Word: leno
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...strike Jokes, at least, have died down. David Letterman?back on the air with his writers after making a separate deal with the Writers Guild?has moved on to wisecracks about the Clover-field monster and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Jay Leno, who has returned sans scribes but is supposedly writing the monologues himself (angering the Guild, which claims he's violating strike rules by doing so), is pummeling viewers with the usual rat-a-tat of gags playing off the headlines, from the presidential primaries to funny animal news...
...writers of prime-time shows you can't live without, movies you haven't heard of yet and soap operas you're pretty sure are recycling story lines from 10 years ago. But it's the late-night hosts who have been in the most visible, and delicate, position. Leno and Letterman are both former stand-up comics and Guild members themselves, who supported their fellow union members for weeks, refusing to do their shows until the prospect of laying off all their nonstriking staff members forced them into an uneasy accommodation to get back...
...burn the fucking place down!' It was insanity." David Letterman was there, along with his good friend George Miller, who was particularly outraged because his mother used to work as a bookkeeper for Mitzi Shore - and thus knew how much money she was socking away. Leno came too, though Letterman thought he made something of a spectacle of himself. "Jay, bless his heart, couldn't sit still," he says. "He was behaving like a hyperactive child. Jumping up and down, being funny and distracting, to the point where everybody sort of thought, well, maybe we shouldn't tell Jay about...
...club - acted as marshals on the picket line, protecting the strikers from harassment by Mitzi loyalists. One night, the bad blood got out of hand, as one of the antistrike comics tried to drive a car through the picket line, brushing some of the comics and knocking Jay Leno to the pavement with a loud thud. Dreesen ran over to him, panicked that Leno had been seriously injured. Leno gave him a wink; he was only feigning an injury and had thumped the car with his hand. But he got hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance anyway...
...strike left a bitter legacy. Some of the activists, like Leno and Dreesen, never worked in the Comedy Store again. Some who crossed the picket line later regretted it. "There were a lot of personal attacks on Mitzi, and I felt protective of her," says Mike Binder, a protégé of Leno's, who continued to work during the strike. "But it was a mistake. I didn't understand the magnitude of it. She was a bad horse to back." Mitzi, complaining that she could no longer afford to keep all her showrooms open on slow nights, shut...