12-29-2007, 04:26 AM
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Meow.
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Tacoma, WA USA
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Some Late-Night Talk Shows Set to Go Scriptless
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119...ff_main_tff_top
Quote:
Television's late-night talk-show hosts are set to return to the airwaves next week, but their jokes will pretty much have to write themselves.
After sitting out the first two months of the Hollywood writers' strike, the hosts have agreed, under pressure from their network bosses, to go back to work. But members of the Writers Guild of America -- including the folks who supply the hosts with most of their laugh lines -- are still out on picket lines this week, and no new rounds of negotiations are scheduled.
As a result, the shows are likely to look very different from what viewers are accustomed to. The guild's strike rules are extremely broad and vague, prohibiting the late-night talk-show hosts, most of whom are guild members, from doing anything that constitutes "writing services." That means the hosts are technically forbidden from writing and performing the traditional opening monologue, plotting out sketches in advance, or creating fictional characters that would perform on the shows.
Producers of the late-night shows are hoping to fill that void with more and longer celebrity interviews. But those are proving hard to book, especially for the first night that the shows return to air, according to celebrity publicists and people who work on the shows. Many of the most prominent actors are reluctant to be the first to cross the picket lines to appear on late-night TV.
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This should prove to be interesting. It seems that early January we'll be seeing these.
Reading further into this in other articles, I've found out that David Letterman may have writers for him by that time, but I still don't know about Jay.
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