There are few producers in live television with the kind of career Don Mischer has had in television, a career spanning six decades and just about every major event from the Oscars to the Olympics to Obama and all in between. Just a sampling of his credits include the Opening Ceremonies of both the 1996 Summer Olympics and 2002 Winter Olympics; the Super Bowl Halftime Shows with Michael Jackson, Prince, Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen; the Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial; Motown 25; the Democratic National Convention; the 100th anniversary of Carnegie Hall; the Academy Awards and Emmy Awards; and so many many other events in our lives.
Mischer has won 15 Emmys, a record 10 DGA Awards, the Peabody, the 2012 Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television from the PGA, and the 2019 DGA Lifetime Achievement Award for Television, along with just about every other honor you can think of for a career in television.
Now retired from the manic life of live TV, Mischer is looking back at it all and has put a very entertaining and informative capper on it by authoring (with Sara Lukinson) his autobiography, “:10 Seconds To Air: My Life In The Director’s Chair,” which is loaded with some amazing anecdotes and stories about his life in the control booth during so many momentous moments, not to mention working with the likes of Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, Prince and countless other legends.
Recently I caught up with Mischer at a book signing at the DGA Theatre in West Hollywood, where he held the audience of his peers rapt with attention as he talked about his career with one of them, Kenny Leon. He started right at the beginning.
“I was 9 years old when television came to my hometown, which was San Antonio, Texas, and I remember going to the very first (TV show),” he recalled. “I was in a gym, a big gym, and on the floor, there were cameras, lights, booms, and mariachi bands, and square dancers, and country bands, and all of this. And we sat in the audience, and we watch this happening on the stage in front of us, and the entire basketball court was ringed with monitors. And so, we could stand on the stands, see it happening live on the floor, and see it on television. And it planted the seed. You know, I became infatuated with television.”
As he does in the book, Mischer has remarkable total recall, and it is a real page turner just in the sheer numbers of situations and scary moments that, for him, were just part of the gig. Prince provided one of those.
“They’re always a challenge. There’s always challenges, you get addicted, I think, to the process of rolling the dice every time you do these things, especially when they’re live. It’s like, you’re daring it to go right. And so, I mean, I think that that really has had a lot to do with it,” he says as he recalls directing Prince in his Super Bowl appearance. “Sometimes you can anticipate these things. And other times, you can’t. I mean, the Prince Super Bowl in the rain, for example. I mean, based on the weather forecast, and based on the act, as we were rehearsing it, Prince was playing, rain was coming. There was no question about it. Rain was coming. Prince was playing four live electric guitars. Would they stay in tune? Would they short out. He had two dancers called the twins, elegant tall ladies with long black hair, eight-inch heels, and his stage was made out, like his logo, kind of a mash up of the male and female assembles, and it was slippery when it was dry, and treacherous when it was wet. So, the night before, I’m just sweating it out. What happens if Prince falls down? What happens if one on the twins fall down? Do you just step over her and keep going? One twin on the deck?
“And so, the first half of the show was okay. I was communicating with Prince. We put the stage together. It came out and like 20-some-odd pieces, weighed tons. It was brought up by 600 volunteers, who had been working on it for a month. And so, just as we were counting down to start the halftime show, the heavens just opened up. I mean, they really, really opened up, there was a deluge. I talked to Prince, who I had communication with, and he was buried in the stage, he was going to pop up, and I said, ‘Man, it is really coming down, and I just want to give you a heads up, it’s really coming down.’ There was a pause, and he said, ‘Can you make it rain harder?’ And he, clearly, saw the rain as a challenge, and as a result, he rose to that occasion, and delivered one of his best performances in his history. So, those things happen. And it turned out that it was spectacular, because the rain would hit the lights, it created on the ethereal smoke, and it kind of drifted across the stage, lights, water hit the lenses, they made those hexagonal stars that you get, and the whole thing turns out to be magical, when I was like dreading it, you know. I mean, really, really dreading it. That’s the fun part of the business.”
Mischer became something of an expert in doing Super Bowl halftimes over the course of directing and producing six of them. He sometimes had to explain some tough rules to the super-est of superstars.
“Well, the first thing about the Super Bowls is, the first thing you say to the artist when you’re talking about the Super Bowl is, whoever you are, McCartney. ‘Sir Paul, now you do not have control of this event. Okay, you do not have control of it. You are one cog in a wheel that is Super Bowl Sunday.’ And I said there are going to be things you’re going to have to deal with. And I remember going to London, and talking with him and this is right after the Janet Jackson wardrobe-malfunction thing. That’s when I got hired to do the Super Bowl. The Nipple Gate,” he said as he explained you have to be aware who is watching.
“Super Bowls are family events. They are appointment television. They’re seen by families in their living rooms, with everybody from age 6 up to the grandparents. 20% of the audience is under the age of 12. So, you have to be really careful about what you say, and how you say it, in terms of wardrobe, and everything else, and that’s if you want to do the Super Bowl, you’ve got to agree to that. You’ve got to agree to keep it to 12-1/2 minutes, you know. And there were times, issues when we had really tough discussions. I remember the Rolling Stones, they sang a song at their halftime show, which had the lyric with Mick Jagger saying, ‘I used to be your rooster, but now, I’m just one of your cocks.’ I said, we can’t say that on the Super Bowl. We can’t do that. And I remember being on the phone with the lawyers in London, and one of them said to me, ‘You Americans are so stuffy. Why can’t you handle this?’ But that’s just part of the problem. You’re negotiating all the time.”
One special moment Mischer describes in the book involves Michael Jackson doing the classic “Motown 25” special.
“I first met Michael when we were doing “Motown 25.” And we did “Motown 25” in 1983, and the concept was, everybody comes back and does one Motown song. So, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, The Tops, and The Temptations, everybody in Motown, came back and did one Motown song. We wanted Michael to come back and do something with his brothers, the Jackson 5. He said, ‘I’ll do that, but you’ve got to give me a song on my own’,” Mischer recalls.
“So, Suzanne de Passe and I, we were producing it together and I was directing it, we came real close to saying ‘no’, to Michael Jackson! Then on the night before the show we said to ourselves, ‘We better just take a look at this.’ We emptied the theater, it’s midnight, house is dark, just the light on Michael. Smokey Robinson was there, and Linda Ronstadt was there, and de Passe and I were there in the audience. That was it.
“Michael came out. He had the fedora, the hat, the glove, the whole thing, all of which is now at the Smithsonian Institution, under glass, by the way, and he did ‘Billie Jean.’ And we looked at each other and asked, ‘Okay, who’s going to take the call on Monday?’ That was because Marvin Gaye wanted to do ‘Sexual Healing’ … he loved Motown, but he wanted to do ‘Sexual Healing’ instead. We said, ‘No, everybody’s doing a Motown song!’ But after we watched Michael do ‘Billie Jean,’ Suzanne and I looked at each other and said, simultaneously, ‘I’ll take the call on Monday morning from Marvin Gaye.’ It’s still considered a cultural moment in our in our history, you know, that ‘Billie Jean’ performance.”
There are so many memories, so many stories like that, and Mischer could probably write a second book with just as many. I had the pleasure of working with him on an Oscar season where I wrote the Governors Awards show. Watching him in action is quite something. Asked if he had any regrets about the way his career all went down, he summed up his life in the director’s chair this way.
“That’s a good question. And one I’ve thought about a lot since I’ve stopped doing this. ‘Did I spent too much time away?’ You know, I remember doing things, like flying back one night to see my kid in the play, when we were doing something in New York. I saw the play, and got right back to the airport, and took a red eye back. And I’m sorry about those, on one level. But you know, people around me understood. I had a very supportive family. And it’s something,” he said.
“I sometimes wake up in the middle of night and say, ‘Would you do that again?’ I probably would, because it’s just so damn addictive. It’s rolling the dice, and the adrenaline, and it becomes addictive. You like putting yourself in this situation where it’s all on the line, and it’s all live, and it can’t be redone, and there’s one shot, and that’s it. And if you blow it, screw it up, it’s gone. It’s part of history.”