The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE - COMEDY TONIGHT
CHAPTER TWO - SELL-BY DATE
CHAPTER THREE - THE CONAN OF IT ALL
CHAPTER FOUR - LANDSCAPE AT LATE NIGHT
CHAPTER FIVE - SEIZE THE JAY
CHAPTER SIX - THE TEN O’CLOCK SOLUTION
CHAPTER SEVEN - CONAN ROCKS
CHAPTER EIGHT - STILL DAVE, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
CHAPTER NINE - THE POWER OF TEN
CHAPTER TEN - THE LATE UNPLEASANTNESS
CHAPTER ELEVEN - MANIFESTO DESTINY
CHAPTER TWELVE - MAKE LAUGHS, NOT WAR
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
INDEX
ALSO BY BILL CARTER
The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night
Desperate Networks
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Bill Carter, 2010
All rights reserved
Page 406 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Carter, Bill, date.
The war for late night : when Leno went early and television went crazy / Bill Carter.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44342-2
1. Tonight show (Television program) 2. Television talk shows—United States—
History—21st century. 3. Leno, Jay. I. Title.
PN1992.77.T63C375 2010
791.45’6—dc22
2010034988
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For all the Carters and everyone else who shared the love at Fourth Street and Breezy—and especially in memory of Mom (Grams), who served it up to all of us in such abundance
CHAPTER ONE
COMEDY TONIGHT
By eight thirty on the evening of May 19, 2009, a stream of cabs and limos was snaking slowly down West Forty-third Street, pulling up one by one to the doors of the venerable, somewhat shabby Town Hall. The theater was a fabled Broadway-district house, and everyone from Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff to Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan had played there long ago to sold-out audiences. The newly dark sky over Manhattan was clear but the temperature cool for a mid-May evening—only fifty-seven degrees.
The arriving crowd didn’t want to linger in the night air anyway, preferring to get inside as quickly as possible, if only to avoid the haranguing voices from members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, who were arrayed in force across the street in an effort to shame the management of their employer, NBC, into offering them a new contract.
Most of the milling guests