But then Matt and Trey were on and I was backstage in their dressing room and in comes Jay with the scripts. They had done a pre-interview over the phone the day before and some PA had typed it all up and here was Jay to go over everything. It lost so much charm right then. Then, when they were on a second time, we were backstage and I went to pee and when I came out of the bathroom (you could still hear the toilet flushing) I walked smack into Jay and he remembers me a little and so like a gentleman puts out his hand and receives my dry shake. No post-urination wash-up. There was a slight pause of recognition between us and then I slithered away. (What Jay doesn’t know, however, is that I was a left-hand operator on that particular occasion, and he had nothing to fear.)

The point is, Hollywood came crashing down. No magic. Scripted interviews and dry handshakes. When the announcement came on “The Price Is Right” to send for tickets and the address was Burbank, Burbank was a distant paradise of palm trees and star homes. Now it’s where the Burbank airport is, and warm chocolate chip cookies.

After Trey and Matt finished filming “Baseketball,” Universal or Paramount or whoever got them a private jet and we all went to Cabo San Lucas. Pre-flight we’re all sitting at the hangar. Then our pilot and first officer come over to get our bags and inform us that we’ll be taking off as soon as they take the chocolate chip cookies out of the oven.

So that’s what Burbank has become. And travel. When we took a private jet to the Aspen Comedy Festival last March, the bill was footed by this gazillionaire who credits his success to an acid trip he had once. Saw a vision of what he needed to do, did it, and now he’s driving his trophy girlfriend and bratty kid right onto the tarmac and next to the plane. Out goes the cockpit crew to valet his behemoth Suburban, carry his bags and escort him onto the plane. And you can bet the car was waiting in that exact spot — turned around and running — when we got back. So, who wants to fly coach anymore? Or carry their own bags? Wait in line, are you kidding me?

Trey always takes me along to fun things mostly so we can steal those private looks at one another, the ones that say: Who ever thought we’d be doing this when we were little dickheads back in Evergreen High School? Who thought we’d meet Elton? Or Clint? On more than one occasion Trey’s woken me from fitful slumber in order that I might play his second when the model and her hot friend arrive to enjoy a night of hot tubbing. To which I have always said, “Well, OK.” I mean, he’s my best friend. What else could I do?

Went to the premiere of “Three Kings” on Monday. We got really drunk and took pictures with Trey’s new digital camera. Once you take all the pictures you can put the memory stick into what’s called CyberFrame. It’s a small LCD picture frame that lets you cycle through each photo or pick one to display. Anyway, we ran around drunk, taking pictures, yelling “CyberFrame woo-hoo!” and when people would give us weird looks we’d point at them and in total surfer dude voices scream, “You’re a robot!”

Also, I decided to rub up against the stars, literally. So I slid my Versace shirt against Cindy Crawford, Rose McGowan, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and this hot chick who is the roommate of my friend’s agent. Oh, and I fellated a hot dog. “CyberFrame!”

Love, David

The American people feel like nobody’s looking out for them right now. Traditionally, what held this country together was this notion that if you work hard, if you’re playing by the rules, if you’re responsible, if you’re looking out for your family, you’re showing up for work everyday and doing a good job, you’ve got a chance to get ahead and succeed. Right now, it feels to people like the deck’s stacked against them, and the folks in power don’t seem to be paying attention to that.

If everybody’s tuned into that message — and we are working every single day to figure out how do we give people a fair shake, and everybody’s doing their fair share — then people won’t be occupying the streets, because they’ll have a job and they’ll feel like they’re able to get ahead. But right now they’re frustrated. Part of my job over the next year is to make sure, if they’re not seeing it out of Congress, at minimum they’re going to see in their president someone who’s fighting for them.

2. “Glee” goes viral

The stars of the Fox musical stopped by Internet star Keenan Cahill’s to cover Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.“

3. Field of “NFL” Dreams

Taylor Lautner in a FunnyorDie video spoof of the Kevin Costner flick. Well, it’s nice to see those “Twilight” kids getting work these days.

4. Jay Leno bombs while talking about the Casey Anthony verdict

HELLO IS THIS THING ON?

5. Harry Potter houses

You know, I always wondered what those Hufflepuffs were good for, anyway.

“I just love being high,” the comedian told Leno Wednesday night. He then admits he would suck dick to get his Percoset back. Right before he wishes he was an alcoholic. I love Louis C.K.

3. Tea Party tries for TV

Members of the Tea Party movement created their own pilot, called “Courage, New Hampshire.” It still needs to find a network home, but when it does, watch out, world! It’s going to be like “The West Wing,” but without the lefty politics and also set in the 1770s (which we all know is what people are referring to when they say “the good ol’ days”).

I like the part where it just cuts to a dude saying, “If it pleases the court!”

4. Barack Obama lets a kid use his car phone

And no offense to this child, but he totally blows his chance to have the president leave his mom a voice mail. Obama’s face is so giddy in this, you’d think he was doing an episode of “Punk’d.”

5. Anderson Cooper, king of sarcasm, will still not give blessing to 51-year-old Doug Hutchison marrying a 16-year-old

It’s never been so much fun to watch someone on TV have a live-action flame war with a blog.

It’s also a joke, I guess, when O’Brien later compares himself to Anne Frank, leading his assistant, Sona Movsesian, to gape at him in open-mouthed disbelief. He grumbles his acknowledgment that she’s right, it may be going too far to compare being paid $45 million not to appear on TV with being killed by the Nazis, and you see a flicker of distaste or unhappiness move across his truculent expression. Like: Am I really this person now? Success in show business demands an obsessive, even maniacal drive, along with a diva-ish degree of self-regard and a projection of your own will onto the universe. It should be no surprise that O’Brien possesses all those qualities, despite a public persona based on his humility and upper-middle-class ordinariness. I think the guy is a talented and often funny TV performer, and I’ve got nothing against him as a person. Either bravely or stupidly, he allowed Flender total freedom to make a movie that simultaneously portrays him as a vulnerable human being and also as a massively entitled douchebag who’s being eaten alive by his own contradictions.

If there’s one belief that all Americans share — Jew and Gentile, black and white, Kenyan-born Muslim socialists and normal people — it’s that one day we’ll become celebrities and millionaires. “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” may serve as partial inoculation against that desire, but if it winds up happening to you anyway, here’s my advice: Don’t let the documentary film crew into your house! And if you simply can’t resist, at least stay off the couch, which is where O’Brien spends much of this film (both literally and figuratively), making pronouncements like: “I could be a genius, or I could be the biggest dick ever. Or both. I can’t tell.” Flender’s title has obvious multiple meanings, but one of the biggest is that O’Brien can’t stop running his damn mouth, to his own detriment.

Flender’s film follows in the “direct cinema” tradition of legendary backstage documentaries like D.A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” (about Bob Dylan in England) or the Maysles brothers’ “Gimme Shelter” (about the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont concert). It casts a cold eye at the sausage-making machinery behind the entertainment industry, and if the principal audience for “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” is obviously the comedian’s legions of fans, it’s probably most interesting as a detached study of the workings of fame. We watch O’Brien and his staff tirelessly constructing their road show, a raucous blend of comedy sketches and mediocre folk-rock that feels like a way of reconstructing the star’s ego by way of old-school showbiz bona fides. (Not sure the guy should quit his comedy gig for music, but my gosh, he’s a dervish!) We see him irritably engaging hordes of fans in L.A. and New York, and groups of two or three people in Oregon and rural Alberta. In that last location, he meets a kid who’s driven for hours across the prairie with a fake ID, who tells him, “I hope they don’t Jew me out of getting into the show!” O’Brien calmly asks him what he just said, and the kid goes, “I mean, I hope they don’t gyp me out of it!” (Marginally less toxic bigotry! Much better.)

Let me admit that I came to “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” as a neutral in the great late-night war of 2009-2010. I mean, I’ve seen both O’Brien and Jay Leno on television, and many people I know have strong feelings about the perceived generational and cultural divide between them. But the fact that there were actual street demonstrations on both coasts around the question of who would host the “Tonight Show” (which seemed antique when Johnny Carson hosted it in the ’80s) seems puzzling, although no more so, I guess, than setting fire to police cars because your team either won or lost the championship. What’s clear from the film is that there’s a massive, almost tribal demand for O’Brien’s brand of slightly more upscale comedy (maybe less so for his rock-star stylings), and also that being that famous doesn’t do wonders for anyone’s personality.

There’s a scene late in the movie that made me feel a little better about O’Brien, when he gets dragged into praying to Jesus with a carload of enormous women at a Connecticut gas station. They’re the most obvious targets for a mean crack you could imagine, but either O’Brien held his tongue after the episode was over or Flender had the good sense to turn the camera off. Either way it’s one of those moments in documentary where you’re grateful for a little restraint. He also tells the women that he feels ultimately grateful for getting fired by NBC, when he’s spent much of the movie complaining about the “anger” and “despair” he felt after being paid tons of money rather than agreeing to move his TV show half an hour later. After the tour’s over, he tells Flender, he needs to take some time off and reconnect, maybe drive his kids to school. Then he leans into the camera to correct himself: “Or have my agent drive my kids to school!” In fact, he started working on his new show for TBS almost immediately.

“Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” opens this week in Albany, N.Y., Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, with more cities to follow.