King of Late Night forever
It was kind of depressing and pathetic to watch Jay Leno do his tribute to Johnny Carson last night since it was Leno and his manager who were responsible for Carson’s forced retirement when Carson still had a number of good years ahead. Worse, the shoddy treatment of Carson by NBC after 30 years of service resulted in Carson’s never returning to public life thus robbing us all of some great humor and who knows what else. Now we see this tribute. The true story of Carson’s ouster is clearly documented in the book, The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night, by Bill Carter. This was made into a made-for-TV movie that featured Cathy Bates as Leno’s creepy scheming manager. Rent the DVD if you can find it.
What I found appalling is the fact that with all these tributes the injustice and underhandedness of NBC is only mentioned by one lone Canadian news outlet. What is the point of glossing it over? Fear? Incompetence? A desire to get on MSNBC? One other outlet — Slate — mentions NBC’s willful and callous destruction of the old Tonight Show tapes and kinoscopes from the early New York era of the show.
Now we get to see this tearful tribute. It will be interesting to see how Letterman deals with this — if he does — on Tuesday.
CTV.ca | Carson never expected to last 30 years: Anka
Ironically, for someone who was on television constantly for 30 years, Carson shunned the limelight offscreen, Anka said, noting he wasn’t surprised Carson rarely surfaced after his retirement in 1992.
“He’d had his fill of it,” Anka said, adding Carson seemed to have gone “out with a kind of a sour note because I don’t think they treated him well at the end there at NBC.”
Although Carson announced his retirement, there were rumours at the time that NBC wanted to attract a younger audience with a new host.
From the Slate Magazine tribute, more NBC callous disregard.
It’s deeply depressing that most of Carson’s liveliest shows — the ones from New York, when he had dark hair and was still drinking heavily — were destroyed by NBC, back in the days before DVD boxed sets (or syndicated reruns).
I had read a quote recently from Carson on how he’d send jokes to Letterman. Obviously, decades later he still had animosity for Leno.
From what I remember the carnage done by the “creepy scheming manager” was that EVERYONE on the show was fired, right down to the gaffers. And then Doc Severinsen was sued for performing under the Tonight Show Band name. Basically everyone associated with the show was f#cked and f#cked hard. Leno really seems like a decent person, but obviously that’s a facade.
I saw a clip of Leno’s last night’s show this morning with plenty of Carson’s regular guests. It sickened me.
I think Leno is a very nice guy who was also under this woman’s thumb and took forever to grow a backbone during those years you describe. He is not blameless. I interviewed him years before on another matter but even before he had the job he was single-minded about the show bringing it into the conversation a lot. I’m more annoyed by the fact that the media coverage of Carson’s death ignores how he got screwed by NBC (as did his protege Letterman). Did anyone including Leno EVER apologize for this shoddy treatment?
The idea that the early shows were destroyed was briefly mentioned in the sunday Parade, of all places. 🙂
Someone wrote in to the inside-front-page, celebrity Q&A section, asking why there was any doubt about who had been the most-frequent guest on Johnny’s show – “Can’t the producers count?”.
One of Carson’s sons answered that the first 10-years of shows were destroyed – years ago – by the studios as a cost-saving measure of recording over old shows. 1. to save on buying new tape 2. to save on archiving old shows they didn’t have a use for – in the pre-DVD box-set era. 🙁
So, They know for certain who was the most-frequent guest rankings – for the years that still survive – but there is debate about how that would change if the earlier shows could be reviewed.
I don’t think Letterman did any sort of tribute to Carson on his show (I flipped to it from Leno periodically). I doubt Andy Dick is part of any tribute tonight. I don’t really care, nor like Letterman, but it’s pretty pathetic and disgusting if he doesn’t give Carson some kind of tribute.
For what it’s worth, Howard Stern has been talking about how the network and Leno screwed Carson over for the last two days.
He has also been talking about how he didn’t like Carson that much to begin with, but he also talked about how the network treated him. This morning he talked at length about the offensiveness of Leno’s tribute.
Granted, it’s not TV, but he has a pretty big audience.
I found it ironic that Carson would e-mail his jokes in to Letterman, then get a major kick out of it if Dave used them on-air. That alone speaks volumes about what the late Mr. Carson thought about those whose careers he helped launch and define.
May he rest in peace, and may the rest of us carry with us the message of laughter that he tried so hard to share with us. May his legacy be more profound than this afterlife backbiting about how he was treated by his network masters. In the end, they are irrelevant. He, clearly, was anything but.
That is so annoying that they destroyed all those tapes. I wish we could access the great reams of data held away in copyrighted vaults. Stern’s full collection, Carson, the list goes on and on.
FYI — Letterman was a rerun, hence no mention. In fact I suspect he’s seriously upset and could not have done a tribute on Monday even if he wanted to. To even suggest that he’d avoid it is idiocy. He even did a tribute to the late comic George Miller.
If the tapes were tossed it is typically because of storage, not to “tape over them.” It’s usually some dolt with a hair up his ass who just decides to throw out “old junk.” The thing is, nobody ever asks anyone if they’d like to take any of it home. This is a rampant problem. A friend of mine who used to be an editor at Dell Publishing once went to the warehouse and found a dumspster full of original artwork from old 1950’s era paperback books. Great stuff. He grabbed as much as he could. The rest went into the pit. Nobody was ever told. To much trouble to offer any of it to the employees.
I concur: Howard Stern has been talking about the hypocrisy since Monday. It’s refreshing to hear someone who can speak the truth.
As an aside, wasn’t Merv Griffin pathetic on LKL Sunday? He always tried to bring the conversation back to himself.
Idiocy is paying much attention to TV, as some people appear to do.
The only good thing my atrocious local paper, the Valley Times (a Knight-Ridder ho) , has ever put on their front page was yesterday’s big picture of Carson and a pretty good story – although without mention of any NBC/Leno nasty stuff. I watched the Leno show and was most put-off by that Drew Carey clod who seemed to think he was an actual guest. And his hair – the “I just woke up and fucked my model girlfriend” wig look. And if you want to come on a show and pretend to be a slob, don’t wear brand new shitty clothes. Wear wrinkled shitty clothes, ya dope.
Anyway, those clips of Carson were great to see – that guy was a super talent. The rest of these pretenders look like fools – forget Leno, ever watch this Jimmy Ferguson? What, did his undertaker business fail? And we know you got teeth, bozo, so what’s with all the gratuitous smiles? Retchingly incompetent.
I grew up watching Carson,the best late show ever. Tuned in and watched Jug-Jaw Leno one time and that was enough.Carson made you relax like you had a old friend entertaining you,Leno is like watching a car wreck,we have the news to make us feel bad,some of you might like him,but has no class.I wish they still had his early stuff I would buy it in a heartbeat,no replaceing carson