Name: "Leaving Letterman": The Last Days Of "Late Show"
Uploaded: 2023-05-19T22:35:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video '"Leaving Letterman": The Last Days Of "Late Show"' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video '"Leaving Letterman": The Last Days Of "Late Show"' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-19. Transcript available.

I was in the control room. The phone rang. Can you come to Dave's dressing room?
That was a very rare occurrence that all of us would be gathered prior to a
show.
He said, well, I guess you want to know why you're all here. I'm going to call
Les Moonviz
and tell him I'm retiring. And we all were like, what? What do you mean? What
do you mean?
He was like, you know, I'm done. I said what I had to say, like, get out.
It felt like some kind of strange dream.
It was, now it's going to happen.
Oh, God, I need to find another job.
My name is Barbara Gaines, and I worked with Dave Letterman since his morning
show in 1980.
So that's 35 years.
24 years.
11 years.
25 years.
11 years.
30 years.
25 years.
I was just shy of the 30-year mark when we went off the air.
We all just got very used to this was the place we worked.
Crazy successful TV shows last maybe 10 years.
To be in a television job for 30 years, or in my case, 25, is completely freakish.
I remember the last show at NBC, and Paul said to me, you know, I'm a musician.
You're not supposed to have a gig for 11 years.
You're not supposed to have a gig for 11 days.
You get together, you work on a show.
You work on a show.
It's six months.
You rap.
You get on, and you get in a cycle of freelancing and going from show to show.
As a writer, you're usually writing for someone who's just a haircut.
But, you know, Dave Letterman was a guy that you aspired to.
Whether the days were up or down, there was always that, oh, I'm working
actually for
someone who's going to be considered a legend.
I wanted to be completely immersed in something that was going to be seen by a
lot of people.
There was a sense of job security there that you have a job.
You know that tomorrow morning you'll have a job, and next week you'll have a
job, until
Dave has another heart attack.
Like so many long-running projects, you get to feel like it's a family, and yes,
families
are full of odd, simmering undercurrents of tension.
You definitely get on each other's nerves when you work together for that long.
While you're here, every day we're trying to claw your kidneys out, but if you
ever need
a kidney, we're there for you.
I think that kind of sums up the late show experience.
The excitement of the end of the show was drawing a very quick line to the fact
that this was
going to leave my life, and what am I going to be able to do that's going to
compare with
what was really my dream job.
When you're so closely tied to a place, the notion of what's to become of me,
it was a
lot of our identity.
There were a lot of conversations, you know, writers would kind of pull each
other aside
and say, hey, did you hear about this thing?
Have you applied for this thing?
We were all pulling for each other, but we were also kind of worried about
ourselves.
It was a little stressful.
Once I got over the terrifying notion of having to find another job, I got very
excited about
what the end would be.
It was a creative peak.
I was pushing on adrenaline for most of that final year.
You had the biggest stars in the world, and they came ready to play.
George Clooney wanted to be handcuffed to Dave.
Tina Fey came.
Julia Roberts.
Nobody was saying no to coming on.
All of us did mark almost everything, you know?
Oh, this is the last stupid Petricks we will ever do.
Oh, this is probably the last time so-and-so guest will ever be here.
The President of the United States, he said to me, how long have you been here?
And I said, well, this will be 25 years.
He took a beat and he said, gee, that's got to be strange.
I'm looking at Barack Obama and I'm saying, this is your definition of strange?
Even he was taken by the fact that it was all coming to an end.
There was a certain looseness, like, well, we might as well just try to have
fun.
There were, you know, some staffers who had little parties in their offices and
a lot of alcohol was involved.
We only have another two months to go.
Pour me a drink.
We'd have like a dozen different balls.
We'd be throwing them at each other and playing loud music and turning off the
lights.
It was called Murder Ball and it was mostly an excuse to just get out all of
our aggression and to physically attack each other.
I don't know if I should be talking about that on camera.
We started talking about the last show years before he retired.
One day I will stop working and what will we do on that last show?
And he said, we're going to have to have a big ending montage and, of course,
we'll do it to the Foo Fighters live.
And I thought, live?
I said, I don't know how we're going to do it live.
And he said, well, you have to do it live.
The first time it rolled to the montage fairly well and I ran on stage and
David Grohl doesn't know me and I don't know David Grohl.
I ran on stage and grabbed him and just said, that was amazing.
And being the nice guy he is, he didn't say, you know, who are you?
He just taught me.
We were doing the top 10, the big celebrity top 10.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus came over and kind of said, can I see something else for me?
And we found the joke about Jerry and I do remember that shot of Jerry getting
a huge laugh.
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
That's funny.
That's funny.
That's funny.
Ten minutes before we were taping, I got a call from Jay Leno wishing Dave the
best.
And it was lovely, although what I remember was at one point I'm on the phone
and I'm looking and I go,
I'm going to miss, I'm going to miss the last show unless I can get off the
phone now.
It was an event.
I mean, it felt like an event.
There were satellite trucks everywhere.
There was a huge crowd on Broadway.
It was celebratory and I was interested in how the show was going to turn out.
A lot of people are paying attention.
Thank you very much.
This is, I think, maybe the most important show of my life.
So I appreciate it.
I heard that and all of a sudden it's like, oh, right, it's the last show.
The guy is saying goodbye to his entire professional existence.
So I felt an obligation that you've got to get this one right.
The world at large didn't know I made that montage, but I knew I made it.
And it was my life.
Of course it was David Letterman's life, but it was my life too.
For so many people to describe that last show as perfect, that was really gratifying.
The best thing about the last show going so well was that you could leave with
absolutely no regrets.
Twelve hours later and, you know, you just see them just knocking things into
the dumpsters.
There goes the desk.
There goes Paul's bandstand.
There goes the backdrop and the bridge.
And it's like, they're serious about this.
The show really is ending.
This wasn't a joke.
It's life, you know.
It's, I think they had to get Colbert in there and they had no time to waste.
I don't begrudge them any of it.
It's, you know, it's the law of the show business jungle.
I was leaving my office and I thought, I have nowhere to go tomorrow.
Somebody said to me, you better know what you're going to do the day after the
show ends.
I have to pretend to be a grown-up now and think about jobs and things.
This is as real as it gets.
You've got to find something else.
You've got to see if your skills that you've built here are in any way transferable
to anything
else in life because I wasn't sure that they were.
When I finally walked out of the building, it just felt like the right thing to
do.
Like, now it's time for me to go.
I often would stress over whether or not I could succeed in another environment
with a different
set of circumstances and a different group of people.
That was always in the back of my head.
Like, well, are you a one-trick pony?
Well, we're about to find out.
It's not a surprise to me that people that worked on The Late Show have gone on
to success
because you're producing a show every day on the highest level.
I'm proud to have been a part of television history.
I think the jury is still out as to whether Steve Young will have a career that
blah, blah,
blah, and then Letterman was an asterisk to it.
Or really, is it just going to be Letterman writer Steve Young also tried
briefly to do other
things.
20 years from now, if you and I run into each other, we will look at each other,
and with
an unspoken glance, we will know, yep, we were there, we know what that was.
It was a formative moment in my life, and very little of the craziness has withstood
the
test of time.
It's mostly just fond memories, with a few key exceptions.
I worked on a big-ass broadcast with a really dynamic group of people and a guy
who will
be in the history books.
I brought a lot of my strength to that show, but I gained a lot of knowledge
and strength
from the show.
I know I'll do fine.
I'm never going to have the relationships that I had with the people on that
show because
we have that thing, that shared experience.
So that's a great gift.
It was a good 35 years.
Certainly in retrospect, I have no complaints.
Hi, I'm Dave Letterman.
A lot of folks say, hey Dave, what have you been up to, man?
I'll tell you what, bought myself a piece of real estate right here on 55th
Street in Manhattan.
I'm telling you, I've never been happier.
It's a place to be, and if you're ever in the area, you know, show, lunch, and
that kind
of thing, business point, stop by.
I'd love to see you.
Take care.
Hey, is that my pie?
I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm telling
you, I'm telling you,