President Obama at 2009 RTCA Dinner

President Obama in his speech to the RTCA got right to the heart of Washington’s journalist dinner rivalry, saying he was on hand to “Tell jokes that weren’t funny enough for me to use when we did this five weeks ago,” at the White House Correspondents’ dinner (known as the Senior Prom to the RTCA’s Junior Prom.) Then again, he said, twisting the knife deeper: “The jokes may not be as good but neither is the guest list.”

And later: “I think your programming is more relevant than ever before — at least that’s the impression that I get when I read the blogs.”

In his appearance before the Radio and TV correspondents at the Washington D.C. Convention Center, the President was unaccompanied by First Lady Michelle Obama on the orange and yellow rose-rimmed dais and he left at 9:20, before dinner was served. His short stay prompted some last-minute frantic juggling of the entertainment lineup, according to insiders. VP Biden wasn’t there, either, despite apparently erroneous earlier reports that he would attend. A spokeswoman said that he had a scheduling conflict.

Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, right after the speech, noted the President’s “sharp elbowed humor;” a few tweets from the dinner suggested that his humor was “underappreciated” by the audience. He cracked himself up several times, however.

The biggest laughs of the night came when he joked about embattled California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger competing on “I’m a Celebrity….Get Me Out of Here,” then added: “That’s how I feel about tonight.” The dinner, he said, was causing him to miss “date night” with Michelle, and his plans to go for Thai food-pause-”in Bangkok.”

A joke about being in bed with NBC’s Brian Williams, whom he called a terrible house guest, was followed by a list of new TV programs that the success of “Inside the White House” had inspired, the funniest of which was TLC’s “Jon & Kate plus Peter Orszag.”

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski

There was also a mild jab at NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd for having the style of a TV correspondent and “the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” To MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, he said: “We both have partners named Joe who used to be in Congress and don’t know when to stop talking.” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, he noted, was “the only other man in America with his own situation room,” and it was cooler than the President’s, which he said, was unable “to generate the bandwidth to turn Larry Summers into a hologram.”

Random jokes poked fun at his own Administration, including Richard Holbrooke, whom he alleged sprayed WD-40 that caused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s elbow-breaking fall. He announced a “new” plan to rescue the auto business, telling dinner guests to look under their seat, a la Oprah, because everyone was getting a car company. Fox, he said, would get AIG.

Looking relieved that his speech was over, the President ended his remarks with a serious tribute to the work of the press, noting “I am here tonight because I appreciate the role you do.” He got the traditional standing ovation at the beginning and end.

NBC News VP Mark Lukasiewicz briefs camera crews during a pre-production meeting in the Old Executive Office Building on Thursday, May 28.

Mark Lukasiewicz (a.k.a. “Luk”) was the Executive Producer behind one of NBC’s most revealing portraits: “Inside the Obama White House, Brian Williams Reports.” WHC Insider reported Luk’s production plan to create the most personal look yet at the White House and this President. Today, we go behind the scenes with Luk as he tells us how they got the “get of the year.”

Linda Rozett:  How long did it take to get the administration to agree to appear under this sort of microscope? How did you convince them to cooperate?

Mark Lukasiewicz:  We began that conversation very early with Robert Gibbs and other Obama advisers. The conversations got more serious in February, and then got even more serious after the White House Correspondents Dinner in May. NBC has done this kind of show with virtually every administration since Nixon; it’s a very long tradition. President Ford was the only exception, since he wasn’t in office long enough. It’s been our practice to approach each new administration to participate, because it’s an opportunity to introduce the nation to them and how they work.

After that, we had a number of meetings on the details: the number of people involved, equipment to be moved in, where we would have cameras, and work space. We had a space in the Old Executive Office Building. Finally it became a matter of finding a date that worked.

From the outset I had the strong impression it really was only a matter of when, not if. The White House understood the value of this project in terms of introducing this administration to the country, to their key players. I didn’t sense any hesitation on their part.

Were there any restrictions on what you could shoot (rooms off limits, security, etc.)?

There were conversations with the Secret Service to make sure we weren’t doing anything inadvertently to compromise the President’s protection. And there were definitely areas we would have been happy to shoot, but were told no. Not the residence floors of the White House where the Obamas live. Not the Situation Room, for example, and limited opportunity to shoot in the areas occupied by the National Security people.

But the restrictions were really minimal in terms of where we could shoot; and almost all of them had to do with security.

How about the staff — any restrictions there?

No.  But there were some logistical issues — making sure we could carve time out of the day to have access to the key players.  Once we had agreement, we needed to make sure Brian Williams could stop in on certain people, that they’d have a free 15 to 20 minutes on their calendar.

How did you set this up? With crews following people around?

I produced our last “Inside the White House” special in 2002 with the Bush administration, and I learned than just how small the West Wing is.  It’s pretty tight and pretty crowded; narrow hallways, small offices. Having camera crews on the move through that space all day long would be too difficult. So we set it up as a zone system: cameras and crews in different areas were responsible for shooting what went on that area. So, if Larry Summers moved, we didn’t have a crew chasing him. The crew in his office area saw him leave and the crew in the Oval Office picked him up arriving.

The only exception: a crew moved with Brian Williams everywhere he went. So any time Brian Williams arrived somewhere, I had two cameras on that area; the one with Brian and the one that was geographically assigned to that area.

In 2002, I had actually created a floor plan of the White House to map this out.  That special was shot in the aftermath of 9/11 … and there was tremendous sensitivity about a floor plan showing the interior of the West Wing. I couldn’t get one from an official source, so I basically sketched a map of the West Wing floors to get where crews could be and what they’d be covering.

South Portico, L to R: Lighting Director JoAnne Fyanes, NBC News VP Mark Lukasiewicz, Director Jim Gaines, Technical Director Leonard Venezia – courtesy Antoine Sanfuentes

For the Obama program, we began setting up our workspace on Wednesday, May 27. We moved equipment in on Thursday the 28th. We had a production meeting for the crews Thursday afternoon in the Old Executive Office Building, and met with all the producers on Thursday evening. The call time, our arrival time, was 5:00 a.m. Friday, May 29, for everybody to be at the White House. We kept the Secret Service busy at the gates with all our crew arriving, but we got set up in enough time to get shots of the staff arriving and turning on the lights.

The last crews stopped shooting around 9:00 p.m. on Friday.

Where were you stationed, outside the Oval Office?

I was in our workspace in the Old Executive Office Building.

You spent whole day in OEOB?

No, I went over to the West Wing a couple of times, like when we interviewed the President, but basically I was mostly in the OEOB where I could be in contact with all the producers and crews and monitor what was going on.  Whenever a tape was finished shooting, it was popped out and brought over to OEOB, to be tagged, identified and labeled. As they came back, I sampled the tapes, so we knew exactly what was there. Every few hours, a courier departed with the tapes to New York to be ingested into our Avid system and logged for the producers and editors to work with.

How many people, crews, cameras, were there at any one time?

In the West Wing, easily 35 to 40 people at one time. Every beta camera crew — there were 16 of them, with two-thirds located in the West Wing — included a camera, plus a sound engineer, a producer and an associate producer. Certain parts of the West Wing are notoriously dimly lit, so overnight on Thursday we were allowed to put up a minimal amount of lights, including in the Oval Office and the outer Oval.

NBC News VP Mark Lukasiewicz (second from right) huddles with producer Meaghan Rady, Senior Producer Subrata De and NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Mark Whitaker in NBC's workspace in the old EOB during the filming of "Inside the Obama White House" – courtesy Antoine Sanfuentes

How did you pull your team together?

It was definitely a handpicked team.  We combined people from all over NBC, virtually every program unit and geographically from different parts of the country. I was looking for a mix of people who had experience doing it before, who had done the last “Inside the White House” project, as well as producers who were able to shoot their own video and who had different sensibilities.  We had White House veterans, but also people who were new to the White House, who would be able to see everything with fresh eyes. .  And we had a lot of producers from our long-form unit, Dateline, who were skilled storytellers and could help craft this special in the short amount of time we had to get it done.

One of the real challenges is you get all of this material on Friday and you have to put into a prime time project by Tuesday. Remember, we finished shooting at 9pm on Friday and it was on the air at 9pm on Tuesday, just four days later.  To get it done, we basically took over the editing infrastructure of Dateline in New York.  We had 12 edit rooms cranking off a single Avid server. It’s a complex process. Tapes were hand-carried by a series of couriers back to New York, where they were immediately pulled into digitizing and logging.  There was a special coding and tagging system set up so that every frame of usable video would be logged and digitized, and available to all the producers and editors.

Any mishaps; cameras go down, lights fail?

No, we were very lucky. The rain gave us some issues; and at one point we had to shut down our outside crew because we were worried about the risk of electrocution

It was interesting to me that in the past, we’ve used radios and I had a set of two-way radios with every team again this time. But this time we didn’t use them very much; we ended up using essentially text messages. Every producer has a BlackBerry or a smart phone. We had a common, shared e-mail group address that anyone could use to broadcast to everyone else on the team. So anytime I needed to say something to all the crews I could broadcast a message to everyone. Early in the day, for example, I could see on the tapes coming back that some of the teams were getting into each others shots too much and I sent a message about being careful about that. Producers upstairs could alert crews downstairs that someone was coming down. It turned into literally hundreds of messages that kept everybody in tune with what was going on — or if the President’s schedule was slipping a bit.

It really worked. At the end of project, we assembled 14 single-spaced pages of those messages. The first one was at 6:48 a.m. and the last one was at 8:07 p.m. They provided an accurate time line of the day, and we used them to find certain events, and shots, that we wanted to use.

That’s a big job, managing such a large team and a big project.

I’m very lucky in that I often get the call from Steve Capus or Phil Griffin to help put together unique projects like this.  Going back to our 9/11 coverage and the Iraq war, I’ve had the opportunity to assemble these teams of great producers and editors for short-term projects

And frankly, NBC News is uniquely capable of doing these big organization projects, because we have the horses, both in broadcast and cable and online.  And it’s always a thrill to watch a team come together — often people who haven’t worked together and maybe even haven’t met before — and see them operate like a well-oiled machine, attacking a project like this one.  We used people from across the organization and it came together in a great collaborative project. This team was truly extraordinary … and projects like this – intense collaborative team efforts – are exactly why I got into TV in the first place.

Obama Walks to Oval Office -- courtesy Antoine Sanfuentes

Mark Lukasiewicz (a.k.a. “Luk”) is one of the biggest names in TV news, yet he operates behind the cameras and lights — and notoriety — as a Vice President of NBC News.

He has been leading NBC News’ digital efforts and on the side (ahem) over the years he has created and produced some of NBC News biggest events, the most recent: NBC’s “Inside the Obama White House, Brian Williams Reports.” With amazing access and resources, he and his team shot 150 hours of tape and created two primetime network hours, which also appeared on NBC’s cable channel MSNBC.

WHCInsider talked to Luk about the two-night special report, both of which captured a “top 10″ TV ranking for that week. about how the NBC the program came together.

Linda Rozett: Did you plan what everybody would be shooting beforehand, or did you just show up with lots of people and start shooting … and sort it out in the edit room?

Mark Lukasiewicz: The White House puts out a public schedule each day, so we certainly knew in advance some of what would be on President Obama’s schedule.  But in terms of exactly how it would unfold, there’s no way to know that.  You just roll with it. In the end, the broadcast included an entire chapter on how the White House managed the Sonia Sotomayor story — and that episode completely unfolded before our eyes. No one could have predicted it.

Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest and NBC News VP Mark Lukasiewicz on the South Lawn of the White House, consider camera locations for "Inside the Obama White House: Brian Williams Reports" – courtesy Subrata De

In the process we followed, every producer submitted an outline of their best material, what they saw what was noteworthy, what unfolded. Each submitted the outline by midnight on Friday, a few hours after they left the White House.

Before leaving the White House Brian, Subrata De and I were also able to compare notes — and overnight I put together a 12-act outline of the two hours incorporating all the best material from the producers, and laying it out and structuring it into a rough narrative.

By noon Saturday everyone was back in New York and the entire team went to work on that 11-page outline, in a two-hour meeting.  We moved some things around, added some things, took some others out.  And at the end of that meeting, a producer/editor team was assigned to begin producing each act.

Sunday was another full day in a “war room” on the 5^th floor of 30 Rock, where Brian worked with each producer/editor team and scripted each act in sequence.  Brian recorded his scripts for those acts Sunday evening.  By Monday morning, we were screening a largely completed version of the two-hour special.  It was an incredible process.

In addition to the NBC Special, didn’t you have time on MSNBC?

On NBC, we had one hour on Tuesday, June 2, and one hour Wednesday, June 3.  We combined those into a single, two-hour program on Friday, which also ran on MSNBC on the weekend.  And very soon, it will be a DVD.

And had our own website for the broadcast: www.whitehouse.msnbc.com.  Pieces of video that we let run longer and stuff that didn’t make the broadcast, we put that on the website. We also had web-exclusive elements — our web producers were involved from day one; and msnbc.com had its own editorial team with us at the White House.  They had access to everything.  The website also has the full two-hour video, as well as all the previous “Inside the White House” broadcasts going back several years

With that much material, you must have had some good stuff that got left on the cutting room floor … what were your favorites that just didn’t quite make the cut?

There is. We had 150 hours of material. One thing we couldn’t get into the Monday, Tuesday broadcasts, but got in on Friday was a section about White House photographer Pete Souza. The producer who shot that material made the case for a great segment; a lovely and fascinating little glimpse of how the White House photographer works, how he works with the President. The segment told the story behind a particular photo, hanging in the West Wing, of a young boy in the Oval Office. The picture shows a 4-year old standing in front of the President’s desk and Obama is leaving over so the young boy can touch his hair. Souza told us the little boy had recently had his hair cut and wondered if their heads felt the same. In the photo, Obama is leaning over so the boy can feel his head.

How would you describe Obama’s comfort level with cameras following him that closely for an extended period?

I can’t speak for the President on this, but it appeared that he was very comfortable. We certainly had extraordinary access to him all day long in different settings: casual interactions with immediate staff members, casual interactions with the First Lady, walking from place to place, backstage, meetings in the Oval Office, in the Roosevelt Room, in the limousine, getting off the elevator in the morning and getting on the elevator in the evening. He seemed very comfortable.

Any surprises during shooting?

Preparing NBC Nightly News June 2, 2009 in the East Room -- the first ever evening newscast to originate from the East Room. Left to Right: Subrata De, Megan Marcus, Brian Williams, Dan Linden – courtesy Antoine Sanfuentes

The rain was an unfortunate surprise. I mentioned earlier how we really used every part of the NBC organization — well one relatively new part of NBC is the Weather Channel and we even relied on them!  When it became clear that weather was going to be a concern, we got hourly, White House specific weather forecasts to help us figure out whether we were going to be able to be outside at specific points.  An excursion to the vegetable garden with First Lady Michelle Obama got rained out.

Another interesting surprise was this:  on Friday the 29th, when we interviewed the President, Brian Williams asked him about his basketball/worklife balance. And President Obama described a plan to paint lines for a basketball court on top of the tennis courts. So the following Tuesday, on our day of air, I sent a crew to get pictures of the tennis court.  And just as they arrived, a work crew was beginning to paint the basketball lines.

Any unexpected stars?

I don’t think so. We knew who would be prominent. It’s not terribly difficult to figure out who the key players are in the White House. But what was fascinating was to see them in their work environment, sleeves rolled up, jackets off.  The degree to which some of the people opened up about their families and the impact of their jobs, for example,  as surprising; David Axelrod describing the separation from his daughter in Chicago and Rahm Emanuel from his family in Chicago. That was a little surprising and a real insight I thought. As Brian pointed out in the script, people burn out of these jobs, it’s very intense.

You produced “Inside the White House” during President Bush’s administration in 2002. Did you notice any differences between the two administrations?

In terms of our planning, from an outside observers’ view, the President’s day in the George W. Bush administration seemed to be more regimented and more planned down to moment than Obama’s day. I say this in full awareness that each administration, when they allow us to come in, they know that we’re going to be there, and they make sure the President’s schedule is reflective of what they want to reflect.  But of course they can’t control everything, like the weather or the news cycle, like the Sotomayor story.

It seemed to me we saw a President here that spends more of his day than his predecessor in unscheduled ways. Like walking down the hall to find someone when there’s something he wants to talk about.   In the Bush administration we saw the President’s staff ushering people in and out of the Oval Office while the President was inside.   In the Obama administration, more often we saw the President himself come out to see who was waiting for him and deciding who was next up.

The time rhythm of this White House is also very different from the Bush White House. Bush was a notoriously early riser and also early to bed. Obama is very clear that he’s more of a night owl. His day starts a little later, and he reserves a significant chunk of work for late in the evening. He described his office on the second floor, where he does a lot of his thinking and his reading.

We pointed out in the broadcast, and it was noticeable, the Oval Office looks a little sparse. Presidents have tended to change the Oval Office to reflect their interests, tchotchkies, art work, carpets, and even which desk they choose.  President Obama uses the Oval Office for official business, for meetings. When he’s working on his own, he tends to work in the private study off the Oval office or upstairs. Not a lot of tchotchkies on the desk in the Oval Office.

Take a virtual tour of the White House and check out the panoramic photo of the Oval Office.

Are you pleased with the way it turned out? Any disappointments?

Yes, very pleased. It was great to work with such a team — and to have Brian Williams taking the ball and running with it.  Brian was a White House correspondent, and he’s as well-read as anyone I know on Presidential and White House history.   There wasn’t an office he was in or a corner he turned that didn’t have some great history attached to it, and he had it in his head.  I was also pleased because it’s the first time we’ve done one of these programs in high definition; every frame was HD. I can’t swear to this, but it was probably the most extensive filming ever done in the White House in HD. As a producer, it’s fun to work with material that had that kind of quality. Extraordinary access to the President himself — behind the podium, talking to Brian about the issues of the day, about his life in the White House and his family — and I think we got to see different sides of a lot of people around him and a real glimpse of how he works, how he solicits advice. Very revealing.

Was Brian Williams with the President all day?  How did that work?

Brian Williams, Subrata De, Mark Lukasiewicz after Brian’s interview with President Obama – courtesy Antoine Sanfuentes

Brian and his senior producer, Subrata De, were on the move from very early in the morning until the President went upstairs to end his day.   Much of that time was spent with the President — including a formal sit-down interview in the Blue Room and a trip to “Five Guys” in the President’s limousine, as well as numerous walks back and forth from place to place. But Brian also spent a lot of time in the “Outer Oval,” where top administration officials and Cabinet members congregate when they’re waiting to go in to see the President.  And he also had a slew of interviews to do, not just the President, but the First Lady, as well as all the key officials — Biden, Emanuel, Axelrod, Jarrett, Gibbs, General Jones — and some of the young staff members who are also key players:  Reggie Love and “KJ,” the President’s secretary.

Any feedback from the White House?

The White House is fairly mum, but I think they were thought we were fair and representative.  I worked very closely with Robert Gibb’s staff on the logistics of this program and I think they did a great job.  On the day we were at the White House, there were dozens of small and large problems they had to help us solve and I think we ran some of them off their feet.  If I had to guess, I’m not sure they loved the section of the program that dealt with the Sotomayor controversy — after all, it started with a couple of the press staff telling Gibbs it wouldn’t be a big story that day, and it was — but they had a good sense of humor about it.  I don’t think they regret having invited us in to do the program.

Tomorrow, we’ll share Luk’s stories from behind the scenes, as the cameras rolled.

1945:Performers included Frank Sinatra, Danny Thomas, Jimmy Durante, Fanny Brice and Danny Kaye.

1969: President Richard Nixon personally requested the Disneyland Golden Horseshoe Revue.

Wally Boagpecosbill from Golden Horseshoe Revue

1976:The dinner featured Bob Hope as emcee and Chevy Chase.^[10] When President Ford rose to speak, he “accidentally” caught a tablecloth in his trousers, causing silverware to fall in Chase’s lap. He also pretended to trip as he approached the podium, flinging pages he was carrying into the audience—he then began his speech with “Good evening. I’m Gerald Ford and you’re not” (a reference to Chase’s catchphrase from Weekend Update

1985: Rich Little and President Ronald Reagan in a dual press conference skit.

1988: Yakov Smirnoff

1993: Elayne Boosler

1994: Al Franken

1995:Conan O’Brien

1996:Al Franken

1997:Norm Macdonald

1998:Ray Romano

1999:Aretha Franklin, entertainment (NBC’s Brian Williams in skit)

2000: Outgoing President Bill Clinton mocked himself in the short film President Clinton: Final Days, which depicted him as a lonely man closing down a nearly-deserted White House, riding a bicycle, and learning about the Internet with the help of actor Mike Maronna as his character “Stuart”.

2001: Darrell Hammond and Survivor spoof

2002: Drew Carey (singer Ozzy Osbourne also attended)

2003:Ray Charles, entertainment

2004: Jay Leno

2005: Cedric the Entertainer, plus some jokes by First Lady Laura Bush

2006:  Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner