The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [74]
On the West Coast Jimmy Kimmel got a call of solidarity: Jay Leno checked in again to commiserate about the bind they both found themselves in. Kimmel felt more pressure perhaps than any of the other hosts. Not only was he still struggling in the ratings, and not nearly as well paid, but he had a string of relatives on his payroll who would be going without income for the duration of the strike.
Jimmy’s need to get back on the air tied him closer than he had ever been to Leno, who also wanted to return to work without delay. The two hosts kicked around the news of Letterman’s special deal and agreed it was “fucking ridiculous.” Kimmel had also been talking almost daily with Stewart. None of the other hosts could believe their own union was giving a competitor an unfair advantage through some bullshit loophole. Leno and Kimmel also wound up speaking almost daily, with Jay providing advice. Some of his suggestions involved telling publicists the Guild had cleared the shows to book actors as guests, a recommendation that led to confusion over whether the union had said any such thing.
When they finally got back on the air, however, the two hosts took decidedly different approaches. Kimmel, hewing to the letter of the restrictions, tried to do a show along the lines of his old radio work or what Regis Philbin did on his morning show, just winging it out of pieces from the papers and other odds and ends. Jay had urged him to perform a monologue; Kimmel thought that would be crossing a line. From his first night back, Leno did a full-on twenty-five-joke monologue. No writers; twenty-five jokes. Like all the other hosts, Jay went out of his way to express support for his writing team. But the show, even with no big-name stars—during his first week back Letterman, thanks to his waiver, had plenty of those, including Tom Hanks—and guests that largely consisted of NBC News personnel, animal acts, and assorted chefs and other odd-balls, had to go on.
The early highlight was a crossover Jay suggested to Kimmel: They would go on each other’s shows on the same night. Leno told Kimmel on the air that there was one good thing about the strike: “At least we don’t have to see a lot of stupid movies and pretend they’re good.” Off the air he continued to counsel the younger host: “Don’t get too excited; don’t worry too much.” Kimmel was so tense he thought he might lose his mind. Jay told him, “Let it pass.” He also urged Jimmy again to start doing monologue jokes.
Kimmel still fretted about taking a step like that. “I don’t feel comfortable,” he told Leno. “I’m not you. I’m not in the position you’re in.” Kimmel wrote nothing down, just to be safe.
With no written material and no real guests, the late-night shows were supposed to come on, flop, and embarrass the networks into forcing a settlement. But Jay wasn’t about to allow The Tonight Show to be damaged that way. And of course, he was eager to show up the critics who predicted a train wreck if he tried to ad-lib his way through a show. Jay made up his mind: He was not doing a strike show; he was doing The Tonight Show, and it would not be a Tonight Show without an opening monologue.
How he did it quickly became a matter of both conjecture and condemnation from the union’s many supporters. Jay said he was merely writing for himself, which is precisely what Johnny Carson had done when he came back on the air during a previous strike. But the Guild had expressly forbidden the hosts from writing material of any kind. They were supposed to sit there scriptless and hack their way through an hour of television.
Many of the jokes on the Tonight strike shows