL:
That was probably--

MICHAEL EISNER:
--a mistake?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
That was a mistake. I'm not sure how you guys allowed us to have alcohol (LAUGHTER). In retrospect, the whole thing is preposterous.

MICHAEL EISNER:
I'm sitting in my office and somebody says to me, "Oh, the first show went great but somebody threw up in the audience and--"

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Yeah.

MICHAEL EISNER:
And I said, "Well, how did that happen?" "Well, we allowed there to be an open bar before the show went on the air." I said, "Well, who did that?" And they blamed 11 people all of whom hadn't been in the company so 20 years--

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Right. (LAUGHTER)

MICHAEL EISNER:
So-- so you stop that. You realize that a sober audience would probably be a better audience.

JIMMY KIMMEL:
No, you stopped that. I didn't stop it. I had nothing to do-- (LAUGHTER) I-- my-- the way I looked at it was, yeah, someone vomited in the audience but people vomit on Pirates of the Caribbean and you don't close that ride down, right? Or maybe not that ride. But on the Matterhorn, sometimes people throw up. What are you going to do?

MICHAEL EISNER:
We give them air sick bags. Did you have air sick bags?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
We should've. In retrospect, that would've been the way to go.

MICHAEL EISNER:
Well, from that first night, which was very funny, by the way, even though somebody threw up, (LAUGHTER) through the evolution of the show, the show has now become, I think, one of the funniest shows. It's being booked extremely well. But I'm not surprised. And I'll tell you why I'm not surprised. When you were on Ben Stein's Money-- And when I called Ben Stein up, I'd say, "Who is this guy?" He said, "I'm telling you, he's going to have a late night show. He's really funny. He's really clever." Was that show fun to do?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Oh, it was a lot of fun to do. And Ben took big, long naps during the day which made it a little bit hard to do. But Ben is a-- he and I are still very close and--

MICHAEL EISNER:
He took naps during the day?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Yeah, he would take naps-- sometimes between--

MICHAEL EISNER:
Alone?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
Oh, usually-- with his dog.

MICHAEL EISNER:
I see.

JIMMY KIMMEL:
His dog would come and he had to have-- 600 thread sheets on set so he could take naps frequently throughout the day. He's a-- he's a character-- as you, I'm sure, know.

MICHAEL EISNER:
And that show, obviously, wasn't fixed. He knew all those answers?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
That show was not fixed. They were--

MICHAEL EISNER:
How did he know all that stuff?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
He just knows-- you know, I-- I had dinner with him one night and I showed up and-- and he was reading-- I said, "Are you reading an encyclopedia?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, what are you doing?" He said, "I'm studying for the show." By our last season, the last season I did with him, he was winning more than 90 percent of the games. I mean, so, we'd have one person beat him every two weeks. I said, "Ben, at a certain point, people are not going to enjoy seeing you just beat every--" but he took every challenge very seriously. And that's what made it fun.

MICHAEL EISNER:
And was it fun being on the s-- you-- you won an Emmy for that show. Was it being the sidekick?

JIMMY KIMMEL:
It was. It was because there's not a tremendous amount of pressure on you. And it was a great way to, kind of, it was my first television job to be introduced and just get a little sampling of what it's like to be on TV.

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