Producing Olympics is relatively painless

PASADENA, Calif. — There are harder jobs than executive producing the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics. For example, trying to get a half-hour comedy/variety show on TV.

Just ask Don Mischer, who's not only executive-producing the Salt Lake Games' ceremonies but also the "The Wayne Brady Show," which premieres next month on ABC. He said the former is actually less trying than the latter.

"It's a little bit easier. In the end, what we do for the opening and closing ceremonies has got to be approved by the Salt Lake City Olympic committee," Mischer said. "(SLOC president) Mitt Romney is the guy we've got to get approval from, and he participated in the creative process a lot.

"It's a little more complicated with the network. With a series like ('Wayne Brady'), the network is there constantly (with unasked-for input). . . . The toughest thing about this job is that you have to graciously accept all that stuff and try to not lose your focus."

While he didn't get specific, Mischer said the Olympics are very much in focus right now. "All of our plans are made. All of our creative concepts are laid out. We're now in the process of casting people in Salt Lake City, and our composers are working on music, our artists are doing storyboards. The major time for me was a year ago, when we were dealing with what creative concepts are we going to do. How do we properly portray Salt Lake City in front of 80 percent of the planet? How do we handle Native Americans?

"Those decisions have all been made and our concepts have been presented to the IOC and they've approved them, so we're in the execution phase of that right now."

Which is not to say that getting to this point was easy. The IOC shot down Romney and Mischer's plans to reconfigure things, such as how the athletes enter the stadium, the flag ceremony and the Olympic oath.

Mischer went through all this before with the 1996 Atlanta Games. "It's a tough job, man, doing the Olympics, because nothing makes a city more insecure about its culture and about it history and everything else than hosting the Olympic ceremonies. All of a sudden — what are we going to say to the world? How do we want the world to feel about our city? What are the biggest misconceptions about our city?

"The hardest thing is coming up with those concepts that will service everything and create the right kind of feeling."

And he's sure that he's not going to make everyone happy. "It's impossible to please everybody," Mischer said. "There will be people, no matter what we do, who will be very unhappy about one or another thing that we do in the ceremonies."