Some say the movie chronicling Conan's ouster from NBC is funnier than his show.
By Eric Ditzian
Conan O'Brien
Photo: Noel Vasquez/ Getty
Four months removed from the debut of his TBS late-night show, Conan O'Brien swept into the South by Southwest film festival over the weekend, a bit reluctantly, to promote a documentary cataloguing the fallout from his "Tonight Show" firing and his subsequent creative resurrection via a live comedy tour.
Called "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop," the doc begins by recapping his NBC ouster and follows the comedian and his team as they come up with the comedy tour idea, build it from the ground up and then head out on the road. O'Brien has already largely moved on from these sordid events, but for one evening, he was compelled to relive the juicy late-night scandal and his reaction to it, which was not always as high-minded as he might have hoped. A few reviews, as well as O'Brien's own comments about the project, have already hit the Web, so read on for some early insight into "Can't Stop."
The Overview
"What starts out as a sanity-restoring make-work project evolves into a highly entertaining cross-country extravaganza during the course of 'Conan O'Brien Can't Stop,' an up-close account of the former 'Tonight Show' host's two-month, 32-city comedy-and-music variety-show tour shortly after he parted ways with NBC in 2010. But the biggest laughs and most intriguing revelations are provided offstage in this slickly produced documentary, as O'Brien — often pushing himself to the point of exhaustion before, during and after performances — plays for keeps while playing for laughs." — Joe Leydon, Variety
The Laughs
"Conan O'Brien should take some satisfaction in the thought that Jay Leno will never earn as much laughter in half an hour as he and his crew does in the first third of 'Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.' To be fair, O'Brien's TV talk show was rarely if ever this full-tilt hilarious, either, which might have something to do with why he seems to have so many more supporters than the program had viewers. But 'Can't Stop' is as entertaining as any showbiz doc in recent memory and could draw a nice audience of Team Coco followers in a limited theatrical release." — John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
Conan, In His Own Words, Part I
"I personally have trouble watching it because it's a time in my life that I don't like to go back to. I'm happy where I am now. I don't really need to go back to it. But I made a commitment." — O'Brien, in an Associated Press interview
Conan, In His Own Words, Part II
"I've done thousands of hours of television, and they get a sense of you, but you're really only on TV for an hour, and this is seeing these other sides of me. It's funny, because my staff, they saw this and they said, 'Oh, we get to see a little bit of Mean Conan.' And they said, 'Mean Conan, he's our favorite, he's the funniest Conan.' Which is weird. There's a way in which, after our meetings sometimes, I'll talk about the show and I'll just go on these long riffs, which are over-the-top, sarcastic about everything, and people will be laughing really hard while I'm saying negative things about the show. I'm really hard on myself, I get very dark. I tease people constantly. I physically fight my writers, and they fight me back. And so it's this gear I have that I've used sometimes on television but really hardly at all. There's all of this stuff there that I think, well, if not now, when? Might as well let people know he exists." — Conan O'Brien, in a New York Times interview
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