They're All Gonna Laugh at You

This week, I haven't been able to go to my usual gym location (on 41st Street) because access to the entire block has been shut down due to "falling bricks". Wednesday, I headed up to another location along the Upper West Side. Each New York Sports Club is structured so differently, you've got to carefully explore it beforehand to make sure you don't accidentally walk into the wrong locker room.

While in the area, I went to a Barnes & Noble and picked up Bill Carter's book "The War for Late Night" for approximately TWICE the price I could've paid through Amazon. The cost of instant gratification. And not dealing with unpredictable UPS delivery schedules.

I was a big fan of Carter's book "The Late Shift", which meticulously chronicled the feud between the Leno and Letterman camps over who would succeed Johnny Carson behind the Tonight Show desk. "War" serves, essentially, as a sequel: chronicling the subsequent Leno-Conan debacle.

As in "Late Shift", Carter interviewed almost everyone involved for "War", allowing the reader to be a fly on the wall in intimate scenes. The fight over the Tonight Show was a big public spectacle, but the book offers greater insight.

I'm also a sucker for show business stories like this where managers and agents and producers and executives are all duking it out in a battle royale. More so now that I've got some experience with managers, agents, producers, executives. Not in television, but it's a similar game.

Obviously, Misanthropy Central is a longtime supporter of both Letterman and Conan. In college, I attended a taping of Conan early on in his late night career. Tiffani Amber Thiessen was the big guest. Rip Taylor had a surprise cameo. This was in the really early period where the show was just seen as a joke: a rank unknown given a major network talk show, standing in the shadows of late night titans Letterman and Leno.

I don't even remember the transition when I actually began to legitimately *like* Conan O'Brien. It was gradual.

Gotta love the internet for housing old clips...