The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [73]
The news stunned Kimmel—this time in a good way. The offer also put James Dixon in a potentially touchy position, because ABC had chosen one of his guys over another. When Braun called Jon to let him know, Stewart did not hold back his displeasure—he was especially consternated by how ABC had gone about the process, jerking him around. Remarkably, considering how personally hosts had taken such tugs-of-war over late-night shows in the past, Stewart blamed Kimmel not at all. He praised Kimmel’s talent, saying he was happy for him to get this chance, “even though I was disappointed for myself.”
Perhaps more remarkably, Stewart never wavered in his continued allegiance to James Dixon. One deal that didn’t happen was hardly going to disarrange what had become the closest and most important professional partnership of Jon’s life (Dixon’s as well). One thing it did mean, though: James Dixon, now with two clients installed as hosts—and other assorted late-night players on his roster, including Winstead and Smithberg, the creators of The Daily Show, and Stephen Colbert, then emerging as the hottest comedy correspondent on that show—was positioning himself as a kingmaker for late night. Dixon, a savvy, aggressive Cornell graduate seemingly escaped from a Damon Runyon tale, spoke like a New York cabdriver from a 1940s movie—both in accent and colorfully descriptive vocabulary. A contemporary of Stewart in age and a match in physical stature, Dixon engendered an unusual degree of loyalty and actual, identifiable fondness from his otherwise cynical comic clients. He routinely called them all “Baby Doll,” to a point where that became his own nickname. It occasionally turned heads when a client like Kimmel addressed the darkhaired, always moving, often smoking Dixon as “Baby Doll.”
During the writers’ strike the late-night hosts found themselves pushed together by a combination of forces, which included their networks, their union, and, on a different level, David Letterman.
The networks continued to try to squeeze the hosts in every way possible to come back to work, because it could only erode the union’s position to get at least some original programming on the air. The union, meanwhile, did everything possible to oppose the shows’ returning, because the strikers needed to hurt the employers in every way they could. So the Guild underscored its prohibition against the hosts doing any writing at all, even for themselves, and they pressured actors to refuse to appear on the shows as guests.
But the tack that the Letterman camp took to deal with the strike managed to unite the other hosts. Most of them were still wavering over whether to try to get back to work but had agreed in their back-channel conversations, that if they did return, they would try to do so en masse, as protection against union unhappiness. Letterman’s top executive, Rob Burnett, had been part of the discussions with the other shows, but all that changed when Worldwide Pants decided to take advantage of Letterman’s unique position with CBS.
Because Dave owned his show as well as the 12:35 Late Late Show, he had an opportunity to make a separate peace with the Writers Guild. In December 2007, with the strike past the one-month mark, word leaked that Letterman’s company was in talks to secure an “interim agreement” with the union. That meant Letterman and Ferguson could come back on the air—with their writers.
Besides infuriating the hosts and producers of the other shows—as one producer complained, “Dave is Dave, it always has to be about Dave; and Rob Burnett always