Word: letterman
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...from Botswana to Burbank, everybody knows. After a flurry of last- minute negotiations, Letterman announced he will leave NBC when his contract expires in late June and resurface on CBS -- an hour earlier, at 11:30 p.m. Eastern time -- two months later. NBC, after a siege of executive indecision (and possibly a last-minute change of heart), decided to stick with Leno, the man it installed as host of the Tonight show after Johnny Carson's retirement last May. The result will be a face-to-face battle between Leno and Letterman in the latest, liveliest chapter of the late...
...previous agreement with Letterman's representatives, headed by Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, NBC had one month to try to match CBS's offer. Though neither Letterman nor NBC executives would divulge details of the negotiations, insiders say NBC made several offers, including a weekly prime-time slot. But Letterman rejected them. "If you were going to do a half-hour of prime-time television," he explained, "you would have to do it as well as Jerry Seinfeld does it. I couldn't do it that well, so why waste my time?" The prospect of a different kind of prime-time...
...became clear to NBC that its only chance of keeping Letterman was to dump Leno as Tonight host and give Letterman the job -- something NBC executives had publicly ruled out. What's more, a "poison pill" in Letterman's CBS contract made the 11:30 time period a virtual sine qua non of any deal. The CBS contract promised Letterman a $50 million penalty payment if his show was not aired at 11:30. Since NBC, to keep Letterman, was required to match CBS's monetary deal, it would have had to include the same penalty payment -- effectively forcing...
...this point the story takes an Amy Fisher turn: the facts are in drastic dispute. According to some reports, NBC executives caved in at the last minute and proposed to give Letterman the Tonight show spot -- though for less money than CBS offered and not starting until June 1994. The reason for the delay, according to the reports, was that once the deal was made known, Leno would almost certainly quit, thus freeing NBC from the obligation of paying him $10 million for breaking his contract...
...executives heatedly denied the report, insisting that they never offered Letterman the Tonight job. "The goal was always the same," said entertainment president Warren Littlefield: "Is there a way to keep both of these talented people on NBC? And ultimately, without giving away 11:30, there was no way." But even the hint of a last-minute abandonment of Leno was yet another public relations blow to a network that, by this point, may wish it had never heard of the Tonight show...