The Heart-Attack Moments Behind the Super Bowl Halftime Show

This feature is part of Super Bowl Week at VICE Sports.

There was nothing they could do except pray. Because while the NFL controls a lot of things, the speed at which the sun sets is not one of them.

The halftime show of last year's Super Bowl was supposed to start after sunset: it required darkness so viewers—and dancers—could see the projection of a chess board on the field. Without that projection visible, the show would have been a complete bomb, an undressed set packed with hundreds of lost and confused dancers. Timing was critical, and it absolutely had to be dark for the start of halftime.

But the Patriots and Seahawks had just played the fastest opening quarter in Super Bowl history and the second quarter was also unfolding far too fast. The halftime show starring Katy Perry, months in the making, was on the verge of being destroyed.

Disaster only was averted thanks to three touchdowns and a couple of timeouts in the final two minutes of the second quarter—a confluence of events that slowed the game down, allowed the sun to set, and permitted the show to go on as planned.

"Without a doubt, the worst 12 and a half minutes of my year is that show," says Mark Quenzel, who, as the NFL's senior vice president of programming and production, has overseen the halftime show for the past six years.

Quenzel has one of the most stressful jobs in sports. With upwards of 120 million people watching the live show that costs millions of dollars and takes months to prepare, a lot can go wrong. A big part of Quenzel's job is making sure those land mines are kept to an absolute minimum.

"Some you overcome," he says. "Some you just get lucky. Most of the blood-pressure moments aren't really much about the show you are doing, per se, because where you can control them, you do.

"It's what you can't control."

Take Super Bowl XLVIII, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey—the NFL's rare cold-weather championship game. Three days before kickoff, it was frigid. Bruno Mars rehearsed for the halftime show dressed in combat boots and thick layers that made him look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man while league executives freaked out behind the scenes.

"We were trying to figure out what we would do it if was nine degrees or if it was snowing three days later," Quenzel says.

The temperature at kickoff was a mild 49 degrees—the NFL got lucky. With plans for every contingency Quenzel and his team can imagine, however, very little is left to chance.

Just about the worst thing that could possibly happen during a halftime show is a blackout. The lights went out in New Orleans in 2013 prior to the start of the third quarter, but the halftime show had nothing to do with it. The juice for his show, Quenzel says, comes from a separate generator that's not connected to the game's power source. And he's got a backup generator in case that one fails.

"If that show had been happening when the substation blew, that would not have affected our show one iota," he says. "You wouldn't have even been able to tell."

It wasn't always like this. For the first few years of the Super Bowl, the humble halftime show consisted only of a marching band or two. (Later, there was Up With People!) But that all changed in 1993 when Michael Jackson was the featured attraction, transforming a modest spectacle into something far more over-the-top.

The history of the Super Bowl halftime show was altered again in 2004 by another member of the Jackson family, when Janet had her infamous wardrobe malfunction. That was the last time the NFL contracted out the show to an outside production company. The following year, with the league in total control of the show, Paul McCartney was the main attraction at Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, beginning a run of rock icons.

"I think it sent a message to the entertainment community that we got McCartney," Quenzel says. "And if it was good enough for McCartney, it has to be good enough for everyone else, right?"

McCartney was followed by the Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and the Who before the show went through another transition. In 2011, the Black Eyed Peas headlined, signaling the start of more contemporary acts (although Madonna, an icon, appeared in 2012). Since then, the stage has belonged to Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, and Katy Perry and friends.

This year, Coldplay is headlining a halftime that will also feature Beyoncé and Mars again, though Quenzel would not confirm or deny those names.

"We guard this stuff with our lives," he says. "Whether you think you know who's going to be on stage, one of the most important parts of this is we want people to watch it and say, 'Wow, I can't believe I saw that,' not, 'Wow, they did what I thought they were going to do.'"

Every year presents a new challenge, a new set of obstacles. Last year's Katy Perry show was at University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona, which has a retractable field. When it's not being used, the field sits in the parking lot under the hot desert sun because as soon as it rolls back inside, the grass begins to die. As big as the halftime show is, it's a secondary act to the Super Bowl, which requires a healthy field. If the halftime show had ripped up the grass, heads would have rolled.

"Amazingly in Arizona, it rained the entire week leading up to the Super Bowl and it became an issue with the field," Quenzel says. "The people that are responsible for the quality of the field got very nervous, to the point where we had about 800 people on the field in ballet slippers to keep the field in play."

Then there was the lion.

"We had a 20-foot lion," Quenzel says of the mechanical beast Perry rode in on. "No matter how you build it, it can be pretty heavy. So they were nervous about that, too, and for rehearsals the NFL had to build an apparatus to decrease the amount of weight on the field."

And the fact that Katy Perry was going to be flying around the stadium, 40 feet in the air.

"Does your blood pressure go up a little bit?" Quenzel says. "Yeah. Things can go wrong. But I'll give her credit. She was a trooper and it was amazing."

The halftime show is a massive event that takes months to plan and thousands of hands to pull off. Quenzel oversees it all, but he can't take all the credit.

"Let's be clear: I'm not the one out there showing people dance steps or how to sing," he says. "This is not false modesty. This show is incredibly good because we have so many talented people that are on-stage and off-stage, and they're the ones that make it go."

He recalls watching Madonna and Perry each going through hundreds of dancers lined up on the 50-yard line before their shows to personally inspect and adjust costumes like drill sergeants at muster. Gloves. Ties. Bows. Shoes.

"The attention to detail and the complete inability to compromise on anything, from all these artists, is a common thread," he says. "They exist on perfection, so I don't get worried about that. There's just too many good people. You just worry about things that are beyond your control because once they roll out, there's nothing you can do. You just hang on."

Trying to anticipate every possible mishap keeps Quenzel up late at night during the run-up to the Super Bowl. By the time the lights come up and the show starts, his agita is at full blast.

"When you're watching it after you've rehearsed it that many times, you focus less on what's happening because you know what's coming next," he says. "You know where the pressure points are, where the largest potential issues are."

Last year, Quenzel's eyes and mind darted from one piece of the show to the next. After he saw that the 20-foot lion was functioning properly, he began stressing about Perry successfully executing a critical six-second wardrobe change. From there, he worried about Missy Elliott hitting her mark; if Perry would bang into her during a quick transition; and if Perry would be able to run through the darkness and make it to the platform that held the harness that she had to get into to fly around the building. It's a mental obstacle course Quenzel navigates for 12 and a half minutes. But for those who work on the Super Bowl halftime show, it's part of the deal.

With millions of dollars and reputations—of the league, of the event, of the artists involved, of the thousands working behind the scenes—at stake, Quenzel sweats the small stuff. And the big stuff, too.

"It is a lot of work," he says. "But like most things that we do, the goal here is to make something very difficult to do look easy. Because if it looks hard, then you haven't succeeded."

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