Conan Not Laughing All the Way to NBC’s Bank

By DAVE ITZKOFF- nytimes-Arts Beat
Just to be totally clear — and regardless of what any bandleaders for any other NBC late-night shows might say — a publicist for Conan O’Brien said on Monday that none of the skits and stunts that Mr. O’Brien ran during his final week at the host of “The Tonight Show” broke NBC’s budget or cost more than what was normally spent on the show.
In a telephone interview, Leslee Dart, Mr. O’Brien’s publicist, said the various sketches “all fell within the show’s normal prop and music budget guidelines.” For example, for a skit in which Mr. O’Brien appeared to bring the Kentucky Derby-winning horse Mine That Bird onstage while showing National Football League Super Bowl footage on a television screen, Ms. Dart said, “The horse was a standard rental and the Super Bowl footage wasn’t from the N.F.L.” For a segment in which Mr. O’Brien showed off an expensive Bugatti Veyron automobile while playing the Rolling Stones song “Satisfaction,” Ms. Dart said, “The Bugatti was loaned to the show for free, and the music clearances were no different than the show gets for other pop tunes all the time.”
?uestlove, the bandleader on NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” had written on Twitter that it cost “The Tonight Show” $500,000 to play the Beatles song “Lovely Rita” when To Hanks appeared on the show Friday. But a representative for Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which handles the Beatles catalog, said it cost the show only a “nominal fee.”
Ms. Dart said she wanted to emphasize that “The Tonight Show” was “a comedy show, which means that not everything Conan says on the show is a fact.”