Lean on Me

Behind every successful airing of The Oprah Winfrey Show is chief booker Cindy Mori and a team of Badgers.

By Jenny Price ’96

You wouldn’t think anyone would say “no” to Oprah, would you?

At first blush, any outsider, including me, would assume booking guests for the top-rated daytime talk show would be a breeze.

But Cindy Goldberg Mori ’89 finds otherwise when she scrambles to line up guests for the annual post-Academy Awards broadcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show in front of a live audience of six thousand people at the Kodak Theatre, where the Oscar ceremony is also held. It seems the nominees and their publicists are fearful of somehow jinxing their chances to win by committing before the envelope is opened — and that makes the job of Mori, the show’s chief booker, more than a little interesting.

“I go out to L.A., I have no idea who’s going to win,” she says. “I have no idea who’s going to be on the show, but I have a live show in twelve hours and I have to have people in the chair and they have to have won an Oscar.”

Despite the pressure, the job’s a blast for Mori, one of eleven UW-Madison alumni who are part of the large production team working on one of the most influential shows on television. As On Wisconsin took a peek behind the scenes — thanks to help from some of these alumni — a certain aspect was clear: although the show carries only one name, it’s much bigger than one person.

The Oprah Winfrey Show airs 140 new episodes every season, but it’s hard to put a number on how many ideas are floating around before some of them become shows. Ideas are a driving force at Harpo Studios — the show’s Chicago home — and with the program now in its twenty-third season, bringing Winfrey and her viewers something new and surprising is a top priority, and an exciting challenge.

The show’s season premiere, which featured 176 U.S. Olympians — and reigning American Idol David Cook — on one stage in Chicago’s Millennium Park, demonstrated the lengths to which her staff will go to meet that challenge.

No detail for a potential show is overlooked. Each one of the thousands of e-mails sent to the show is read. That’s how producers first heard about the now-famous pregnant man, who contacted the show through its Web site and ended up being featured in one of its highest-rated episodes last season.

And then there’s Mori’s booking team: seven people who keep a close eye on what’s hot in entertainment and the news, and pass on possible topics and guests to the teams of producers who put each show together. At any given time, the booking team handles hundreds of pitches about books, movies, music, and news stories. And as Mori perches at her desk, she keeps tabs on breaking stories via a small TV mounted near her computer that’s tuned to a cable news channel. “We’re TV addicts,” she says.

During an ideas meeting, the group sits at the end of a large conference table, and each person gets seven minutes to pitch as many topics as she can. When time is up, someone hits a button that emits the twangy tagline from TV commercials for Yahoo, the popular Web portal. There’s no guarantee that any of these ideas will ever become part of the show.

“We have to have this timer because people get so passionate about their stories when they’re pitching,” Mori explains before the first team member takes a turn.

The session kicks off with a pitch about a study revealing that living in a dangerous area can be detrimental to your health. Suggested title: “Stress and the City.” Mori agrees it’s a great title for a show, but she reminds the team that viewers need some kind of take-away message. Since people can’t necessarily afford to move, she points out, the show would need to offer tips about how people could reduce stress and improve their health right where they live.

The Yahoo buzzer goes off and pitches continue around the table, from homelessness among the middle class — prompted by a series of stories about people living in their cars after losing their homes — to the critically acclaimed cable drama Mad Men, to one booker’s self-declared obsession with somehow getting Star Search back on the air. “I know I should let this go, along with Richard Simmons,” she says.

Another team member says she spotted a photo of a s’more in a magazine the night before and wondered, “What if we had Oprah and Gayle go on a camping trip?” She notes that during past shows, Winfrey and her best friend, Gayle King, went on a road trip across the country and toughed it out at the location of the PBS reality show Colonial House.

“I don’t think they’re going on a camping trip, I gotta say,” Mori says, as the group chuckles about the misadventures the pair had during the previous trips.

Mori still has the rejection letter from the first time she applied to work at The Oprah Winfrey Show. She was a booker for ABC’s Good Morning America, spending three years based in New York and another three in Los Angeles. Along the way, she chased down some of the biggest stories of the 1990s: O.J. Simpson’s civil trial, JonBenet Ramsey, and the Columbine High School shootings. Eventually, she had some contacts at the Oprah show and sent her resume again in 1999, this time landing an interview and an offer to work as an associate producer.

“I felt on the first day like I feel now … like a kid in the candy store,” Mori says.

And now she does her best to help UW graduates who eagerly seek her out, reliving the dream that she once had — and pursued for so many years — to work on the show.

“When I think about Wisconsin and giving back and the journalism school and what I can do … it’s not just about giving money, it’s about trying to be a good mentor and be a good role model, trying to help fellow Badgers,” she says.

Not everyone who connects with Mori ends up getting a job — it’s competitive, after all — but the Badger connection did make a difference for three alumni who now work as research coordinators for the show. “It makes me really proud that they have done so well, so fast,” Mori says.

Chelsea Carey ’07 first met Mori when she and two classmates presented a project to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s board of visitors. Before the meeting, Carey looked over the list of board members and thought her eyes would pop out of her head when she spotted Mori’s name and her Harpo e-mail address. The answer to the question, “Does she work at Oprah?” was the one Carey was hoping for. The two talked, and Mori offered Carey the chance to shadow her on the job for a couple of hours. The connection led to a summer internship for Carey, followed by a full-time position.

Wendy Corenblum ’05 was equally motivated when she learned Mori would be attending the journalism school’s centennial luncheon in April 2005. She arranged to sit with Mori, getting a foot in the door that eventually led to a job.

And in summer 2007, during a chance encounter on the Memorial Union Terrace with mutual friends from their sorority, Jill Salama ’06 was prompted to call Corenblum and get right to the point. “Wendy, I haven’t talked to you for a while,” Salama told her. “I heard you work at Harpo. It’s my dream job — tell me about it.” Within a month, Salama had a job at the show, a goal she’d set in freshman year after experiencing a taping as an audience member.

Today the three women are part of a team that handles an array of responsibilities. They read the thousands of e-mails sent by viewers, flagging their favorites and trying to persuade producers that they might lead to a good guest or a strong topic for a show. They track down information and provide producers with a binder chock-full of details for each program. They check the facts included in scripts. Every day brings something different — especially when a breaking news story sends them springing into action to assist the show’s producers.

“We work such long hours, but the people we work with are not even like our co-workers anymore,” Corenblum says. “You truly find your friends here.”

“You have to pinch yourself when you can say, ‘I love my first job out of college,’ ” says Salama, adding that many of her friends are miserable in their current jobs. “The time really does go by fast when you’re here from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on some days on a night before a show, and it’s crazy, but you still love what you’re doing and you get such a rush. That is really lucky.”

Carey, Corenblum, and Salama all laugh when asked whether friends and family regularly bug them for tickets to be part of the show’s studio audience. That’s pretty much a given, Salama says, adding that sometimes people she doesn’t know well track her down via Facebook to make such requests.

The three also say that when someone finds out where they work, a conversation like this usually follows:

Question: “Have you met her and what is she like?”

Answer: “Yes. She’s very nice.”

Question: “Can you get us tickets for the ‘Favorite Things’ show?”

Answer: “No, I can’t.”

Question: “Can you get us tickets for any show?”

Answer: “Maybe, but I have a waiting list about this long, so talk to me in three years.”

If there’s one thing the show has, it’s reach. Every week, it’s seen by an estimated 44 million viewers in the United States and distributed to another 140 countries, ranging from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe.

Mori sums up the experience of being an Oprah guest quite simply. “It’s going to be transformative,” she says.

Authors who appear on the show see their books climb the bestseller lists. Products that are featured during the program sell out quickly. So it’s not really a surprise, as I drive toward Harpo Studios in Chicago’s West Loop on a summer day, to notice that a motivational speaker has purchased a billboard one block from the studio to hype his new book. The same tactic worked for a Pennsylvania animal shelter, which bought a billboard as part of its ongoing crusade against puppy mills. Oprah producers saw the message and pursued a hidden-camera report.

The UW alumni who work for the show see its influence firsthand.

For example, Corenblum did research for two shows on health care in the United States, which included talking with filmmaker Michael Moore, who made the Oscar-nominated documentary Sicko. As part of those broadcasts, show correspondent Lisa Ling investigated insurance companies for viewers who were struggling to get coverage. After the show aired, insurers for some of the viewers featured “called them back and said, ‘We’re going to cover you now,’ ” Corenblum says.

“It was just a really powerful show and very moving to work on,” she adds, “and to meet the people that we helped was really amazing.”

Mori saw how the show could change a life after she read an article about a young black playwright who once was homeless and sleeping in his car. The man, who had struggled to produce his plays, saw his career take off once he addressed his unresolved issues, including an abusive father. Mori booked him for a show, and after it aired, Tyler Perry experienced phenomenal success in theater and eventually on the big screen, including with Madea’s Family Reunion, a movie he directed.

“In some ways,” Mori says, “he credits me with bringing him here the first time and having the opportunity to meet Oprah and have that experience. I’m so excited to see his success and feel — in some small way — [my] stumbling across this article changed the trajectory of his life.”

Mori has worked on hundreds of shows, but some of the more serious subjects stick out most in her memory. As an associate producer, she was part of a team that put together “Islam 101,” a show that aired after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The goal was to break down stereotypes and inform viewers about the religion.

“That was a lot of responsibility for us,” Mori says. “What I learned about that religion in the two weeks or ten days that we had to prep for it was amazing, because I didn’t really know much about the religion — and I’m not sure anyone I was working with on that show knew. But we had to do an hour for our audience that really broke it down in simple terms that would teach them, that would educate, and hopefully make them think about Muslim people and the religion of Islam in maybe a different way than they had right after 9/11.”

The studio where Winfrey tapes her show looks smaller in person than it does when you’re watching from home. But it’s still impressive, with a breathtaking canopy of spotlights hanging down from the ceiling and rows of chairs waiting to be filled with ebullient fans. On a typical day, the stage is set up for an interview, with two armchairs — one for Winfrey and one for her guest. But overnight, crews can transform the space. For a show featuring dancers and contestants from the ABC reality show Dancing with the Stars, they converted the studio into a ballroom, complete with a parquet dance floor.

People who work on Oprah think big. After all, this is the show that once gave a car to everyone in the studio audience. “Nothing’s too big. We’re only limited by the size of the TV screen,” Mori says.

That scope includes 125 Osmonds. Carey worked on the team that put together a reunion show featuring the entire Osmond family, including the brother-and-sister duo of Donny and Marie. As it turned out, keeping track of who belonged to which part of the family wasn’t easy.

“It was down to even making a spreadsheet in Excel of ‘Okay, this is Donny. His wife’s name is this. They have three kids,’ ” Carey says. “The nine Osmonds had fifty-eight kids, and those fifty-eight had forty-two kids. So, it was like putting together the family tree.”

Getting the entire clan to Chicago involved chartering a plane and buses, and when they all began arriving at the studio early the day of the show, Carey was there to greet them.

“It was nuts, but it was really cool seeing [them],” she says. “And they all look alike.”

The show took it to a whole new level for its season premiere in September, when the staff pulled off a homecoming party for Team USA in just nine days. Mori’s crew worked the telephones and sent e-mails “all hours of the day and night” to book athletes for the show, she says. The United States had 262 medalists in Beijing; the goal was to get as many as possible to appear on Oprah.

On the research side, it was Salama’s job to double-check everything about the Olympians, including their hometowns, the number of medals won, and any other facts the producers might want to know. “Up until the end, people were RSVPing,” Salama says. “It just kept getting bigger and bigger. … It was exciting to be part of it — and lucky.”

Not every athlete could attend — for example, one baseball player had to cancel at the last minute because he got called up to the major leagues. As the big day loomed, though, Oprah staffers finalized travel arrangements to bring 176 athletes to Chicago from sixty cities and thirty states. The final group included Olympic sensations Nastia Liukin and eight-time gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps, as well as Kobe Bryant and other NBA players from the men’s basketball team.

“I learned that anything is possible in any amount of time. … If you can dream it, you can make it happen,” Mori says. “The way that we all felt when Michael Phelps touched the wall — that’s how I felt times 176. With the confetti going, and Oprah on stage, and six thousand people on hand to watch, I just cried tears of pure joy.”

When looking around the table at the ideas meeting or reading the closing credits of the Oprah show, one fact is inescapable: there are a lot of women on the staff. Mori’s team is all female, save for one member who introduces himself as “the new guy.” Given those odds, Mori still marvels that she actually met her husband, a senior producer for the show with whom she has two young sons, at work.

“Oprah once said about my husband, ‘Well, he’s worked here forever, he’s about 70 percent woman. … He’s got a little girlfriend in him,’ ” Mori says.

Although the work schedule can be grueling, Mori says it’s inspiring to work in an environment where so many other women are balancing marriage, family, and career every day — just as she is.

“There’s no glass ceiling at The Oprah Winfrey Show,” she says. “Women have many, many, many of the top jobs … and have from the beginning.”

Mori briefly left the show after the birth of her first son, now five, and found that she “missed it desperately.” She returned on a freelance basis, helping out in different departments until she filled a position booking celebrities. Now that she is manager of booking relations, her team does most of the traveling and knocking on doors that she used to do.

“I wasn’t sure I could [make the change],” she says, “but they were extremely accommodating in finding something that really fit my talents, but that also contributes in a big way to the show. So, for me, it’s worked out great. You know, there’s a lot of girl power there.”

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On Wisconsin writer Jenny Price had the thrill of appearing on the Oprah show in 1995 as one of ten audience members selected to receive a Hollywood makeover. She has failed to replicate the fabulous results on her own.