Name: A David Letterman Talk Show Narrative, Part 1 of 4: Late Night
Uploaded: 2023-12-19T19:26:39.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'A David Letterman Talk Show Narrative, Part 1 of 4: Late Night' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-12-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'A David Letterman Talk Show Narrative, Part 1 of 4: Late Night' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-12-19. Transcript available.

A David Letterman Talk Show Narrative, Part 1 of 4: Late Night

Thank you.
World Wide Pants proudly presents Late Night with David Letterman.
World Wide Pants, the most trusted name in pants and entertainment and pants.
All right, Fred's here. Fred, this is the first time that we're meeting.
I want to interrupt and begin right away.
I really applaud your courage at ripping the lid off the steaming cesspool that
was Late Night with David Letterman.
It takes a lot of courage to dig in and find out what the truth was.
So let's talk now. Let's get it out.
And let's let the healing begin.
You can look up answers to the surface questions.
I mean, we talked a bit about what the show is all about.
And it's like, well, look, Conan wrote a great piece.
Bill Simmons wrote a great piece.
Yeah.
You know, go read those, you know, and all that.
So I'm very happy for it.
I'm sure it's clear just for the opportunity to mention some of the more unsung
people to share things that went on behind the cameras and what it was actually
like.
Not everyone is interested in this stuff.
But to the people who are, it's like being a Beatles fan.
No, no detail is too small.
The Tomorrow Show, you were a part of that.
It's why Letterman hired me.
Honestly, I mean, I was offered in 1980.
Letterman got his morning show.
You know, I was working on The Tomorrow Show.
And we never looked at Letterman as a threat, particularly because, you know,
we thought, all right, he'd do okay in the morning.
Who knew?
Actually, we didn't think that, but he could have.
But we never thought that he would be taking over our time slot.
Right.
So Jack Rollins, who was the legendary manager and was Letterman's manager and
executive producer with Letterman of all the shows.
He was with Woody Allen for all of Woody's movies.
Jack was a legend.
He managed Harry Belafonte.
You know, he discovered Nichols in May.
He was quite the guy.
You know, by the time we worked with him, he was in his, I'd say, 70s to late
80s, early 90s.
Yeah.
You know, so he kind of lost a little of the zip.
But he was a wise, great guy to have on your side.
Yeah.
I'm thinking, what was the point of the story?
Where was I?
Well, you're late with the morning show.
But then also.
Yeah.
So I had an office at NBC and Stu Smiley, who was my college roommate and best
friend, also worked for Rollins and was the point person for Letterman as his
manager.
And he was my college roommate.
So they used to come up to my office to watch the closed circuit feed of the
rehearsals.
Yeah.
And I would say, oh, they're doing this all wrong.
Oh, are they doing this wrong?
And this is when Bob Stewart was the producer, who was the producer of The Pyramid.
He was a game show guy who led him and trusted because Letterman felt
comfortable with him when he always did The Pyramid as a guest.
So I would say, oh, this is, you know, talk show one on one.
They're doing the wrong thing.
They're just fucking.
They got to do it this way.
They got to do it that way.
And Jack would always agree with me.
So when they got rid of Bob Stewart early in the run, they offered me the
producer's job of The Morning Show.
Right.
And I had a meeting with Brandon Tartikoff.
Or was it Silverman?
I don't even remember who it was.
And Nancy Geller was in late night programming, a daytime programming.
And they offered me the job to produce it.
At the time, I was dating a woman who was a talent booker on the show.
And when I mentioned it to her, she flipped out.
She said, I can't work for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then I told Snyder I was offered the job.
He goes, you're going to become the next producer of this show.
You don't have to take that job.
So I passed on a job.
And they gave it to Barry Sand.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That doesn't get, see, that narrative doesn't come out there enough.
No, nobody knows that.
That's a different time.
That's really interesting.
So then when, when he started the late night show, Letterman called me.
I was working at Good Morning America at the time as a writer and an associate
producer.
And he called me and he said, I can't offer you the job to run the show anymore
because
Barry Sand is with us, but you know, you could be the number two and produce
segments
and all that.
So I said, yeah, sure.
And then 14 years later, so.
One thing comes to mind, what I, I must take credit for, um, when they were on
in the morning,
I, I didn't, um, wasn't on the morning show with Dave Letterman as he used to
like to refer
to, you know, I couldn't get up that early.
Couldn't get up that early.
Yep.
However, they had a beautiful theme written by Michael McDonald.
Um, and they, he made a recording of it.
I think, I don't think he's saying any lyrics, but he was just kind of coming
along with that
voice of his, and they used to play that at the beginning.
And then segue into live band when they would come out and hopefully you don't,
you know,
you don't hear the, I don't think you did it.
You, you hear the transition.
Yeah.
They kind of assumed I would do the same thing.
You know, you'll record your theme of course, and we'll play it.
And then, you know, segue to live when Dave, and I said, it doesn't make sense.
I said, it just came off Saturday night live.
The whole thing was, you know, the band playing it live again, the audience
action
live.
So I talked to him into letting me do it that way.
And of course it was, you know, it set us up.
There was a, there's a wonderful guy named Hal Gurney, who was the director of
late
night and the first few years of late show.
I had a phone conversation with him three days ago.
Oh, oh, oh, he's, then, you know, he's, he's, he's the best.
He's, he's another delightful person.
Absolutely.
So he was also the director when Dave had his morning show before late night.
And he was telling me once that like in the, one of the first shows they did,
um, there
was, um, a musician.
I want to say Judy Collins could be wrong, but Judy Collins, she came on and
she was, she
was singing and she starts to sing and the mic isn't working.
And so she's, she sings her first line and nothing's coming out.
And Dave's kind of looking around and Judy's looking around and Hal just got on
the PA and
went, uh, Judy, hold on for a sec.
Your mic's not working.
Just give us a second.
Give us a second.
We'll get it right.
And you know, okay, Judy, you can start singing.
And then she does her song.
And Hal said after the show, Dave, like rushed back to him and was not mad, but
just the
opposite.
It was like, that's what I want the show to be.
Like it felt real.
And again, it's, it's stripping away that artifice of TV and showing you like
what's
going on behind the scene.
Not everything's perfect.
You know, that we were showing warts and all of, of what it is to do a TV show.
Like at 12:30, it was just this weird, odd thing.
You felt like.
Different energy that hour.
Uh, absolutely.
Uh, I think Dave used to joke that it, it was only watched by, uh, prisoners
and shut
ins.
Um, but you know, it just, it did feel like you were just stumbled upon this
kind of public
access show that no one else knew about.
Yep.
The studio was sort of like purposely, you know, not very ornate.
Yep.
I used to love when he came through though, when he was introduced and he came
through, you
saw the exit sign.
Yeah.
Like it just looked like they put a desk in some, um,
audience chairs, just in the middle of this abandoned office building.
Almost industrial.
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So those double doors, the industrial double doors that you, yeah, absolutely.
And also, you know, I just, it very much spoke to me, uh, communically.
Um, not that I knew what irony was or this and that it was just so different
from Carson,
you know, and as a young guy that really appealed to me.
So I was, I was hooked very, very young and that just keep growing.
That just kept growing as I got older.
There was no internet.
There was no show like this show.
Maybe Saturday Night Live, obviously in the seventies and the eighties did have
that kind
of like secret club.
There was something dangerous and weird happening late at night.
Aside from that, the TV landscape in the 1980s was very, um, there was a lot of
artifice.
There was a lot of phoniness.
Yeah.
There was a lot of just sort of, uh, homogenized, uh, ridiculous, so pre-packaged
plastic feeling
television.
Yep.
So the feeling at 1230 at night to turn on NBC and see this like secret weird
TV clubhouse,
uh, that, that was the late night show and just see this bizarre deconstruction
of a talk show.
It was like, it was commenting on itself in real time.
It had this self-analytical postmodern detachment.
It was talking about being a show while also being a show.
It was very writer forward that show.
Yes.
It was, it made, you know, the jokes were written.
Dave would comment about the material.
If he didn't like something, he would make a joke about, about the written
material,
but he would also bring out writers, bring out Chris Elliott, bring out Jerry
Mulligan.
Writers would come out and be in bits and, and the idea that this show was
written by
people.
I mean, that's why this book exists that I was just blabbering on about late
night.
Letterman, the book is a tribute to the written material of that show.
It's not a Dave fan book.
It is a writer's fan book.
Yep.
And, uh, that's, that was unique about that show.
It was very writer centric, writer forward.
Dave, Dave himself is such a good writer.
If you, if you look at Dave's standup before the show and, and his involvement
with the
writing through the show, he is, he's a wordsmith.
He is brilliant with a turn of phrase.
He cares about the specificity of word choice.
He's always been a writer.
He's a writer.
He has a writer brain.
And, uh, he always, you always felt that on his show, including during that
writer's
strike.
And I remember having this feeling of solidarity towards TV writers at age 13,
because Dave was
talking about it.
How would I have ever known anything about that at 13 years old, but, but, but
for Dave
talking about that.
So I was like, I think that just indicates Dave's reverence for writers.
The pencil that went through the window in behind Dave and had a glass, a
crashing effect.
That's, that's you, you, that was you, right?
It was, you know, the, the, it's, it was a viewer mail joke that was, that came
along pretty
early.
It wasn't honest to God.
It was not one of my better jokes that I'm most proud of as a joke, but
basically somebody
wrote a question and said, is the glass in your window real and in the windows
on your,
you know, on your set.
And the joke I wrote is originally I had wanted him to sort of just so early.
We didn't know what, how the letters were going to be handled.
Right.
So I wanted to crumple up the letter and throw it to the window, which seemed
like more of a
joke than just him throwing something at the window.
Right.
But it did, you know, it didn't work like that.
So he threw it through the pencil window and it got a mild response from the
audience.
Not a huge, pretty much what I would have expected, but he did it like three
more times that night,
four more times the next night and for the next 30 years.
So when I say, when people say that's one of my bigger contributions, it's like,
I wrote
funnier stuff.
You know what I mean?
It's like, it's just, you, you just never know what's going to, you never know
what's
going to catch, but he enjoyed doing it.
Carl Tiedemann and I discovered, Tiedemann and I discovered Calvert.
We had made a short film, uh, at NYU, Carl was at NYU.
I had graduated UW, uh, Madison, uh, at that point, uh, he was still there and
we had written
a short film called King of the Zs, which is a parody documentary.
I hate the term mockumentary, uh, parody documentary about the world's cheapest
movie studio of the
forties and fifties.
And we, what we did was we made, you know, all the live, the new interview,
interview footage
we made in, in color.
And we also created all the black and white bad movies that they 