Tonight, after more than 33 years, David Letterman ends his legendary career as a late-night TV host. To mark the occasion, we asked Merrill Markoe---co-creator and original head writer of NBC's Late Night With David Letterman, where Dave got his start---to recount some of her favorite moments from her tenure on the show (1982-1988). "Bear in mind," she warns, "that the segments that stand out for me are not the ones the world at large cared much about." Here, then, in her own words, "are just five memories that I still kinda like."
"Chinese Food Delivery Race"/"Chinese Food Bowl" (1982)
"There was a funny idea floating around about having 'instant reunions'---it started as an idea about forcing reunions onto members of comedy teams who hated each other, and ended up getting sillier and sillier. We started thinking we might collect the names of everyone riding an elevator, then invite them all back a few weeks later and reunite them. Then we decided to have a reunion of a bunch of people who were all eating at the same Chinese restaurant.
"After we picked the place, and collected the names, the piece kept growing because the restaurant we picked was called Szechuan State. We somehow found another place called Hunan Wok University and decided we would also have a food delivery race by ordering takeout and seeing which food got there first. Knowing we were going to do this, we took the cameras down to both places and did a tour of the "campuses," like they'd do for a college bowl game.
"I remember this fondly not because it was such an audience-pleaser, but because it was the biggest possible fulfillment of such a silly idea. By the time we did the show, it had the reunion, the race, and a look at the campuses. It was a lot of work for something probably hardly anyone got. I really liked it."
"They Took My Show Away" (1983)
"A taped piece by Tom Gammill and Max Pross, shot in the earnest style of an old educational film, where Dave explains the sad reality of show cancellation to a seven-year-old boy who is mourning the loss of his favorite show [Voyagers!]. No explanation given of the relationship of this boy to Dave. Just a sad boy with a dilemma, and Dave."
"Dog Poetry" (1986)
"I directed this; it was my dog Stan reciting a poem. The poem itself was in subtitles. The vocal track was all noises Stan made. I worked a long time on this thing, and Dave wasn't that crazy about it. We weren't going to air it, so I created the 'things that will never appear on the show' segment and included the piece. After 'Dog Poetry' killed, Dave liked it much better. He even took it with him to the Carson show as an example clip. Don't forget, this was 20 years before an Internet full of this kind of video."
The Dubbed Show (1986)
"Randy Cohen, who went on to be The Ethicist at The New York Times Magazine, came up with some of my favorite cerebral ideas. One was a "live rerun," where all the guests would repeat everything they did the last time. That one never happened. But the dubbed show did. We taped a regular show, then Randy transcribed it verbatim, and professional voiceover actors redubbed it, the way you would have them do a foreign film. The result was a show that looked ordinary but had someone else's voices coming out of Dave, Paul, etc. It made you rethink everything you know to be true about the universe."
Point of View Pieces
"Like everything we did, we did these ’til we wore them out. It started out as a piece where you were watching the show from Dave's POV. You heard Dave's voice but realized the camera was showing you everything through Dave's eyes. As Dave did his opening jokes, you heard them, but you saw the cue card guy, the audience, and the studio cameras. After that, we did that one from the point of view of someone in the audience: standing in line, being seated, watching Dave do the warmup, etc. That eventually led me to do pieces from the POV of a dog ("films by Bob the Dog") and Randy Cohen to write Monkey-Cam, from the POV of a camera strapped to a monkey, and Thrill-Cam, where we strung the camera on a high-wire above the studio."
