Conan O'Brien looks back before moving forward

NEW YORK — When Conan O'Brien worked as a writer on Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s, he would gaze in awe at the black-and-white photographs of John Belushi and other early SNL stars that adorned the hallways of NBC's Studio 8H here.

"I looked at those pictures the way you would look at photographs of Lincoln at Gettysburg," he recalled in an interview. "Those sketches were done when I was in the fourth or fifth grade."

Now, it's a similar sense of déjà vu as O'Brien, 45, looks back on clips of himself as a "fresh-faced" comic who, at 29, stumbled into his hosting job with no on-camera experience. "We'll look at a clip from 1993, and it does look like a kinescope, a clip from TheSteve Allen Show."

At the time, he says, "I was uncertain as a performer and insecure about how do I fit into this world. I was following Dave (Letterman) at the height of Dave-mania, and we went a completely different way. Dave very much used the world around him," while O'Brien "created an alternate reality. (We) used animation, we used puppets. When something worked, it was great, but when something didn't work, it was a Hindenburg crashing."

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