The Late Shift
February. 24,1996 RDavid Letterman vies with Jay Leno and his manager to succeed Johnny Carson, retiring from "The Tonight Show."
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Reviews
People are voting emotionally.
A lot of fun.
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
The other reviews say it all but watch Treat Williams for his awe inspiring speech to David Letterman. I wish someone said that to me sometime.And Bob Balaban may be Littlefield's clone-He tells Helen Kushnik to " F you and the horse you rode in on."It's amazing how the actors captured the essence of the book characters by Bill Carter.Higgins portrayal of Letterman is spot on...When he refers to his CBS contract, he says "It would put a smile on Jack Benny's face... and that's in the condition he is now."You can watch this over and over again.
Interesting and short television movie describes some of the machinations surrounding Jay Leno's replacing Carson as host of the Tonight Show. Film is currently very topical given the public drama surrounding Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno.The film does a good job of sparking viewers' interest in the events and showing some of the concerns of the stakeholders, particularly of the NBC executives. The portrayal of Ovitz was particularly compelling and interesting, I thought.Still, many of the characters were only very briefly limned or touched upon, and some of the acting seemed perfunctory. Nevertheless, an interesting story.
While I found the movie interesting, I was disappointed that Kathy Bates, who does bare a physical resemblance to Kushnick, did not think it necessary to lose the 60 pound weight difference that would have made her performance more accurate and that she shuffled rather than walked with the clip Kushnick had in her step. I was hoping for more insight into the character's motivations and was disappointed to find it to be pretty much of a "hit" job on all of them. Overall the film was enlightening as to the inside workings of network television, but I was left wondering how accurate the representation of each person was. It seemed as if they were reaching for the tabloid aspect of the story.
Good movie, great story, great characters, I enjoyed it immensely, enough to buy the DVD when it came out. The real life story it purports to tell is more fascinating and engrossing than anything the fictionalizers could ever come up with. My friend who is in the media business said they shouldn't show insider dealings like this, it gives the business a bad name. As if.There are a few problems with the DVD though: First, the sound volume is awfully low so you have to run up the TV volume to watch it. I notice that its also like that when HBO runs it so its in the original production copy. Second, for about the first five minutes the left side of the video is cut off, that is the picture is cut off about one inch short of the left side. After the five minutes it fills the screen properly, left to right. Sloppy technical production like that is very amateurish and I don't know why the director and producer let such sloppiness slide by.Still, even with the technical flaws, its an enjoyable story, one of HBO's best I think.