He was just spotted at a gas station, actually. True story.
I thought we were going to get a bunch of LSDL reruns until Colbert started. (NBC ran LNDL reruns for a while until Conan started.) But instead they’re airing Castle/Mentalist reruns.
Crap.
Cool. Good to see him out and about. I knew he had to cut a trip short recently for medical reasons, but it looks like he’s doing better.
I think he mentioned Hal when he talked about the move from NBC to CBS. Hal’s picture also appeared in the closing credits, along with all of the other staffers.
Somebody I don’t remember him mentioning: Bill Wendell, who was not only his announcer on NBC, but, IIRC, his first announcer at CBS (I remember the episode when Kalter took over).
Trivia fact of the day: both of Letterman’s announcers were game show announcers in the 1970s (the ones I can think of off the top of my head: Wendell on the early-1970s Sale of the Century, and Kalter on The Moneymaze.)
Wendell was listed in the In Memoriam credits at the end of the next to last show. He was also shown several times in the finale montage.
I always had the feeling that his departure wasn’t on good terms.
Another odd one is cue card boy Tony Mendez. Suddenly replaced by Todd the Intern. Don’t recall seeing him in the montage.
But there are a lot of folk that appeared on the show a few times that just had to be left out: Mrs. Marv Mendenhall, Flunky the Late Night Clown, Lyle the Intern, etc.
I wondered about the omission of any mention of Tony Mendez, too. Dave had really seemed to like featuring another ‘older’ guy who was still in there doing his job; was there some sort of unpleasantness involved in his retirement?
Also was puzzled to see no mention of “Lyle”–the Jimmi Simpson character who was featured prominently for quite a while. (The omission of mention of Monty/Smitty/Stephanie Birkitt, by contrast, was to be expected.)
Tony Mendez got into an altercation with Bill Scheft and was fired last October.
Dave owned his CBS show (he also used to own The Late Late Show prior to Cordon). It makes sense that he wouldn’t allow any old shows rerun now. He certainly doesn’t need or care about the money, and he’d want a clean, definitive end to the show. Unfortunately this will mean you’ll probably never see reruns of Dave’s Late Show anywhere ever. I remember when NBC sold reruns of Late Night to A&E while Dave was still doing it and he complained on-air tremendously. So much so they stopped the deal and gave back the money!
Yeah, I seem to remember Wendell wrote a tell-all autobiography after retiring in which he kinda trashed Letterman for some reason. Made me sad because he seemed like he ‘got’ the show and was always a great occasional bit player. If you ever see some episodes of The Ernie Kovacs Show Wendell was on that and doing much of the same sort of bits (Kovacs was very much a forerunner of Letterman’s style).
I checked the official LSDL YouTube channel on my Roku and was delighted to find a “Dave’s Monologues” playlist with 250 videos! I thought I’d start working my way through that list to soothe my Letterman withdrawal.
Turns out that all but a handful of those videos are marked “private” and can’t be played.
CRAP!
That sours me a lot on the guy, actually. Sure, keep it away until Colbert takes over. But the shows are a part of television history and need to be available at some point.
Of course, I was just now getting to the point where I appreciated him in the first place, by catching some of his older stuff before he seemed to just check out.
Thanks for that; I can see now why he was left out of the finale. A shame; it was clear over the years that Letterman enjoyed Mendez’ combative personality. That may have encouraged Mendez to do what he did. (Not that Letterman was responsible for the acts in question; Mendez was responsible.)
There are still a lot of Dave’s old NBC show clips on YouTube (strangely it looked like this was the source for some that were shown on the final show*!*) Dave didn’t like any of his old stuff being rebroadcast partly because some of it is embarrassing, but in the case of the A&E reruns he felt it was diluting his comedy. It’s a struggle to come up with totally fresh stuff all the time so he didn’t want old bits being shown that may have had obvious similarities to ‘new’ stuff. Plus NBC was simply being greedy (Dave was getting nothing from the A&E deal). However, now that he’s actually retired he may eventually let his old CBS show be re-shown. As self-deprecating as he is he does know he has a significant place in late night TV history.
That whole thing was fucked up, and I firmly blame Scheft. He was being a petty, selfish sleeze-ball. He was jealous of Dave & Mendez’s long-time friendship and he deliberately goaded Mendez into an altercation that he knew would get him fired. Mendez was part of the Letterman family since NBC, like Biff Henderson and Chris Elliot. He was “Inky the Cue-Card Boy”, getting hepped-up on magic marker fumes*!*
I had the opposite reaction; Mendez sounds like a psycho to me. I’ve never bought his claim that Scheft, a successful writer, was jealous of the cue-card guy. Why people think Mendez is some kind of hero is beyond me.
Mendez was not a psycho at all. He was a really nice guy who was a part of Dave’s show for 20 years. And unlike stagehands like Biff, Mendez and Dave had to always be very much ‘in sync’. Sometimes Dave would want to skip a joke or line, or shift their order around and Mendez had to respond immediately. They’d built up an incredible rapport over the years. Scheft joined the show in the last few CBS years and as an outsider (but with more authority than Mendez) tried to suck-up to Dave by constantly interrupting Dave & Mendez’s monologue rehearsals. Dave doesn’t like confrontation and so never did anything, so Scheft kept doing it again and again until it was obvious he was just being an asshole, and Mendez finally lost his temper.
What’s really sad is Mendez didn’t ‘attack’ the guy at all, he just yelled and pushed him a little, which in the old days wouldn’t have amounted to anything. But nowadays everything is a big deal so Scheft ran to HR like a little bitch and had him fired. Mendez immediately admitted that he was wrong and shouldn’t have done it, but he should not have been fired for it.
What’s your source for all this info about the Scheft/Menendez spat, Hail Ants? Not doubting you, just wondering.
Being a long time fan I knew who Tony Mendez was (he was frequently shown on camera holding the cue cards and in occasional bits). So when the story came out I read a number of different accounts. I’ll admit that most were interviews with Mendez himself, but others on the show did comment about it and this was the gist I got.
Okay. I read about it at the time, too, but I guess not quite as much as you did. Thanks.
In every workplace I’ve ever been a part of, assaulting a coworker is a serious offense that will generally get you fired, regardless of what the attacker’s motivation was. If this had happened to me, you better believe I would have reported it to HR. I’ve supervised some fairly large departments in my career, and if I found out that someone under me had assaulted a coworker, I’d have come down on that person like a ton of bricks. This is the norm in any sort of white-collar workplace in the USA. I don’t know what you mean by “the old days,” but I’m almost 60 and I can’t ever remember a time when you could throw a coworker against a wall without any consequences.
Scheft has said very little about the incident and Letterman has said nothing. Most of what we know about it comes from Mendez’s own self-serving account, in which he comes off as an arrogant hothead who is still in denial about why he was fired. He actually believes CBS forced Letterman to fire him, which is patently absurd. Letterman owned his show, and it’s inconceivable that Mendez was fired without his approval.
I’ve never read any comments from Scheft either, but I do remember reading a blurb from Dave to the effect of, ‘Tony knows that’s not acceptable behavior’ or something similar. CBS didn’t force Dave to fire him, but Dave could have intervened and prevented it and he didn’t. To Mendez this probably seems like the same thing.
The key issue for me is other coworkers backed up his account of Scheft constantly interfering in their routine for no reason other than to provoke Mendez. No other head writer had ever done this because there was no reason to, and every reason not to. Scheft knew Mendez would only have two choices: One- Continue to be humiliated in front of his coworkers (what could he do? who could he complain to?) or Two- Stand up for himself and maybe get fired. It was a no-win situation for him, and Scheft knew it. And he deliberately made it happen.
And while I agree that pushing somebody physically in the workplace is not acceptable, that in and of itself IS NOT an ‘assault’. He wasn’t trying to hurt him. And the mitigating circumstances of Scheft’s repeated provocations more than makes up for it.