[QUOTE=kunilou
So yes, it was an orchestrated career move – with her Broadway production of The Color Purple opening across the street, I don’t doubt she would have appeared on a talk show hosted by Hitler.
[/QUOTE]
Yes- because if this thing flops, she’ll never be a success. :rolleyes:
Maybe she’s just been busy.
Maybe it’s because she didn’t know what tack Letterman would take with her. She can handle herself, but if Letterman was going to be sarcastic or try and make comedy out of something that was important to her, she’d have to be sarcastic right back. That’s not how she wants to be perceived.
She and Letterman are quite different. She treats all her guests with respect, even those who we might think don’t deserve respect (wife beaters, airhead fashion models, child abusers, rich spoiled brats, Tom Cruise). Letterman doesn’t. You’ll never be ambushed on Oprah, unless it’s for a makeover. You can’t trust Letterman.
Plus, has she gone on any talk shows since she became so popular and powerful?
There’s also another anecdote that supposedly feeds into this “feud”. Years ago Oprah and Dave happened to coincidentally be dining at the same restaurant in Florida… very chi-chi, very expensive place. They didn’t really know each other personally and apparently acknowledged each other’s presence with little more than a wave and a smile across the room.
When Dave and his party were ready to leave, he instructed the waiter to give Oprah his “tab” and stuck her with his bill. She apparently let it be known that she didn’t appreciate his wise-ass moves and made something of a public issue of the matter, at least among the show-biz crowd. Dave subsequently apologized and made up for the money involved, as well as a token gift to Oprah.
Oprah always felt put-upon by her previous appearances with Dave on the NBC show; she didn’t appreciate being the “butt” of his jokes and wasn’t ready to be anyone’s comedic foil. On the other hand, she was among the first to acknowledge the birth of Letterman’s son with a gift of a large number of children’s books. He’s mentioned his appreciation for this gesture numerous times.
I really doubt that “feud” properly characterizes the situation between the two of them. It’s more likely a case of two very different personalities with a fair amount of discomfort with and some fear of each other. Dave is notorious as a “loner” and even describes himself as anti-social. He values his own (and his family’s) privacy to the point of being thought by others as being dysfunctional.
-Richard
From the New York Times story about it:
I’m with kunilou; I thought it was brilliant TV. Dave has on occasion done these Grand Gestures and managed to not make himself look like an ass (remember the late-80s New Year’s Eve show when he rode out of the theater on a white horse?); I was charmed by his walking her down the street to the premiere of the show.
Was it a PR gimmick? Of course it was. I see wrong with that. It would be asinine and offensive for Dave to act like some kind of “outsider” at this point in his career, when he’s one of two dominant figures in late-night TV, and one of the most powerful people in show business (along with Oprah). He’s a big shot, and he knows it, and I think he handles it well and doesn’t try to play “aw-shucks” about it.
On preview, I should clarify: He’s changed the nature of his satire over the years. Now he satirizes people who make it big and still try to act like outsiders.
(By the way, on an interesting but only semi-related note, Roger Ebert wrote a column a few weeks ago about his relationship with Oprah, called How I gave Oprah her start.)
I saw her on Leno a few times.
Can you help me understand something from the article?
I don’t understand what Oprah is asking Roger, and why she chooses King World over ABC:
If ABC can “keep you on” because they “own themselves,” why does she choose King World? And was she asking whether she should go into sydicated television, or just which network to go to? Because if the latter is true, then Roger didn’t really do jack…
The story about the feud that Dave has told dozens of times is that when The Late Show did a week of shows from Chicago many years ago, they invited Oprah to be a guest. She declined (perhaps because of her previous experience on Late Night), reportedly telling Dave, “I am totally out of town that week.” Although Dave has never said so, I have always assumed that he knew that she wasn’t really away, but just didn’t want to come back on the show. From this he gathered, and said often, that she hated him.
I will now reveal what I have always assumed was the inspiration for the “Uma, Oprah” bit. I recognized it immediately during the Oscar broadcast, but I have never heard anyone else cite the connection to it.
Thomas Meehan wrote a short humorous article called “Yma Dream” in the New Yorker in 1962, before going on to write The Producers and Annie. In it he recounts a nightmare in which he is hosting a party with a strange collection of guests, celebrities of the day–Yma Sumac, Ava Gardner, Abba Eban, Oona O’Neill, and others–that he must introduce to one another: “Oona, Yma; Oona, Ava; Oona, Abba,” and so forth. It’s very witty. (You can hear Christine Baranski reading it here.)
I have little doubt that Dave knew this piece and was doing his own update on it when he saw Uma and Oprah in the first row.
For this reason I have always liked the “Uma, Oprah” bit, but apparently I was the only one. I liked Dave (and still do) and enjoyed his hosting of the Oscar show, but there, too, I seem to have been in the minority. At 50 years old, I’ve gotten used to this.
I believe syndication is where you basically sell a TV show to a network as opposed to producing a show specifically for a network. Since King World is an independent studio it allows her to syndicate the show to ABC making a bunch of money.
One article I read about the “feud” said that there never was any between Letterman and Oprah, that he wouldn’t have joked about her all this time unless there was “love” there. The article pointed out that Letterman never jokes about Leno, with whom there is genuine animosity.
As for the King World vs. ABC decision, Ebert pointed out that ABC was the safer choice for Oprah, since they could guarantee her show appeared on their own stations, but King World could not guarantee any stations, but offered the possibility of making a lot more money. And clearly going with King World has been enormously profitable for her. (I remember when Phil Donahue was the dominant talk show host, and he never made anywhere near the kind of money Oprah has made over the years.)
Say what? Dave jokes about Leno all the time! Of course, it’s most frequently in the form of putting down his own show, but Dave refers to Leno as part of a joke a couple times a week usually.
I saw this morning that the Oprah appearance had 13.5 million viewers. About 4 times Dave’s regular audience.
That’s because Oprah’s audience is all brainwashed.
Did Oprah announce on her show that she’d be appearing on Letterman?
Somebody must have pimped it (Inside Edition or Entertainment Tonight) – that’s quite a jump in viewer numbers.
She wasn’t asking anything, really. She had mentioned to Roger that she was considering an offer from ABC. He took it upon himself to scribble out the numbers and show them to her. The advantage of syndication is that she still owns the show. The syndicate merely owns a license to sell the show. With ABC, she would have been an employee.
Around the height of my Letterman-watching (circa 1998) Dave would rarely mention Leno. I recall hearing one reference to him and being somewhat shocked to hear it. Nowadays, it seems like he jokes about Leno more often.
On Letterman’s first show back from heart surgery, one of his monologues jokes explained that he had a quadruple bypass (or whatever) surgery…
“A bypass… that’s also, coincidentally, what happen with me before with the <i>Tonight Show</i>.”