To the surprise of absolutely no one, David Letterman is electing to remain at CBS under a "5-year contract."  I put that in quotes because, if the reports are to be believed, he will have — commencing in 2004 — the annual right to quit.  (For more details, consult my pal Aaron Barnhart's article by clicking here.)  I suspect that particular clause will be significant in the future; not that Dave will exercise it before the term is up but that, as with Carson's last decade or two, we'll hear many a rumor of impending early retirement.  Actually, we heard them aplenty when Dave didn't have that out.

I mentioned earlier that this Late Night War struck me as even dumber than the last Late Night War, and it still does.  This one was utterly needless and it may actually lead to some casualties.  Despite the hype and attendant TV-movie, the squabble over who'd get Johnny's job was a "war" that yielded no real bloodshed, no real losers.  When the dust settled, Letterman and Leno each wound up with the best job either has ever had or will ever have.  Today, they have two of the more secure positions in all of show business.

The brouhaha just concluded, however, will probably result in someone going down and I don't mean Ted Koppel.  He was slapped and slapped hard by whoever leaked the story that ABC was willing to dump him for Letterman.  (The reporter who broke the story — Bill Carter of The New York Times — has said it didn't come from Dave's people.  I'd be very surprised if there's ten people in all of show business who believe it came from anywhere else.)

Still, unless the folks at Disney are uncommonly lucky or reckless, it'll be a while before they find something with which they can replace Nightline.  With the entire press corps eager to condemn the replacement of news with entertainment, ABC won't be able to put a new show in its stead unless they come up with something absolutely sure-fire and with some amount of prestige.  There are probably some there who are now arguing it isn't worth the risk for anything besides a proven commodity…and, with Dave and Conan under new contracts and Jay not about to budge, there are none.  So Ted's secure for now and, when it's time for him to pass from the 11:35 slot, they'll pay dearly for him to go quietly.

Bill Maher will probably also not be a casualty of the latest "war."  Apparently, his days at ABC were numbered some time ago and he was already entertaining other, better offers.  The rumor mill says that HBO has the inside track but even if he doesn't go there, he'll land somewhere — and on his feet.  ABC is probably now looking for a one-hour entertainment show to go into Maher's position, with the distant hope that it might develop into enough of a hit to eventually move to 11:35.  The future of Politically Incorrect on ABC will hinge on how soon they find something promising…but even if they want to keep Maher, he may elect to flee to a more compatible venue.

My prediction, for what it's worth, is that the real casualty of the Letterman renegotiation will be The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn.  If Dave is looking at retirement in 2-5 years, it's not too soon to begin grooming his replacement.  What better way to do that than to find someone who, in the interim, can boost his ratings a tad the way Conan helps Jay's?  Perhaps Jon Stewart will finally get the job that he should have gotten back when Letterman's company had him under contract…and left him on the bench.

Video Maven Stuart Shostak operates one of the largest companies that sells videotapes (and, now, DVDs) of old TV shows.  I've been an occasional customer of his since…well, I still have Beta tapes I purchased from him.  Does that date me?  Anyway, you can browse his catalog over at www.shokus.com and if you see something you like — and you will — order with confidence.  He's been around a long time and everyone's been happy with the service and the quality.

Stuart writes to remind me of a correction I meant to make (and have just made) in a column posted here — the one about Soupy Sales.  The director of Soupy's short-lived TV series in the seventies was Lou Tedesco, not Lou Horvitz, who is another fine director of television programming.  Lou Tedesco is the gent I was thinking about as my fingers, darn them, typed the wrong surname.  This is embarrassing, especially since (a) I knew the difference, (b) this column was published in 1995 and Stuart's only the second person to point this out to me in all that time and (c) the column was reprinted in Soupy's autobiography…with the error intact.  One of these days, someone is going to look it up in there, get the wrong name and say, "Well, if Soupy published it in his book, it must be so."  It's times like this I almost wish I was a rabid, right-wing Republican so I could blame it on Bill Clinton.

Since we've written here about the Li'l Abner Broadway show and the movie, we oughta mention that a company is now auctioning off the costumes used in the latter.  They're up on eBay from time to time, going for a wide range of prices.  The Daisy Mae outfit worn by Leslie Parrish just went for $511.  (Here's a link, which will soon expire, to the listing.)  Costumes worn by anonymous dancers are going for considerably less…but if they have Julie Newmar's Stupefyin' Jones suit, watch out.  It may set a record for the highest price ever paid per square inch of fabric.

A follow-up query from Jeff Glover:

Interesting explanation of Carson's rerun problems.  How does this tie in with the reruns they used to run on Saturday (Sunday?) nights?  I don't recall if it was The Saturday Tonight Show or The Sunday Tonight Show.

It was both.  From the late sixties through the mid-seventies, NBC offered its affiliates a weekly Carson rerun that was intended for the 11:30 PM Saturday night slot.  It initially opened with a graphic and a voiceover by Ed McMahon that proclaimed it was The Saturday Tonight Show.  Alas for the network, a number of affiliates decided there was more profit in running an old movie or some syndicated offering in that position.  Some didn't broadcast the Johnny rerun at all while others bumped it to 1:00 AM or to Sunday at 11:30.

In other words, The Saturday Tonight Show was running in a large part of the nation on Sunday.  Even a few of the NBC O-and-O's ("owned and operated" by the network itself) began to delay Johnny to less desirable slots…so NBC made up a secondary opening — one in which Ed announced you were about to see The Sunday Tonight Show.  Each week's episode was distributed with both opening billboards, one after the other, and stations were supposed to edit out whichever was not applicable.  At least in Los Angeles, they usually got sloppy and left them both in.  Eventually, it dawned on someone to change it so Mr. McMahon proclaimed you were watching The Weekend Tonight Show.  Increasingly, viewers watched neither and the ratings for the reruns declined.

Around the beginning of 1975, Carson decided he wanted the weekend reruns off, which gave NBC an opening.  Two years earlier, they'd begun airing a rock music program — Midnight Special — after Johnny's Friday night airing and it had snagged a lot of advertisers who weren't buying into NBC's other programming.  Some exec decided they should try to come up with a music/variety/comedy show with the same sensibility to replace the Carson reruns.  Even though they didn't have a format or host or anything specific in mind, they named the project Saturday Night Live.

I've never seen this mentioned anywhere but it always seemed obvious to me why they picked that name and why they decided the show would be broadcast live, even before they knew what the show was.  If they'd called it almost anything else, affiliates could have run it where most of them were, by then, running Johnny's old shows — at 1 AM Sunday morn or 11:30 Sunday night.  By doing the show live and calling it Saturday Night Live, they kinda forced affiliates to run it at 11:30 on Saturday night.

By the time the show debuted, however, Howard Cosell was hosting a doomed variety show for ABC called Saturday Night Live, so NBC's offering wound up being called NBC Saturday Night for its first 41 airings — a distinction that almost no one noticed.  Everyone thought it was called Saturday Night Live and, once the Cosell program became a distant memory, it was.

One other thing: Most of the shows that tried to park in the NBC Saturday night slot before SNL are long-forgotten but one lingers in my mind.  Does anyone reading this recall The Lohman and Barkley Show?  Al Lohman and Roger Barkley were popular L.A. radio personalities but for 26 weeks (I think) around 1974, there was an attempt to syndicate a very funny talk show that they did in conjunction with the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles.  Craig T. Nelson, Rudy deLuca, Barry Levinson and Alan Thicke were among the behind-the-scenes people involved.  I'm going to see what I can dig up on the show and post it here but if you have any info, drop me a line.  It sticks in my memory as a show that was waaay ahead of its time.

One of our readers, Jeff Glover, writes to ask:

This week, Letterman is running reruns from just four weeks ago.  What gives?  I understood after 9/11, the late night shows didn't want to go too far back for fear the Bush-bashing would seem unpatriotic but why can't Dave and Jay rerun shows from a little farther back?  Or why wouldn't they go back and pick older shows but edit out the dated parts?  Why don't they do the reruns as "best of" shows?

After 9/11, Bush jokes were briefly a consideration but time and pretzels seem to have alleviated that concern.  No, the problem — and this goes back a bit — is that Americans are increasingly reticent to watch dated episodes of what is supposed to be a topical show.  This became a problem back when Johnny was in power.  Once upon a time, they'd run shows from (often) a year earlier with only a modest drop-off in the ratings.  Some combination of increased competition and changing audience tastes has caused viewers to be less tolerant of this so Johnny had to start plucking his reruns from not-so-long-ago and to stop billboarding them as "The Best of Carson."  The hope then, as it is now with Dave and Jay, is that if you pick a fairly recent show, a lot of viewers won't realize it's an oldie and the ones who do won't be discomforted by a lot of glaringly past-tense references.  For a time, Carson's talent coordinators tried to get guests to not mention dates; to say, "My new album comes out in two weeks" instead of "My new album comes out May 3rd."  This was so that, if and when the episode was recycled, there wouldn't be that extra reminder of its age.

Weakening ratings for reruns were high among the factors that led to Johnny's decision to retire.  You may have read that, at one point, Arsenio Hall's show was looming to move into first place.  A close analysis of the ratings at that time yielded the deduction that Johnny's reruns were his Achilles' Heel.  Arsenio brought a lot of new viewers to late night TV but to the extent he took audience from Carson, it was largely because of Johnny's reruns.  People saw that Johnny had a show that was notably out of skew with the day's events so they'd flip over to see who Arsenio had in his house and, sometimes, they enjoyed that show enough to tune it in even when Johnny was new.  (Oddly enough, "This is an old show" seems to be more of a turn-off than "I've seen this before.")  The nights Leno was guest-hosting, The Tonight Show did fine — generally garnering ratings as high as Carson's but with younger demographics.  When Johnny did new shows, he also did fine, at least in the raw numbers, leaving aside the age of his viewership.  It was his recycled episodes that weren't competitive for any audience and that led to this dilemma: What would they do when some real competition — i.e., someone more threatening than Pat Sajak or Alan Thicke — came along?  Johnny didn't want to work more nights and if they'd cut back on reruns and increased Leno stints, Jay would have been hosting Johnny's show as often as Johnny.  Couldn't have that.

Letterman's people once tried a week or two, pasting together "best of" reruns from earlier shows but it didn't work.  The ratings were no higher than any other reruns and may even have been lower than unedited shows would have received.  Folks at both the Letterman and Leno operations have occasionally discussed whether it might make their old shows more palatable if they taped new intros to them.  The general consensus at the moment seems to be that it's not wise to call attention to the fact that an episode isn't brand, spanking new.

Rumor has it that Dave's current negotiations involve the possibility that he will use guest hosts in the future.  This may be simple hypochondria or it may indicate a desire to model his schedule more on Mr. Carson's.  Either way, it probably reflects an awareness that the day may soon come when, to be competitive, a late night show will go with even fewer…possibly no reruns.  They'll re-air the shows in the early A.M. or perhaps on cable channels, but not in that choice 11:35 time slot.  (And what do we think the odds are that Jay Leno will take a night off?  Oh, I dunno…what do we think the odds are that Kenneth Lay will be sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom again any time soon?)

The networks are starting to really screw with us TiVo owners.  Last night's episode of Saturday Night Live was on from 11:30 PM until 1:01 AM…so if you marked it and a show commencing at 1:00 AM, one or the other would not get recorded.  Nickelodeon and TV Land have both been sliding their shows around: This one starts a minute early so the beginning gets cropped off; that one starts two minutes late so you lose the end.  If you have a Digital Video Recorder, you'd better check your listings carefully.  You don't want to miss Paula Jones boxing Tanya Harding, do you?

Once upon a time on this site, I recommended McAfee's virus-checking programs.  Let the record show that the McAfee people have "improved" their Active Shield product a number of times in the last year and, with each "improvement," it gets slower and clunkier and more likely to crash my system.  Ergo, Active Shield is no longer on my system.  No McAfee product is.  I've switched over to Norton Anti-Virus and, so far, it's working great.

If you don't have a virus-checker installed, you should.  And if you do have one, you oughta know about a tiny program called eicar.com.  This is a perfectly harmless fake virus that was written to test virus-checkers.  You can download it here…and if you run it and it doesn't trigger your virus-checker, you ain't got no protection.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick will only be in The Producers for another week or so, and there have been no reports of professional videotaping of the show with them in it.  One assumes either or both will return whenever the grosses start to drop.  Still, it's a shame that this first incarnation is not being recorded for posterity.

It is well-publicized that Mr. Lane has not been playing matinees, so folks who showed up for yesterday's afternoon performance expected to see his splendid (from all reports) replacement, Brad Oscar.  Much to their surprise, Nathan was up there playing Bialystock — apparently because Mr. and Mrs. George Bush, Sr. were in attendance.  Here's a link to a newsgroup message by someone who was there that day.

My longtime pal Tony Isabella just gave me the following nice plug in his online column, which you can read at www.wfcomics.com/tony:

I visit there almost every day and it's not just because Mark has those risqué pictures of me with Jennifer Connelly. At least Mark told me the woman was Jennifer Connelly. That was the year I was hanging out with George W. Bush and, to be honest, most of it is an alcoholic haze.

Tony, I hate to break this to you but that wasn't Jennifer Connelly.  That was Billy Connolly.  Here…perhaps this will explain it for you:

That's Jennifer on the left and Billy on the right.  In case you get this confused in the future, Tony, here's a handy way to tell them apart: Billy only wears one earring and he has been known to speak with a Scottish accent.  Also, I should admit that I burned all the photos of you and Billy because, quite frankly, they were making me ill.  Especially the ones with the lima beans and the gecko.

Speaking of comic character figurines — as we often do 'round these parts — here's a pic of the prototype of the forthcoming Groo figure.  This will be part of the PVC set coming out in May from Dark Horse, which features not only Groo and Rufferto but also statues of Sage and Mulch (together), Arba and Dakarba (separate), Minstrel, Taranto and Chakaal.  They're about four inches tall and cute as all get out and, like I said, this is a prototype.  His jersey is actually more of a yellow-orange than it may appear in this pic and Sergio has asked to give this guy a bit more of a scowl.  Still, didn't the sculptors — who are somewhere in China, I believe — do a great job?  And how'd you like to have to paint all them spots on the dog?  2002 marks the 20th anniversary of our idiot barbarian, of whom it was once said, "This comic will never last."  We have a few Groo special projects for which we'll try and soak you before the year is out, including a special book of rarely-seen Groo stories and sketches.  Happy Groo Year to you all.

We're sticking with our prediction that David Letterman will keep his show at CBS.  Actually, everybody who's predicting seems to be sticking with that prediction, so it probably won't happen.  Nevertheless, we also have a prediction as to who CBS will go after for the slot if they lose Dave, which they won't unless they do.  Matt Drudge is reporting that Howard Stern is at the top of a short list, so that's probably not true.  Jon Stewart's name has been mentioned but, though I think Stewart is brilliant, I can't believe anyone thinks he could survive a three-way race against Dave and Jay.  He's out of the same school of comedy and the other two guys have already carved up that audience and developed loyal followings.  So my guess is that Stewart would be a little ways down on that list and Stern would be even lower.

What CBS would want there is someone young and capable of doing an entertainment show but whose style and audience didn't overlap so much with Leno and Letterman.  And if he's going to attract advertisers and big stars, the host would have to be enough of a star himself that he would instantly be accepted as a contender.

I haven't seen his name mentioned anywhere for this and I have no idea if he'd do it.  But if it comes down to CBS having to offer the 11:35 time slot to someone else — which it won't, unless it does — I suspect the first call would be to whoever represents Chris Rock.

In 1971, Jack Kirby was writing and drawing a new creation, The Forever People, for DC Comics.  As is not uncommon among writers, Jack based just about everything he did on either people and events in his own life or those he saw on the news.  At times, the connections were obvious.  At other times, his reference points were so disguised that, even when he told me what he thought he was writing about, I could see no trace of it in the finished product.  He also did composites.  The master villain of Forever People (and its allied titles, New Gods, Mister Miracle and, for a time, Jimmy Olsen) was Darkseid — who was not based on then-President Nixon but a number of Nixon's traits, speeches and actions did inform the character.

A lesser villain who toiled in the service of Darkseid was inspired more directly by evangelist Billy Graham, who was then rather difficult to avoid on TV.  Kirby was appalled at some of Graham's apocalyptic sermons which — to Jack — were more calculated to instill fear than faith, and to stampede people into service of Graham's causes.  Jack called the foe Glorious Godfrey, the name being a Kirbyesque pun.  The comic book evangelist was "god-free" and also had some of the traits of TV pitchman Arthur Godfrey, though the main reference and the visual came from Billy Graham.  Not evident in on the pages he drew was Jack's belief — which he expressed on several occasions — that Graham and the president he counseled were both virulent anti-Semites.

A year or two ago in some interview or article, I mentioned that Jack based Glorious Godfrey on Billy Graham, and I mentioned it over in our Jack F.A.Q. section, as well.  This disclosure prompted a number of e-mails and letters from folks who said they had great respect for Rev. Graham and were shocked that Jack Kirby did not.  I explained to them that Graham's current style is quite different from the fire-and-brimstone doomsday preaching he did in the early seventies…and that while Jack might appreciate how the act has been toned down, I believe he would stand by his opinion of Billy Graham, circa 1971.

I was therefore fascinated — though perhaps unsurprised — at recent revelations from the fabled Nixon tapes.  As you can read here, Graham can be heard on several newly-released recordings from the first six months of 1972.  In them, he and Nixon are discussing their mutual distrust of Jews in high places, especially in the media.  It is exactly the kind of thing Kirby believed of the two men.  His view of them was, like his view of just about everyone and everything, right on target.

By the way: I've never quite understood the claim that the Jews control the media.  I'm Jewish and I can just barely control my TiVo.

Here's a one-line summary of last evening's Salute to Fred Allen at the Museum of Television and Radio.  Nine very witty men got together to watch clips and to discuss another very witty man named Fred Allen.  The nine gents were Stuart Canin, Dick Cavett, Norman Corwin, Larry Gelbart, Stuart Hample, Hal Kanter, Norman Lear, Dick Martin and Herman Wouk.  A few knew Fred and had the honor of working with him.  Others were just fans from afar.  All had good stories and insights and historical information and (especially) quotes of clever Allen remarks.  Wouk is, of course, best known as the author of serious, award-winning dramatic novels.  Hard to believe — but true — that he was once a comedy writer for Fred Allen.

Stuart Hample is an author-cartoonist who compiled All the Sincerity in Hollywood: Selections From The Writing of Fred Allen, a fine book you can purchase by clicking on its name here.  The other folks, you probably know of…though Canin's name may be unfamiliar.  As you may be aware, Fred Allen enjoyed a very famous fake feud with Jack Benny that commenced one evening in 1936 when Allen had a 10-year-old violinist on his program.  The young man played a stirring rendition of "The Bee," and then the host commented, "Jack Benny oughta be ashamed of himself."  Well, Stuart Canin — now an important concertmaster — was that 10-year-old boy.

He told of his experiences, Lear, Kanter and Gelbart talked about their encounters with Allen, Cavett spoke of listening to the shows in Nebraska and then, when he first came to New York, exchanging but a few words with the man outside a What's My Line? broadcast.  There were a lot of very funny Allen quotes, many of them almost poetic in their beauty, some so familiar to us from repetition that they seem like clichés until you realize that, when Fred first said them, they were fresh.  Here are a couple of my faves…

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 AM and finds a molehill on his desk.  He has until 5 PM to make this molehill into a mountain.  An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

Fred Allen was one of the cleverest men ever on radio but he never quite found a niche on television, which was a shame.  When he died, Groucho was quoted as saying there were only two wits on TV — Fred Allen and Steve Allen and now, with Fred gone, television was half-witted.  Steve's gone now, and the joke still applies.

I don't know how many of you noticed it but it was on the news that actress Shirley Jones has filed for divorce from her husband of 25 years, Marty Ingels.  Asked what had prompted the action, Ms. Jones replied, "I woke up one morning and realized that I was married to Marty Ingels."

Okay, we're plugging a friend's book here…a very lovely, wordless collection of sketches by my pal Michael Paraskevas.  Mickey (as we call him) is a brilliant cartoonist and illustrator whose work has been featured in dozens of fine books, most of them written by his mother Betty, ostensibly for children.  I'd recommend them all to you — especially Junior Kroll — but right now, I'm suggesting L.A. Times, a new paperback collection of doodles from his frequent trips to Los Angeles.  His style is unique and his "eye" for capturing the essence of all the purveys is uncanny.  Like many artists, he carried around one of the bound books of drawing paper and captures whatever catches his attention.  This self-published volume is a faithful reproduction of a sketchbook I saw him filling up on his visits out here, and it's great to have a copy of it I can call my own.  Click here to order a copy.

(If you're in L.A., you can see a lot of Mickey's work exhibited over at the Storyopolis Gallery over on Robertson Blvd.)  If you click on the picture, you and your credit card will be whisked over to Amazon where you can buy this splendid book — or anything else they have there — warmed by the knowledge that a teensy percentage of your purchase is going to this site. Bless you.