Listen to me on TV CONFIDENTIAL:
As always, the further we go back in Hollywood history, the more that fact and legend become intertwined. It's hard to say where the truth really lies.
June 25, 1993
Last night
of Late Night with David Letterman. Offbeat comic Letterman, passed over by NBC for the host seat on The
Tonight Show after Johnny Carson's retirement, left the network to launch a
rival show on CBS.
David Letterman was born
in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1947. From an early age, he aspired to host his
own talk show. He became a stand-up comic and a wacky weatherman on a local TV
station. After years on the stand-up comedy circuit, he made his first appearance
on The Tonight Show in 1978 and served as the program's guest host 50
times. In 1980, Letterman had a short-lived morning variety show, The David
Letterman Show, which won two Emmys.
He launched his popular
late-night TV show in 1982. His offbeat humor and goofy stunts spoofed
traditional talk shows. Antics like wearing a Velcro suit and throwing himself
at a wall or tossing eggs into a giant electric fan, Letterman gained a large
following, especially among college students. Regular features included his
"Top Ten List," "Stupid Pet Tricks," and tours of the
neighborhood. He also frequently wandered with his camera into other NBC shows
in progress. Over more than 11 years, the show won five Emmys and 35
nominations.
When
Carson announced his retirement in 1992, Letterman and rival comic Jay Leno
engaged in a heated battle for the coveted host slot. When Letterman was passed
over, he left NBC for CBS, where his new program, Late Show,
outperformed Leno's show almost every week in its first year.
However, Leno
pulled ahead the following year and maintained a strong lead. Letterman
underwent emergency heart surgery in 2000 and was off the show for five weeks.
In recent years, Leno's lead over Letterman in viewership has slimmed.
June 26, 1975
Sonny and Cher's divorce becomes final. With a string of pop hits
in the mid-1960s that
began with the career-defining "I Got You Babe" (1965), Sonny and
Cher Bono established themselves as the most prominent and appealing married
couple in the world of popular music. Hipper than Steve Lawrence and Eydie
Gormé, and far more fun than John and Yoko, Sonny and Cher projected an image
of marital harmony that a lot of people could relate to—an image not so much of
perfect bliss, but of a clearly imperfect yet happy mismatch. Mr. and Mrs. Bono
traded on that image professionally for a solid decade, even several years past
the point that it was true. After 13 years together as a couple and six years
of marriage—the last three for the cameras—Sonny and Cher were legally divorced
on this day in 1975.
By the time they were divorced, Sonny and Cher were primarily known as
television stars thanks to their hugely successful NBC variety show, but their
romantic and professional relationships started in the Southern California music
industry in the early 1960s. In 1962, Salvatore "Sonny" Bono was
working as a producer, gofer and sometime percussionist for the legendary
producer Phil Spector when he met Cherilyn Sarkasian in a Los Angeles coffee
shop. Just 16 years old and recently dropped out of her Fresno, California,
high school, Cherilyn was soon singing backup on such legendary
Spector-produced hits as "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" (Righteous
Brothers, 1964), "Da Doo Ron Ron" (The Crystals, 1963) and "Be
My Baby" (Ronettes, 1963). The couple released one unsuccessful single
under the name "Caesar and Cleopatra" before
landing a #1 pop hit in 1965 with "I Got You Babe" under their new
name, Sonny and Cher.
Ultimately, Sonny and Cher had only a few memorable hits after their first,
the biggest of them being 1967's "The Beat Goes On." By 1968, in
fact, Sonny and Cher were essentially finished as a viable recording act, and
Sonny's efforts to establish a film career for the pair were foundering. A move
to Las Vegas, where
they developed a nightclub act featuring playful, between-song bickering, is
what ultimately resurrected Sonny and Cher's career. By 1971, they were
starring in a top-10 television program built around that act that would run
off and on, in various incarnations, until 1977. Two years later, they would be
living in separate homes and with new romantic partners, but it was not until
two years after that that their split became public and their divorce final on
June 26, 1975.
June 27, 1945
FCC
allocates TV channels.
On this day in
1945, the FCC allocates airwaves for 13 TV stations. Before World War II, a few
experimental TV shows had been broadcast in New York, but the war postponed the
development of commercial television. With the allocation of airwaves,
commercial TV began to spread. The first regularly scheduled network series
appeared in 1946, and many Americans viewed television for the first time in
1947, when NBC broadcast the World Series. Since privately owned television
sets were still rare, most of the series' estimated 3.9 million viewers watched
the games from a bar.
June 28, 1975
Rod Serling dies at age 50 after open-heart surgery. Born in 1924 in Syracuse, New York, Serling became
one of early television's most successful writers, best known for the anthology
series The Twilight Zone, which he created, wrote, and hosted.
In 1959, CBS aired the first episode of The
Twilight Zone. Serling fought hard for creative control,
hiring writers he respected (such as Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont) and launched himself into
weekly television. He stated in an interview that the science fiction format
would not be controversial and would escape censorship unlike the earlier Playhouse
90. In reality the show gave him the opportunity to communicate social
messages in a more veiled context.
Serling drew on his own experiences for many episodes, with frequent stories
about boxing, military life and aircraft pilots, which integrated his firsthand
knowledge. The series also incorporated Serling's progressive social views on
racial relations and the like, which were somewhat veiled by the science
fiction and fantasy elements of the shows. Occasionally, however, Serling could
be quite blunt, as in the episode "I Am The Night — Color Me Black",
where racism and hatred causes a dark cloud to form in the American South
before eventually spreading elsewhere. Serling was also progressive on matters
of gender, with many stories featuring quick-thinking, resilient women,
although he also wrote stories featuring shrewish, nagging wives.
The show lasted five seasons (four using a half-hour format, with one
half-season using an hour-long format), winning awards and critical acclaim for
Serling and his staff. While having a loyal fan base, the program never had
huge ratings and was twice canceled, only to be revived. After five years and 156
episodes, 92 of them written by Serling himself, he wearied of the
show. In 1964, he decided to let the third cancellation be final.
Serling sold his rights to the series to CBS. His wife later claimed that he
did this partly because he believed the studio would never recoup the cost of
the show, which frequently went over budget.
In 1969, NBC
aired a Serling-penned pilot for a new series, Night Gallery. Set in a dimly lit
museum which was open after hours, the pilot film featured Serling (as
on-camera host) playing the part of curator introducing three tales of the
macabre, unveiling canvases that would appear in the subsequent story segments
(its brief first season rotated as one spoke of a four-series programming wheel
titled Four in One), focused more on gothic horror and the occult than did The
Twilight Zone. Serling, no longer wanting the burden of an executive
position, sidestepped an offer to retain creative control of content—a decision
he would come to regret. Although discontented with some of producer Jack
Laird's script and creative choices, Serling maintained a stream of creative
submissions and ultimately wrote over a third of the series' scripts. By season
three however, Serling began to see many of his script contributions rejected.
With his complaints ignored, the disgruntled host dismissed the show as "Mannix in a cemetery". Night
Gallery lasted until 1973.
Subsequent to The Twilight Zone, Serling moved onto cinema screens
and continued to write for television. In 1964, he scripted Carol for
Another Christmas, a television adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It was telecast only
once, December 28, 1964, on ABC.
On May 25, 1962, Serling guest starred in the episode "The
Celebrity" of the CBS sitcom Ichabod and Me with Robert Sterling and George Chandler.
He wrote a number of screenplays with a political focus, including Seven Days in May (1964) about an
attempted military coup against the President
of the United States; Planet
of the Apes (1968); and The Man
(1972) about the first African American
President.
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
Stay Tuned
No comments:
Post a Comment