Word: daves
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What can viewers expect starting Sept. 7? First, an early start: the Chevy Chase Show will have a half-hour jump on Jay and Dave. He will do a nightly version of his SNL Weekend Update routine. He will play sketch characters: a Monsieur Faux Pas, perhaps the old SNL "land shark" metamorphosed into a dinosaur. Big-name guests? No problem: "I know every celebrity there is, practically, and they're all friends...
...Leno, he hopes just to keep sailing along. "With the Tonight Show," he says, "you don't make sharp turns. It's like trying to turn the Titanic around." The Titanic, Jay? Are you just a tad apprehensive about an iceberg named Dave? Next week, to counter Letterman, Tonight is running a spiffy lifeboat drill: guests include Bill Cosby, Luke Perry and Garth Brooks. But Leno is in the game for keeps. "With all these shows," Leno says, "it's not how good the show is, it's how long you can continue to make it good, every night...
...decade of the fabled Letterman irony, one can be excused a skeptical pause. Is he serious? Or is this another Letterman put-on, one of those statements meant to convey its precise opposite -- the way "those fine, fine people at General Electric" on his old show usually meant Dave had had another dustup with his bonehead corporate bosses. Letterman's new headquarters -- located a few stories above New York City's Ed Sullivan Theater, where he is about to unveil his new late-night talk show on CBS -- are clean, all right, but not without intrusion. The smell of roasting...
...score. "We'd hand in a list of 50 guests, and he'd say no to 48," says a frustrated former booker. He is also notoriously moody and has last-minute pangs of self-doubt. "In the makeup room five minutes before the show," says head writer Rob Burnett, "Dave will suddenly say, 'This bit is not going to work.' Sometimes he needs to be almost pushed in front of the camera." After the show, he typically replays the videotape and broods about mistakes or bits that misfired...
...Store in a labor dispute. Letterman, who by this time was guest-hosting the Tonight Show, kept performing there because he needed to try out material. Miller showed up one night to watch his friend, but the club's owner called the police and had him thrown out. "After Dave heard what had happened, he never worked another show there," says Miller. "That was quite a sacrifice...