By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
December 4, 1994
Oprah Winfrey may be Chicago’s biggest tourist attraction.
Sure there’s the lakefront, the Bulls, the Art Institute, Magnificent Mile, Wrigley Field and Gino’s East.
But how many of them can really make you feel better about yourself?
Here are the facts: After coming to the Windy City in 1983 to host “A.M. Chicago,” Winfrey became so popular so quickly that the show was renamed “The Oprah Winfrey Show” the following year. In 1986 “Winfrey” went into national syndication and became the No. 1 daytime talk show, a slot it hasn’t relinquished since.
Four years later, Winfrey bought a near West Side Chicago studio at 1058 W. Washington. (Marlon Perkins once shot the interior scenes for “The Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” there in its pre-Winfrey days.) Christening her new purchase Harpo Studios, Winfrey remodeled the 24,100-square-foot, four-block studio, becoming only the third woman (behind Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball) – and the first African-American woman – to own her own production studio.
Last year’s blitz of chat show pretenders tried to imitate her success, but only one – Ricki Lake – thrived. Lake may be ranked No. 2, but she’s far from being a close second. Winfrey routinely draws twice as many viewers as Lake.
Two months ago, Winfrey was among seven new inductees into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. (That ceremony will be broadcast at 8:05 p.m. Dec. 11 on the Disney Channel.)
It’s no wonder that Winfrey’s multi-million-dollar deal has been extended through the year 2000. Or that it’s become as difficult to attend live tapings of her show as it is to get Bozo tickets or good seats at a Bulls game.
Realizing how unlikely it is that most people will ever see the inside of Harpo Studios, I attended a recent Tuesday taping, getting up well before 6 a.m. to arrive at Harpo Studios in time for the first show of the morning. Here, then, is an inside look at what really goes on behind the scenes at “Oprah.”
7:15 a.m.: Winfrey tapes two programs per day, Tuesday through Thursday. Viewers are advised to arrive at 7:30 a.m. for the 9 a.m. taping and at 10:30 a.m. for the noon taping. I somehow ended up with tickets to the early show on a recent Tuesday and arrived at 7:15. Learn from my mistake: Do not get to Harpo Studios any earlier than 7:30 because the staff won’t let you in the doors anyway. “It’s first come, first served, but we don’t want people lining up at 5:30 a.m.,” said public relat ions representative Jill Almquist. I suppose if you really wanted to ensure being admitted first and be assured of a first-row seat, you could line up at 5:30 a.m. But trust me – you get a good view from any seat.
7:30: We are let inside Harpo Studios. Once through the doors, we are told to get out our photo IDs so we can prove we are who we said we were when we called to request tickets. They then award us with numbered release forms that we are to read, sign and turn in. It basically says we give our permission to be on TV. The numbers signify our place in line and will be used for seating purposes. There is no sign of Oprah. Her people tell me later that she arrived at Harpo at 7, after doing her morning workout.
7:40: We check our coats and bags and cameras (no photographs, please). Then we are searched for metal; I’m clean.
7:45: I notice that some people are wearing white and/or beige. Shocking. In direct defiance of the warning the show dished out when the tickets were confirmed. Bright colors (blue in particular) are much more apporpriate. If you get tickets and end up making the same gaffe (or, even worse, wear houndstooth), you can always stop in at Oprah’s store, conconveniently located on the second floor: T-shirts ($18), sweatshirts ($30).
8:05: The studio audience has been herded to the upstairs waiting area. Between 150 and 200 fans fill this cramped space prior to each taping. Many of us become fast friends. One group is trading war stories on getting “Oprah” tickets. Terri Knudsen and three buddies took turns calling on and off for three months before getting their requests in. (Knudsen told me she had two dreams: going to Hawaii and seeing an “Oprah” taping.) Jo Wagner and her friend, on the other hand, got through in two hours.
8:15: I mingle some more and meet Bonnie Beres, who came in from Wisconsin with her friends the night before. They’re staying at an Evanston hotel because all the ones in Chicago are booked for a convention. All are dressed in “Phantom of the Opera” T-shirts. They tell of getting up at 5 a.m.
As we’re chatting, I was told later, Winfrey is in the makeup room getting her face and hair done. To optimize her time, Winfrey eats a light breakfast while her stylist fixes her hair. When Winfrey’s finished, she’ll get dressed for today’s show.
8:20: Most people in the audience here don’t know the subject of this taping. I overhear some people say they hope a celebrity will be featured today. They will be disappointed. Janice Kundrot of Villa Park tells me that she has been to “Oprah” tapings five times and has yet to see a celebrity guest.
8:30: While Winfrey is having a last-minute meeting with producers, we are called down to the first-floor studio in groups of 20. With blue release forms in hand, we neatly file down the stairs into Studio One where Winfrey will tape her show. Harpo actually is comprised of four studios. At 10,000 square feet, Studio One is the largest of them. (The 8,100-square-foot Studio Two is rented out for film production. Winfrey shot the interior shots for “There Are No Children Here” last ye ar, as did Tom Selleck and Don Ameche when they filmed “Folks.”) And Studios Three and four – each 3,000 square feet – are used almost exclusively for commercials.)
It is brightly lit inside Studio One and someone is still vacuuming the aqua carpet on stage. It looks the same as you see on TV – comfy and plush. Off stage right, a “living room” and “library” are stored out of camera range. The movable sets are used for different shows. What you don’t see on television is that murals on the the walls depict urban settings. A metal fence divides the walls from the last row of seats.
An associate producer calls out the name of a guest she hasn’t been able to locate yet. She finds her sitting in the back row and relocates the guest a front row seat in the audience. Winfrey will ask her a brief question during a segment. Winfrey’s crew operates seven cameras positioned throughout the set. This morning, WLS-Channel 7 reporter Janet Davies is here with her crew taping a segment on Oprah that will air during November sweeps. Davies and I are seated three people apart, too far away to obtain any juicy tidbits about her. (I can tell you, though, that she ate a chicken sandwich upstairs in the commissary after the taping. But that’s another story.)
8:45: Audience coordinator Andrea Wishom enters the studio. She is young and shy but is trying earnestly to be peppy. “Is everyone excited to be here?” she yells. “How excited? I want to hear.” The audience whoops it up. We calm down and Wishom gives us our watching orders: Don’t stare at the cameras. Don’t chew gum. Don’t pick your nose. Don’t scratch your behind. Someone behind me mutters, “Oh, brother.”
8:50: Wishom’s on a roll. She tells us Winfrey is miked throughout the show, so anything she says from the moment she walks on set till she leaves for her dressing room is heard throughout the audience and might be aired on TV. Likewise, anything we say that gets picked up by a mike is fair broadcast game. I worry about more important things, such as whether all the coffee I drank at breakfast will hit me at an inopportune time. At the end of her spiel, Wishom dispels my fears. Yes, we will be allowed to use the restrooms during the seven commercial breaks.
She encourages fans to shout “Oprah” and threatens to make those who don’t get up and chant by ourselves onstage. I feel unusual pleasure disobeying her.
8:55: Wishom passes the cheerleading baton to spunky associate producer Kandi Amelon, who reveals that today’s segment is an annual followup show bringing back guests from the past. (Backstage after the show’s taping, producer Dianne Atkinson Hudson says that some 10 producers are responsible for getting various shows on the air. The majority of ideas come from them. But they also get a lot of ideas from fans, who mail in more than 5,000 letters each week.)
9: No signs of Oprah yet. She is backstage prepping for today’s show, as she does before each taping, getting familiar with guests’ names and stories. The audience is getting antsy. The show was supposed to start taping by now. Amelon advises, “To get on TV, make noise.” She starts a wave that goes on for what seems like five minutes.
9:15: Still no Oprah. Instead we get a medley of soft-rock songs by Richard Marx and Whitney Houston is piped in through an excellent speaker system. Amelon, possibly sensing the rising anxiety in the audience, corrals a bunch of audience members to come up front and dance.
9:20: Oprah has arrived. The well-trained fans start their “Oprah” chant. Winfrey is stunning in a beautifully tailored salmon pant suit with matching platform slingbacks and stockings. Her producers try to rush her to start the show, but she wants to answer questions. “Could you just let me talk to the audience?” she rhetorically asks in her best Kermit the Frog imitation. “They got up at 4 a.m. to be here.” Winfrey gets an ovation. She tells us today’s show should be good, but that not all of them turn out so well. About a recent show that was so bad she ordered in pizza for the entire audience, she cracks, “We’ve let the producer go.” Without missing a beat, she adds, “He’ll sue me later, I’m sure.” She’s apparently referring to her former publicist Colleen Raleigh’s lawsuit against her.
9:25: Let the taping begin. Her slew of Where-Are-They-Now guests includes an anorexic woman who weighed in at 54 pounds during an all-time low and is still fighting to stay alive. On the other end of the scale, so to speak, is a woman who weighed more than 500 pounds and hasn’t been able to lose much weight since. There’s also a sloppy eater and a father whose outlandish suits embarrassed his daughter – both men regressed to their old ways after their “Winfrey” appearance. On the positive side, a handsome doctor who complained he couldn’t get a date ended up receiving thousands of mash notes after his guest spot. Winfrey ad-libs and reads from TelePrompTers that are built into the cameras. She makes few mistakes.
9:43: Time for the first commercial break. A makeup artist comes on set to touch up Winfrey’s face. Winfrey sips on water laced with lemon slices. “I’m tired of working out,” she says to no one in particular. “Girl, you look good,” a male fan shouts back. “Trying to fight genetics is a bitch,” she says, adding that she fits comfortably into a size 8 now. “Last year I was a 6 for two days,” she sighs. She speaks with the same precision off-camera as she does on.
10:10: Winfrey and Co. have been taping for 45 minutes now but are running behind schedule. (They end up taking 95 minutes to tape a show that will be edited down to fit an hour-long slot.)
The audience members, many of whom haven’t eaten breakfast, are getting hungry.
10:40: An assistant brings Winfrey a fruit plate to munch on. The audience moans. “I won’t eat if there’s not enough for everyone,” she said. There isn’t, so she doesn’t. She is getting tired now and decides to rest by lying down at the foot of her stage. She takes questions from the audience, and there seems to nothing she won’t answer, including one about a whether she had breast reduction surgery. No, she says, she didn’t. When she lost weight, “they just disappeared.” But if she does decide to get any cosmetic surgery, she says she promises to have it filmed. Of her decision to get away from sensationalist subjects, she says, “We try to uplift, enlighten and encourage. If we entertain as well, that’s good.”
11:00 The show is over. Winfrey asks an assistant to bring her a cappuccino, some fruit and one cookie. The audience begins filing out. Winfrey waits to shake hands and chat with people as they leave. About a quarter of the audience books for the door. The others stay to chat with Winfrey. Those who stay are polite to her, and she is warm to them. I’d been to several of her tapings in the mid-’80s and she seemed less comfortable with her fans back then. And it strikes me that here is a woman of incredible power and charisma, who still takes the time to meet every member of her studio audience. And, she does it twice a day.
11:07: Winfrey’s snack is delivered exactly as ordered. A fan compliments her on her svelte figure. Winfrey says she’d like to lose a little more weight around her belly. She lifts up her jacket and pinches considerably less than an inch of fat as proof.
11:30: It’s time to get started for the second taping of the day, but Winfrey still is talking to the audience. She has yet to take her first sip of cappuccino.
It’s been a long morning, but one that I enjoyed very much. I feel uplifted, as if some of Winfrey’s energy has rubbed off on me. Would I attend another taping? Definitely. But next time, I’d wait until I could get tickets for the noon taping. After all, it’s easier to be uplifted when you’re already up.
