David Letterman: Still Making Indiana Proud
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It's nice to see that you can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't take those good homespun Midwestern values out of the boy. David Letterman, talk show titan, has opened up his own coffers to pay his writing staff:
I've just learned that David Letterman and his producers yesterday morning announced to his Late Show staff that they will be paid through the end of the year even though the show isn't on the air during the writers strike. "Dave's not doing this to get good press, which is why it hasn't been reported for almost two days," a source tells me. "This is really significant because, as opposed to all of the other shows, this money comes out of Dave's own pocket." When Late Show stopped making new episodes last week, CBS ceased paying Letterman's production company on November 5th. And, in case you were wondering, Dave owns Late Show while Jay does not own The Tonight Show as Johnny Carson did.
Good for Dave. It's nice to see that all his fame and fortune hasn't gone to his head; he still seems to be the same boy from Indiana who done did good.
However, I can't say the same for CBS, as the technical staff of Dave's party are CBS employees, and they have been out of work as well:
However, most of the technical crew for the Late Show and Late Late Show are CBS employees, some of which are non-staff but per diem, even though they work on regular basis. These employees (at least in Los Angeles) have been on the street since day 1 of the strike. CBS does not want to pay them. They're like the bastard child nobody wants to claim.
I said in an earlier post that this strike would start to affect more than just the writers, and it seems it is happening. I also said that more show hosts might be thinking about crossing the picket lines to save the jobs of their crews, as Ellen has done, and as no less than talk show king Johnny Carson had to do in the 1988 writer's strike. He did so to save the jobs of the Tonight Show crew, and it may come to that for today's talk show hosts. It might not be a popular thing to do, but it just might happen while the studios and writers attempt to hammer out a solution to the strike. Continued on the next page
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