The Show That Never Happened

Life is funny — I think we all know that. And it’s unpredictable. But just how unpredictable? Once in a while, something happens that is so outlandish that you never even considered it possible. Nassim Taleb calls this a Black Swan event. In my case, I’m going to call it — actually, I don’t even know what to call it yet. Maybe you can help me name it. Let me explain. 

Last Thursday, on February 13th, we were scheduled to do a live Freakonomics Radio show at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. Now, a live show for us is both rare and atypical, because the episodes we put out here every week are very much not live; they’re the product of many hours of research and recorded interviews and editing and mixing and so on. And that’s the way we like it; that’s the kind of show I like to make. But every now and again, we decide to put on a live show — in a theater, with an audience — and we record that show to make a podcast episode for later. It’s not going to have the depth or the flow of a regular episode but there is something thrilling about the live setting — the interviews that you’re not really sure where they’re going to go; the response from the audience that you can’t predict; and of course any number of strange things that might happen when you try to do something that resembles show business. 

Coming into this L.A. show, we felt pretty good. We had two excellent guests lined up: Ari Emanuel, the super-agent and C.E.O. of Endeavor, who was also the model for Ari Gold from the TV show Entourage … and we had the award-winning filmmaker R.J. Cutler, who got his start on the Clinton campaign documentary The War Room and who’s been making excellent documentaries ever since, including a recent one about Martha Stewart. We also had Luis Guerra, who composes and performs a lot of the music you hear on this show. He had put together a live band for the evening, which I was definitely looking forward to. I love Luis and his music, and he has a network of musicians that is amazing. Now, I’m not going to say the mood before the show was buoyant, exactly. Los Angeles had of course been hit by those terrible, fatal wildfires, and now it was cold and raining hard. When I got to the theater around 4 p.m. for sound check, the wind was whipping; it felt like a monsoon outside. Plus: there are jitters — always, with a live show. But we were excited, and we were excited to have a sellout crowd. 

The sound check went fine, and then I rehearsed some cues with the band. They sounded great. No problems whatsoever. I started my final prep, which mostly consists of sitting somewhere alone, going over my notes. For a show like this, I write a short monologue — in this case, it was about how L.A. and New York may look like such different places, but how they have a lot in common. They’re both places where people come to invent themselves, or reinvent themselves; I always think of the great line from E.B. White: “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And I would argue the same is very much true for Los Angeles. 

So I’m going over my monologue notes, going over my notes for the Ari and R.J. interviews — and then Ari arrives, early. He’s always early. I recently heard a story about a Zoom meeting that someone had with him that was supposed to start at 2:30. And by the time they joined at 2:30, Ari had come and gone, and the meeting was over. He’s also impatient — did I mention that? For tonight, he had promised us forty minutes onstage but with a hard out — he had a plane waiting to take him to New York for the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary celebrations. So anyway, Ari gets to the theater early, he’s backstage; he is incredibly fun and interesting to talk to, a total live wire. It is true that some people are intimidated by him — he was recently voted the most feared agent in Hollywood — big surprise. Anyway: then R.J. Cutler shows up — totally different energy from Ari, less rat-a-tat, but obviously lovely, and the two of them are getting along nicely, which is not a bad thing for me. So I’m feeling good. 

And then I notice something strange: the theater is quiet. By now the doors should be open, the audience should be settling in, and our pre-show playlist should be playing. I’d put this one together myself — there was some Thelonious Monk, some Arcade Fire, a piece from Handel’s Messiah (long story), and also some music specific to tonight’s guests: for R.J., we’re playing Yung Gravy’s “Martha Stewart” and “Ocean Eyes” by Billie Eilish —  R.J. made a great film about Billie called The World’s a Little Blurry. And for Ari, we’re playing “Superhero,” by Jane’s Addiction; that was the theme song from Entourage. At least we’re supposed to be playing all those songs. Instead, there’s no sound coming out of the speakers. And then when I look out from behind the curtain, I see there are no people in the seats either! So, what’s happening?

It turns out that the theater’s P.A. system had crashed. We’d been told earlier that it was a new system, state-of-the-art but … well, I don’t know what happened. The next hour was pretty chaotic. The microphones aren’t working. The speakers aren’t working. The keyboard player can’t get any sound out of his keyboard setup. There’s a grand piano backstage, and we start trying to wheel it out onto the stage — but it’s missing a wheel, so that doesn’t work. Meanwhile, Ari Emanuel — the most famous agent in show business — is waiting backstage. “What the fuck are these people doing?” he’s saying. We’re getting close to showtime, the theater is still empty — it turns out they didn’t want to let anyone in while they were trying to fix the P.A. system. As I later learned, some ticket-holders were left standing outside in the cold rain. Finally they opened the doors and people started filling the seats. We still didn’t have a P.A. system. At some point, I take the stage to speak with the crowd. And people see me, they start clapping; they think the show is starting. And I announce, as loudly as I can, that no, the show is not starting yet, we don’t have a sound system, and then I ask the people in the back rows of the balcony if they can hear me without mics and they shout “Yes!” they can. So, that’s a good sign. These old theaters were built before amplification, so maybe we can pull it off without mics? Ari, meanwhile, is getting even antsier backstage. He says “Let’s just fucking do it without mics. I can fucking shout.” 

So that’s the new plan. We’re going to do the show as best as we can without a P.A. system. The band’s getting ready — still no mics, still no keyboards, and I have no idea if the video clips we had planned to play during the show are gonna work —and then suddenly, the system starts working again, at least partially. By now it’s way past the scheduled start time so we hustle up, we wish each other good luck, and we start the show. 

The monologue goes pretty well! And then I introduce Ari, he comes out, and we have a pretty sassy conversation that covers everything from Donald Trump to Elon Musk to OpenAI to the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni mess, and a lot more. He stays for nearly an hour. He is a real pro, and a good sport. And then I do a quick AMA — an ask me anything — with a member of the audience named Christina. She asks me how I came up with the signoff for this show — “Take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.” It is a question I wasn’t expecting, and I tear up as I tell the story, because I started using that signoff pretty early in the pandemic; my wife had been very sick with Covid, and we hadn’t been sure that she would recover, but she did. And that line just came to me, like when you’re writing a line to a song, and it stuck. After the AMA, we bring out R.J. Cutler and he is just great — thoughtful and personal, and he’s telling great stories about himself and all the people he has embedded himself with over the years. We play some clips from his films and even that works out ok! So, I finish up with R.J., we say some thank-yous and then say goodnight, the audience claps — they seemed to enjoy it. Although I couldn’t really tell how good the show was; live shows are always a bit of a blur, but this one even more so because of the circumstances. It struck me as a bit of a miracle that the show ended up happening at all. 

So, we hang out for a little bit more at the theater, and then go to a little after-party — mostly friends and family, maybe forty, fifty folks including my daughter, who just moved to L.A. last year, after college. Honestly, she was a big reason I wanted to do a show out here in the first place. So, we’re eating, we’re drinking, we’re laughing now about how close we came to having had no show at all. And that’s when our excellent editor Ellen Frankman comes up to me with a look on her face that I couldn’t quite figure out; in retrospect, she looked really ill —  she was shaky, her face was pale. So I ask her what’s wrong. She tells me that, in addition to the audio failures we had earlier, there was another, even bigger failure: the show had not been recorded, she says. And I didn’t understand. I asked her to repeat herself. She said, “They didn’t record the show,” and I still didn’t quite understand. I mean, I’ve been recording stuff for many years now — I was a musician and I used to work in all kinds of studios; I was a reporter and used to record all kinds of interviews; I’ve been doing this show now for fifteen years, we’ve recorded thousands of studio and live interviews and many other things, and not once have the people responsible for recording just failed to record it. But tonight, that’s apparently what happened. I am pretty sure we did do a live show with Ari Emanuel and R.J. Cutler and Luis Guerra’s band and Christina from the audience, but there’s no recording of it, so I’m not really sure.  

The next several hours were even more of a blur than the hour before the show. We thought about trying to partner with R.J. Cutler to make a forensic documentary of the show, trying to re-create it as best we could. Some friends who had been in the audience had already started sending in bits of video and audio they had recorded. At least one journalist had recorded the entire Ari Emanuel interview, but it’s iPhone-on-the-lap quality, not radio quality. So we ditched that re-creation idea. 

For some reason, I wasn’t angry — I was just flabbergasted. It was a new feeling, a new experience. I woke up the next morning still more confused than anything. I went out to Brentwood to have breakfast with my daughter. We saw Don Cheadle, whom I recognized, and Tom Holland, whom I didn’t. A friend dropped by, a college friend of my daughter; he grew up in L.A., and he still lives there. He’s one of the people who sent us some audio files when he heard about our recording catastrophe. He’s a really nice kid, and the three of us had a nice breakfast. I asked him how his work was going — and also where he’s living now. He grew up in Pacific Palisades, and his family’s house burned to the ground last month. When we said goodbye to him after breakfast, he was shivering outside in a t-shirt; he hadn’t even been able to get a new coat yet. 

As a writer, I’ve always been petrified about losing anything I’ve written. I panic if the computer glitches and I lose even a sentence or two. And now, here, we had lost an entire show. But how does losing a show compare to losing your childhood home? Thousands of homes burned to the ground during those L.A. fires. At least twenty-nine people died. It’ll cost billions of dollars to replace what can be replaced, and a lot of it can’t. So I guess I’m the lucky one. I thought back to this passage from a book called Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947,  by Norman Lebrecht. The passage goes like this: “Moses said: The law is everything. Jesus said: Love is everything. Marx said: Money is everything. Freud said: Sex is everything. And Einstein said: Everything is relative.”

To the 900 people who came out to our show that rainy night — thank you! It’s nice to know there were some witnesses. And to everyone else, who’ll never hear the show that never happened — well, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.