Dennis Wilson writes to ask…
I'm sure you've heard of the Tonight Show layoffs and Leno's pay cut. My question is, why would Leno sit still for this? The Tonight Show is still one of NBC's most profitable shows, and NBC doesn't appear to have a succession plan ready if Jay were to leave. (Moving Fallon to 11:30 p.m. would surely result in losses like those that resulted from moving Conan there, plus leave a hole in the currently profitable 12:30 a.m. slot.) Johnny would've walked. Why won't Jay?
I'm not sure Johnny would have walked. It probably would have depended to some extent on when.
There were a number of times in the first half of his Tonight career when Johnny said he'd quit if he didn't get what he wanted…and then he got what he wanted (or close enough to it) and all was fine. Would he have gone through with the threat? Maybe early in his run if he saw an opening to go someplace else and set up shop at much better terms. After a certain point though — around 1980, give or take a few years — he didn't threaten to quit and they didn't give him a reason to.
What would he have done if he had quit? Past some point, he was not going to dismantle The Tonight Show at NBC, move over to CBS, assemble a new series there with a partly-new staff, commit to stay there for multiple years and risk that the new venue would work as well as the old one had. David Letterman was 46 when he left NBC. Carson was 55 in 1980.
My sense of Johnny is that for the first decade or so, he hosted Tonight with the idea that he'd do that a while, then move on to something else — maybe a prime-time weekly variety show. He'd had one once, it had flopped and he had some desire to go back and do it right. But during the seventies, he seems to have realized that, first of all, that kind of variety show was going out of style. Also, they were a lot of work…probably a lot more than hosting Tonight on his many-days-off schedule. There was a very real worry that he could wind up ending his career on a failure, whereas staying at 11:30 he had a good chance to go out on top and set some kind of longevity record. Quitting just meant setting up shop elsewhere to try and do pretty much the same show…and there was no reason to try that. All it would have meant was more risk and more money…and NBC never refused to give him more money.
Mr. Carson always had an accurate idea of how much his show made for NBC and a pragmatic idea of what piece of that should be his. Then he and his lawyers would get it and that was that. During his years there, that number went ever-upward so he never had to deal with threatened rollbacks. Thus, we don't know for sure what he would have done in this situation.
These days, revenues in late night are declining. All the shows are down and they've all either taken cuts or will…with the possible exception of Craig Ferguson, whose show was already so cheap there's no room for cutting.
With regard to Jay, we don't know the numbers. Some reports say his program has been operating at the higher budget it had during the 10 PM experiment. If that's the case, it's reasonable to roll it back to a late night budget and I don't know why they've waited this long to do that. My guess would be that Leno has a little mystery percentage number in his head — "I get X% of what the show makes" — and that he's still in that ballpark.
One of the interesting things to me about Leno is that he does not seem to be motivated by money, at least with regard to The Tonight Show. He's loaded and could make as much or more playing Vegas more often. But more intriguing (and unusual) is that he isn't weighed down with grand ego issues. There are stars in this business who spend a lot of time crying, "My network doesn't love me," and getting all pissy at real and imagined slights…like their picture isn't prominent enough on the studio wall or they weren't mentioned in some article on the network's history. Leno seems to care very little about that kind of thing. He appears to be driven primarily by the desire to keep moving…to keep doing shows, to keep putting out product. During the 10PM/Conan debacle, he might have gained leverage had he opted to sit out the balance of a contract and be off the air for some time. He always chose not to do that.
He's endured a lot of stuff at NBC — top execs there working against him, offering his job to others, etc. — that would have caused some others to storm out of there and never go near the network again. Leno seems to take an unemotional look at where he'd be if he stayed and where he'd be if he walked. Then he factors in what it means to his staff and he stays. A friend of mine who's close to him says, "Jay's a stand-up comic at heart so all he wants is the best stand-up gig in the world. That to him is the Tonight Show monologue spot." I can see that.
When he got kicked off Tonight to make room for Conan O'Brien, Jay could have gone almost anywhere and for more money. ABC and Fox were both ready to set him up in a competing show. But he was 59 years old and well-entrenched at NBC with that staff…and there was also that problem of being off the air for many months. So he elected to stay there and try to do that 10 PM show he shouldn't have tried to do. If he didn't jump to Fox at 59, he's not going to do it at age 62. I think all of late night TV's due for a shakeup in the next few years. There are probably more cuts to come for all. My guess is Leno will stay as long as they let him and he's getting that X%. And then he'll happily do stand-up gigs all over the world for the rest of his life.