30 years ago on this day, HBO released a little film called The Late Shift, a television film adaptation of the Bill Carter-penned book of the same name chronicling the David Letterman/Jay Leno battle over the Tonight Show after the departure of longtime host Johnny Carson. I recently got the chance to read the book for the first time in years and for what it’s worth, it’s a superb chronicle of all the details surrounding this rather convoluted mess of a situation as a result of pure, unadulterated arrogance and incompetence on the part of NBC… something that would be just as readily apparently over a decade later with the Conan O’Brien situation.
As for the film in question… well, you can watch the movie on Youtube; there’s at least a couple uploads of it that you can check out for free… although I would implore you not to do it and just go for the book. Naturally, there’s only so much you can do to adapt a book into a 95 minute film, but more to the point, the movie is just plain bad.
Why am I celebrating the film’s thirty anniversary if I’m calling it a bad film? Well, I can think of no other time in which it would be appropriate to talk about this film that it doesn’t feel… what? Timely? Something to that extent… but really, with all the noise of late night of the past year – the Colbert cancellation and Kimmel suspension – I can’t help but think of the days when late night’s worst controversy was Jay Leno holding onto the Tonight Show by staying in the lobby while Conan O’Brien fumbled. And while I had missed out on the initial Tonight Show noise in the early 1990s, at no point did I figure that I would get to live this nonsense live and in living color.
And at some point, should HBO or whoever decides to give this late night scene another movie of sorts, I pray that it is yards better than the utter tripe of a film that is The Late Shift.
Basically, it boils down to the portrayal of its two biggest stars; David Letterman and Jay Leno, which comes across as comically bad to the point of farce or parody. I know that Jay had a huge chin, but maybe the make-up crew probably overdid it a bit with Daniel Roebuck, who looks more like a poor man’s Jay Leno cosplayer than he does a poor man’s Jay Leno… and his performance here is obnoxiously overexaggerated Italian stereotype and less funny man trying to be a good guy by waiting in the lobby. As for John Higgins’s take on Letterman, other than the obnoxious red hairpiece, he almost kinda, sorta looks the part, but again, the performance is what turns me off on the whole deal. I can see why Letterman himself didn’t care for the film.
Ironically, the noteworthy performances of this film are the secondary characters. Kathy Bates puts on a good showing as bullish producer Helen Kushnik – even if the portrayal is tame compared to the real deal – the late, great Treat Williams is slick and suave as Michael Ovitz, and hell, I even felt some sympathy for some of the network people, even if they were – technically – the antagonists and instigators of this whole deal… well, except for Howard Stringer; he’s wonderful… and also wonderfully played by Babylon 5 regular Peter Jurasik.
The Late Shift is the sort of thing that deserved to get run over with a steamroller… or dropped from a high-rise building and exploding into a blissful red mist upon impact… or simply smashed with a hammer… it’s essentially one big 90-minute Stupid Human Trick in slow motion… even Big Jaw deserves better than what he got here.
This whole deal is obnoxiously bad. Stick with the book.
dtm666 