Word: stupidities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late night in September. David Letterman is on CBS, with the same bits he perfected (but maybe didn't patent) on his NBC show: running animals through stupid tricks and Calvert De Forest -- Larry "Bud" Melman to you -- through the humiliation gauntlet. Chevy Chase is on Fox, reprising the Weekend Update routine from his early stint on NBC's Saturday Night Live. So what does that leave for beleaguered NBC and its corporate parent, General Electric? To stick with the lunch-pail charisma of Jay Leno at 11:30. To hope that Conan O'Brien (Dave's 12:30 replacement...
...called an issue -- was whether a performer can use material created for a program owned by another network. "There are certain intellectual-property issues that do not travel with Dave," warned peacock president Robert C. Wright on NBC's summer press tour, referring to such Letterman shtick as Stupid Pet Tricks, Larry "Bud" and the Top 10 List. "If CBS thought they were buying that, they didn't . . . They can certainly do things like that. But they can't do those things...
Right now the late-night game is in its dog days, or stupid-pet season. The play-offs begin Aug. 30, when Letterman debuts on CBS opposite Leno, with the wild-card teams headed by O'Brien and Chase joining the fray in September. Addressing a network press conference last week, CBS's star free agent had fun from the moment he came onstage and fiddled with a defective microphone ("Oh, it's the GE equipment"). Anything different on the new show? "Well, I'm going to start using a rinse on my hair." Won't his huge salary alienate...
...character," says Merrill Markoe, Late Night's first head writer. "It was just Calvert being unable to read cue cards particularly well. It was a trait with which he was so consistent that we could call it a character. That was the character: there was no character." As for Stupid Pet Tricks, Markoe dreamed it up for Letterman's NBC 1980 morning show -- which he, not NBC, owns -- and reused it on Late Night. "I came up with a really good sequel to Stupid Pet Tricks," adds Markoe. "If anyone wants to contact me, for $3.5 million I can tell...
Snipes' casting is among Kaufmann's more arch additions to Crichton's plot. A new racial dimension is added to the already racially charged brew. One of Rising Sun's insistences is that Japanese society is laced with ancient prejudice for minorities and a newer prejudice for lazy, stupid Americans. "Rising Sun" does not skirt Japanese prejudice but is always aware of the hypocrisy of Americans lecturing anyone on racism...