Monthly Archives: July 2013

Last month, Gene Wilder sat down with Robert Osborne for a long interview at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Here's a half-hour of excerpts. Mr. Wilder's memory seems to be failing here and there but when it isn't, he's awfully wise…

The last remaining outlet of Damiano Mr. Pizza closed unexpectedly at the end of May. Mitchell Kitay, the owner, told the press that he was forced out by the owners of the restaurant Animal, which had purchased the building two years ago. Whatever the reason, suddenly there was no more Damiano Mr. Pizza. A highly-regarded Italian eatery called Jon & Vinny's is now at that address.

To the best of my knowledge, there were once three Damiano's — this one on Fairfax across from Canter's; another one on Robertson two blocks south of Pico and the one I first visited, which was on Pico near Westwood. It was in a corner building that had previously been the original location of Junior's Delicatessen and is now a Maria's Italian Kitchen.

The places were known variously as Damiano's, Mr. Pizza and Damiano's Mr. Pizza. I'd always assumed someone named Damiano bought a pizzeria that was already named Mr. Pizza and just tacked his name on the way a woman named Ruth bought the Chris Steak House and added her name to it. But that was just speculation. I don't really know where the name came from.

What I do know is that until Vito's Pizza opened locally, Damiano offered the closest thing to "New York Italian" I ever found in Los Angeles. The pizza was good — a bit greasy and a bit salty but quite tasty. Even better were the pasta dishes, especially anything with their slow-cooked meat sauce on it. I frequented all three outlets before the first two closed.

The one on Fairfax opened in '64 and quickly became an institution in the area. It stayed open (and delivered!) until 6 AM…7 AM on weekends, which came in handy at times. In addition to great Italian food and beverages, the delivery guys could also bring you cigarettes…and one of their delivery guys told me once that at 5 AM, it was not unusual for someone to call up for a few cartons of Marlboro's and then say, "While you're at it, have him bring a pizza too."

Most of the delivery folks seemed like homeless people with cars and one friend of mine used to tip them extra to stop at the CVS Pharmacy and bring medicines or candy, as well. It was the one place at that hour you could phone and get someone to do that kind of thing for you.

I often got deliveries from Damiano Mr. Pizza but around 1990, I stopped actually going into the restaurant. It was just too dilapidated, crowded and a little dirty. I assume they fixed it up after that — they would have had to — but the shabby surroundings diminished my love of their chow. It was though fun to watch the one guy on the phone juggling ten orders at once, hopping from one call on hold to another.

There was one period there where I stopped ordering from them because the orders were always incorrect when they arrived…but after a year or so, I finally missed their food enough to give them another try and the first and all subsequent orders were right. You can imagine how much I'm going to miss them now. Mr. Kitay announced was going to reopen in another location but that doesn't seem to be happening. Still, even after I stopped setting foot inside, I was glad it was there…and delivering.

We somewhat interrupt our Jay Defense for a few questions about the whole weird situation. This one is from Donald Byrne…

Thanks for answering these Late Night questions. I have one. How serious was NBC about really letting Conan O'Brien keep the Tonight Show by moving it to 12:05 a.m. and then giving Jay Leno a half hour at 11:35? I sometimes wonder why Conan did not take that deal — he would have kept the Tonight Show. Of course, there would be some egg on his face and it's hardly a show of confidence from NBC, but at least he could have kept his dream job, the one he had been working towards for more than 15 years. Or did Conan have some inside knowledge or a premonition that it was just the first step to getting rid of him in 6 months or a year down the road, when he would have less leverage? Did he really believe when he left the Tonight Show that Fox would be ready and willing to give him an 11:35 show? Was Conan really so committed to keeping the Tonight Show at 11:35 (his stated reason for leaving) that he was willing to leave NBC?

I think NBC was quite serious about the offer…though they might not have minded if Conan had quit, thereby relieving them of having to pay off his contract. They were also facing the prospect of paying hefty production fees for three late night shows when they probably would have preferred to just pay for two.

Why Conan didn't take the deal: This is partly speculation on my part but no one likes to suffer a public demotion like that and he also must have felt cheated. He turned down other, more lucrative offers elsewhere to stay at NBC, then five years later move to 11:35 and get away from directly following Jay Leno…or anyone. Now, NBC was yanking 11:35 away and asking him to again follow Leno. I think we can be pretty sure he felt NBC had not given his show proper time to grow and find its audience before they declared it something of a failure. I think so, too.

As I understand it, he did not have a real offer from Fox at the moment he rejected the 12:05 plan but he and his agents probably had a fair amount of confidence that one would be forthcoming…and indeed, a lot of execs at Fox did want to bring him over. But that would have involved getting their affiliates, who'd invested in Seinfeld and other highly-rated reruns for that hour, to yank those off and clear the time for Conan. That didn't happen. (It would probably not have been an 11:35 show on Fox, by the way. It more likely would have started at 11 PM.)

Personally, if I'd been his manager, I'd have advised him to get out of NBC before he moved any further into the category of Damaged Goods. The Leno half-hour probably would have boosted the ratings and then everyone would have said, "Hmm…think what a whole hour of Jay there would do." But an awful lot of people in the industry — one or two of them in Bill Carter's book — have weighed in with the opposite view. Conan could have kept The Tonight Show and maybe built something out of it…and that might well have been preferable to, say, winding up on TBS. As I said, I wonder if he'd have taken the NBC realignment if he'd known there would be no offer from Fox or ABC or any venue more prominent than Basic Cable.

Quitting one job often has a lot to do with finding another. Did he have something else he wanted to do professionally other than a late night talk show? I don't know the answer to that. He seems to have been eager to quickly commence another, similar program somewhere, possibly to prove to the world that he could still draw an audience to one, possibly because he felt he owed it to his staff to come up with employment for all or most of them. Apart from Fox, there weren't a lot of other good places where that might happen. A friend of mine at NBC I discussed this with said to me, "At the time he refused the 12:05 realignment, if Conan had made up a list of everyplace else he might go do a new talk show, I'll bet you nobody around him would have suggested TBS."

This next question is from Edwin E. Smith…

I have a question that I don't think I've seen addressed anywhere. What will NBC do if Jimmy Fallon tanks on The Tonight Show? Do they try to bring Leno back again? Would they consider Conan or Craig Ferguson? They didn't have much of a Plan B last time, but this time they are really up there without a net, potentially killing two time slots with one stone. I still don't understand why even if they don't want Jay around they haven't offered him some other time slot like a once a week program on Sunday night or a series of specials of the same type Bob Hope used to do. I'm not a huge fan but I could probably get into a Jay Leno Fourth of July Broadcast or a Thanksgiving special. Granted, no one wanted to watch him five nights a week in prime time, especially not with the format he had, but you'd think NBC would try to keep him around in some form.

NBC will probably offer Leno some sort of presence on the network but he turned that down before and will probably turn it down again. Everyone I know who knows Leno says his goal is a venue from which he can do that topical monologue every night…not a weekly show, not a show taped days before it airs. I don't know that any such place exists.

Odder things have happened but I'd be amazed if Leno is ever asked back to that time slot by NBC. Conan or Craig? I think there's more chance they'd offer the job to Paula Deen. Craig, for better or worse, has aligned himself with CBS for whatever happens there. Allegedly, Ferguson's contract has some sort of clause that gives him the 11:35 show at CBS if Letterman retires or dies but I'll be very surprised if that happens. He hasn't won his time slot in quite some time against Jimmy Fallon so why would CBS want to put him on against Fallon at an earlier, more crucial hour? And why would NBC want him there over Fallon? And Conan O'Brien is maybe the least likely person on the planet to be asked to take over The Tonight Show again…for reasons I shouldn't have to explain.

More of this tomorrow…and maybe Wednesday…

Let's go see if Abe Vigoda is still alive.

Hey, remember that scandal about the Obama Administration using the I.R.S. to target its political enemies? Well, while I'm sure it will live on forever in the hearts of those who'll believe anything bad about a Democrat, we now see most mainstream Republicans retreating from it. New evidence shows that everything we heard about it at the outset was misleading or flat-out wrong and that there's no "there" there.

Which raises the musical question: If the press is supposedly so liberal, why did it jump all over this, declare a major, presidency-killing investigation for Obama, invoke the "i" word, etc.? Alex Seitz-Wald notes how many reporters reported things that haven't stood up to the slightest bit of skeptical inquiry.

René Lavand is an Argentinian magician who performs tricks that no one else does. Lavand lost his right hand in an accident when he was a boy and you'd think that would have ended any prospect of a career in magic, especially sleight-of-hand magic since virtually all of the established tricks call for two hands. Lavand didn't let that stop him. He went out and invented his own one-handed tricks like this one…

Someone who signs himself "Steve" with no last name writes…

Appreciate your blog and have probably checked it daily for 10 years+. On the Conan/Leno situation, I guess my question is I believe the main problem that NBC was faced with was not that Conan on The Tonight Show was failing, but that Leno's Primetime show was getting disastrous ratings, leading into a ratings drop for the affiliate's local news, and then into Conan's Tonight Show. NBC's problem was not how to fix the Tonight Show, but how to fix the 10 PM eastern time slot, and please their affiliates. What would have Conan's ratings been on the Tonight Show, if NBC had maintained a more traditional prime time lineup, rather than Leno's prime time program? We will never know, and he was never given that opportunity. I'd appreciate any insight or thoughts you have on this.

I've been a huge fan of Conan since his show started in 1993 (it took about 1 year to make it must see TV, but especially between 1995-1998 the show was fantastic). To me what distinguishes Conan/Letterman from Leno is the quality of their comedy "bits". 1980s Letterman in particular is fantastic and has created memories that last 30 years later on how funny various remote segments and recurring characters were. Watch any Letterman anniversary show where they show an hour of these clips, they are hilarious. Early Conan also has this (I have actually put together an exhaustive episode guide and catalog of all of the Late Night with Conan O'Brien episodes and memorable moments from the show), while I don't think Leno has ever generated these kinds of moments of excellence. What is the trademark moment of Leno's Tonight Show? Hugh Grant's appearance, not too special, and not specifically about Leno. Leno's monologue while it is funny, is disposable humor, that just gets churned out day after day, with no lasting impression formed.

I pretty much agree with the above paragraph but I do think we are well past the era when any late night show outputs the kind of memorable bits that are worthy of an anniversary retrospective…which may be why none of the late night shows do them. At best, they seem to come up with the occasional moments that draw some decent YouTube hits. At WonderCon, I got into a conversation with a friend who loves Letterman and hates Leno and the expressed reason for his Dave-love is those brilliant moments like the Velcro Suit and bits with Larry "Bud" Melman. The actor who played Larry "Bud" died in 2007 and Dave put on the suit of Velcro twenty-nine years ago.

A couple of folks have written me that Jimmy Kimmel is doing some clever, memorable comedy moments. That may well be so but I have made repeated attempts to watch that program and never gotten more than about five minutes into it. I just find him so smug and unappealing that I want to delete the shows before they damage my TiVo. (Kimmel, who I can't watch because I don't like him, should not be confused with Jimmy Fallon, who I can't watch even though I do like him.)

My understanding is that the affiliates' ire at Leno's 10 PM show was mainly this: It wasn't that the show was getting low ratings and damaging their 11 PM newscasts. There was a little more to it than that. NBC affiliates were used to 10 PM shows getting low ratings but Leno's show was getting a more pronounced drop-off in its second half-hour and especially its last fifteen minutes. The ratings for the first fifteen or so were pretty good but unlike a drama which builds to a climax and resolution, there was this massive tune-out. If you watched the beginning of a cop or lawyer show, you might want to stick around just to see how it came out. That wasn't the case with Jay. Every time they went to a commercial, a large chunk of viewers changed channels or went to bed or hauled out the PlayStation 3.

Affiliates expected a certain amount of this. Before Jay's 10 PM show started, they got together en masse and insisted that Jay's most popular comedy bits — Headlines, Jaywalking, etc. — be positioned at the end of the show. They had identified the problem but demanded the wrong solution since it threw off the whole rhythm of the program. Much could be written about other things that damaged that show: The insistence that Jay not sit behind a desk, the rule that Jay could only have one interview guest (NBC originally said none), the barring of musical acts, etc., all with an eye at not infringing on what Conan would be doing.

Neil Simon once agreed with a reviewer who trashed one of his lesser plays and said, "Simon didn't have an idea for a show this year but he wrote one anyway." I think the problem with Leno's 10 PM show was that nobody quite knew what The Jay Leno Show was going to be before they committed to five prime-time hours a week of it. Once someone said, "It can't be too much like his Tonight Show," no one had much of a Plan B.

So affiliates objected to the show's drop-off even though they helped cause it. But what really upset them was that the parent network said they were committed to the Leno-at-10 experiment for up to two years. The programmers had in effect said, "We don't have the ammo to win at 10 PM so let's put all our assets into the earlier hours and schedule Jay at 10 to cut our losses." The affiliates were used to NBC not winning at 10 PM. They just weren't used to NBC conceding the hour — a third of its evening schedule — and not even trying to win there.

Look at it from their viewpoint: You have this guy who's been consistently winning at 11:35. The network takes him off and brings in a guy who can't win his entire first week even after a massive publicity push. Then they take the guy who had been winning at 11:35 and put him on at 10 PM in a not-as-good show that they don't even expect will win its time slot…and they want to keep him there for two years!

We'll never know how Conan would have done if NBC had had blockbuster hits on at 10 PM…but that was not going to happen at NBC. Wasn't going to happen then, hasn't happened since. We do know how Conan did following the kind of shows NBC could put on at 10 PM. Between the time Conan's Tonight Show went on and the debut of The Jay Leno Show, there were a few months of that and he didn't do so well. You have to think some folks at the network thought, "Hey, regardless of what you think of the two guys, Jay was at least able to win at 11:35 with a flop show at 10 PM!" That and the fact that they didn't want to have to pay off his contract was the reason NBC wanted him back on at that hour. What did Jay do in any of this that was unethical? I still don't know.

I think I'm going to wrap this series up Tuesday or Wednesday. If you have some question or comment you'd like to have addressed, send it in now. Thanks.

As Robert Reich notes, Republicans don't want to see Americans pay another cent towards making the environment better or dealing with Climate Change. But they sure like the idea of students going deep into debt in order to go to college.

And now you can hike/click over to the Comic-Con International website and see the programming schedule for Sunday. This will enable you to determine which events you want to make sure you see that day…in addition to the four I'm hosting, of course.  (I'll try and post a list of all of mine later today.)

This is a rerun from long ago — a rare video of comedian Eddie Lawrence performing one of his "Old Philosopher" routines. Back in the sixties and seventies, Eddie may have held the world's record as the performer most often quoted, imitated and plagiarized by people who had no idea who they were doing. He had a series of successful comedy records in the fifties but didn't make a full-time career of that act. He was also a Broadway actor, a playwright, a cartoon voice actor and a painter — and was rather successful in most of those endeavors. I thought he was hilarious and I booked him to do a "cat" version of his act in two episodes of Garfield and Friends just so I could meet him. A lovely, talented man…and he's still working (mostly painting, I hear) at the age of 94.

My pal Kliph Nesteroff interviewed Eddie here. You might want to read it after you enjoy the wit and wisdom of the world's first great motivational speaker, The Old Philosopher…

Here's an article about PETA — the organization that makes you uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassed to care about the treatment of animals.

And now it's back to the Comic-Con International website for a link to the Saturday schedule. Lots of fun stuff on Saturday. It's the day that always feels the most crowded at the convention even though there's the exact same number of people in that building each day.

This one is from someone who signs his name "Corey R." Here goes…

It's real simple. Leno and his manager knifed Johnny in the back and forced him to retire, thereby getting Jay a job that by all accounts rightly belonged to Letterman. Then NBC dumps Leno (finally!) and gives it to Conan. Does Jay have the decency to go away like a good loser? No, he gets NBC to give him that crappy 10 PM show knowing full well his lead-in will sabotage Conan's Tonight Show and NBC will cancel it and bring Leno back.

Yeah…and Barack Obama's from Kenya and Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster. Boy, there's a lot to unpack there…

Personally, I've never bought that Leno and his manager Helen Kushnick forced Johnny Carson out. They didn't have the power to do such a thing. And really, all she did was to plant one insulting (but mainly true) story in a tabloid paper that said a lot of people at NBC felt it was time for Johnny to go and Jay to take over. Johnny Carson — maybe the most powerful man ever in television — was forced to quit because of that? I think a more logical scenario is that Johnny looked at the numbers and realized that if he didn't go soon, he might not have gone out in (arguably) first place. Or that if he wanted to stay much longer, he was going to have to do some wholesale reinvention of his program…which might or might not have worked. The Kushnick-planted story was rude but Johnny had endured "this is Carson's last year" stories in the tabloids for a couple of decades.

One of the things I find intriguing about Leno is that while he's been in some ways as big a money-earner for NBC as Carson was during his last decade or so, Jay had never had very much clout there. Three times now, NBC decided to oust him from the post — the time his job was offered to Letterman which didn't go through, then later with O'Brien and now Fallon — and all three times, Jay was in first place in the ratings when they made that decision. Name me anyone else in television who gets fired when they're in first place in a highly-competitive time slot. There's probably one performer (I can't think of who) who had that happen to them once but Jay's the only one who's had it happen to him again and again…

That's how little power he's ever had at that network. And yet someone believes Leno had the power to force his way into five hours of NBC's prime-time schedule with the intention of sabotaging it and all that followed…and that he didn't worry it would hurt him professionally to crash and burn in that time slot.

People also forget that O'Brien went on the air with his Tonight Show on June 1, 2009. He got great ratings his first night but by the end of that first week, both Letterman and Nightline were beating him. His demographics in the 18-49 age bracket were pretty good but NBC sure didn't expect the program to go from first place to last in the over-all numbers in about three days.

This was not the fault of a weak lead-in from Leno's 10 PM show. Leno's 10 PM show didn't go on the air until September 14th. If Conan's ratings had been okay and then plunged when Jay came on, sure. You could blame that on the weak lead-in. Even then though, you might have noted that when Jay was on at 11:35, he had some pretty awful lead-ins and he usually managed to win his time slot. In fact, since low-rated shows at 10 PM have pretty much been the norm at NBC for a long time — and were destined to be even after Leno's show at that hour was axed — you could say that the job description of hosting The Tonight Show includes recovering from weak lead-ins at 10 PM. Jay's consistently been #1 in his hour following an NBC prime-time schedule that's in last place.

We will continue this tomorrow and for a few more days after. I'll address a few more of Corey's points before we're done.

Over in The Huffington Post, the fine comic book artist Nick Cardy discusses his World War II memories and also working for DC Comics, which was probably a bit less dangerous. We like Nick a lot as both an illustrator and a charming human being. Oh, yeah — and he was a war hero, as well.