Actor Bum Stinking on Goddamn Horse: The Talk Show Host as Actor

“A little less conversation, a little more action please.”

 - “A Little Less Conversation,” written by Mac Davis and Billy Strange

We used to call it water cooler chat, workplace talk on breaks about recent news - sports scores, political scandals, show biz buzz, the previous day’s TV shows, recent viral videos. We’re not so sure there are as many water coolers as there used to be - oases of gossip in break rooms - but one thing for sure is the talk goes on. And lately, there has been a lot of talk about talk show shakeups.

More or less squeezed out by NBC for the second, and last, time, Jay Leno hosted his final “Tonight Show” February 6, 2014, grumbling “I don’t like goodbyes. NBC does. I don’t care for them.” Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” from 2009 to 2014, took over the reins of “The Tonight Show” February 17. Subsequently, former “Saturday Night Live” head writer and snarky Weekend Update anchor Seth Meyers inherited Fallon’s old time slot on “Late Night.”

On April 3, 2014, David Letterman announced on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” that he would retire sometime in 2015. His contract with the network expires in August of that year. Seven days later, CBS named Stephen Colbert as Letterman’s successor. “The Colbert Report,” Stephen’s faux conservative news program, has remained a wildly popular staple on Comedy Central since its premiere in October 2005.

On April 28, 2014, Glasgow, Scotland-born comedian Craig Ferguson announced he would be leaving CBS’s “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” in December. David Letterman’s company, Worldwide Pants Inc., produces the program, which premiered January 3, 2005. Reportedly, Ferguson will host a syndicated game show called “Celebrity Name Game.”

Around the water cooler in the Moviehouse, talk about talk shows brings us to the anomaly of the talk show host as actor. Picture Jack Paar as Marilyn Monroe’s boyfriend, Steve Allen as a controversial professor exploring college students’ sexuality, Johnny Carson as a schmo with a knack for picking winners at the horse track, Merv Griffin as a serial killer, Jay Leno as a streetwise Detroit cop, Craig Ferguson as a pot-growing gardener, Jimmy Fallon as an inept undercover cop (not to mention Ann-Margret’s son), David Letterman as a gristly seaman…

 

The quintessential Steve Allen laugh: spontaneous and inimitable...

In his 1992 memoir Hi-Ho, Steverino, Steve Allen wrote, “Many of today’s talk show hosts…have a background of work in small comedy clubs. This is a sharp departure from what was common during the 1950s and ‘60s when Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas and I emerged; our group had come out of radio.”

Allen maintained, “My ambitions were concentrated fully on a career in radio comedy,” but he started dabbling in television by the late 1940s. In 1953, he created a local, late-night show for WNBC-TV in New York City. The next year, the show went on NBC’s national network as “The Tonight Show,” with Gene Rayburn as the original announcer, and Allen remained the host until 1957.

It was in 1956 that Steve Allen starred in “The Benny Goodman Story,” based on the life of the renowned jazz clarinetist and big band leader (who was still very much alive at the time, providing clarinet solos for the movie’s soundtrack). Cranked out by Universal Studios as a follow-up to “The Glenn Miller Story” (1954), starring James Stewart, the picture was a typical Hollywood whitewash. Little is made of the fact that Goodman was one of the first Big Band leaders to integrate his musicians, bringing in Fletcher “Smack” Henderson (played by Sammy Davis Sr.) as a pianist and arranger. The screenplay also glosses over Goodman’s Jewish heritage with a throwaway line by the musician’s mother, who tries to dissuade her son from a romance with a shiksa (Donna Reed) by saying, “Bagels and caviar don’t mix."

Steve Allen proves to Benny Goodman
that art doesn't always imitate life.

Bosley Crowther, The New York Times’ venerable reviewer, complained, “It is one of those dismal recitations of routine details by which a nice slum boy becomes a fabulous clarinetist, then the struggling leader of a band, then a top-notch swing impresario and then the winner of a high-society girl.” Observing Allen’s “stiffness” in the title role, Crowther noted. “He is so tense and taciturn – or so timid and temperate – that the only real personality he projects is that of an amiable wallflower.”

The “amiable wallflower” himself recalled, “Appearing in the picture was an adventure…because it gave me the pleasure of spending time with jazz musicians I had idolized as a schoolboy – Gene Krupa, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Harry James, and Ziggy Elman, as well as my contemporary Stan Getz.” It was the film’s music, “delivered in abundance and in the genuine Goodman style,” according to critic Bosley Crowther, “that makes the movie…at all worth seeing.”

During his final year as host of “The Tonight Show,” Steve Allen launched his equally successful “The Steve Allen Show,” which aired on various networks and in syndication until 1964. Allen somehow found the time in the midst of a hectic timetable to star in his second major motion picture, 1960’s “College Confidential,” as a courageous sociology professor accused of corrupting his students with surveys about the sexual lifestyles of the younger generation. Allen’s real-life wife, actress Jayne Meadows, portrayed an investigative journalist.

Exploitation producer-director Albert Zugsmith churned out this universally regarded camp classic to capitalize on the popularity of his earlier tabloidrama, “High School Confidential,” starring blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren, “West Side Story’s” Jet leader Russ Tamblyn, Drew Barrymore’s father John Drew Barrymore, Michael Landon, Charles Chaplin Jr., and rockabilly legend Jerry Lee Lewis. Steve Allen reportedly came on board in hopes of giving himself a rare opportunity to show off his acting chops in a non-comedic role.

Plucky reporter Jayne Meadows observes professor Steve Allen's dedication
to his research on college sexuality as he zooms in on typical campus coed
Mamie Van Doren in "College Confidential." Grade Z-movie entrepeneur
Albert Zugsmith tried his darnedest to transform buxom blonde bombsehll
Van Doren into the Drive-In Theater-Marilyn Monroe, giving her the spotlight
in "High School Confidential," "The Beat Generation," "Girls Town,"
"Sex Kittens Go to College," and "The Private Lives of Adam and Eve."

Jack Paar succeeded Steve Allen on “The Tonight Show” in 1957 and remained the host until 1962. Not unlike Allen, Paar started out as a radio announcer and comic disc jockey at a number of stations throughout the Midwest. During World War II, he was assigned to the U.S.O. to entertain troops in the South Pacific. His witty, sometimes crude wisecracks made him a hit with the soldiers but often riled commanding officers.

He returned to radio after the war, and in 1947, he was picked as the summer fill-in for comedian Jack Benny, whose mannerisms Paar would – just as Johnny Carson would – later emulate. Based on a fawning article in Esquire magazine about Paar’s stint as a wartime emcee, Howard Hughes’ RKO Pictures signed him to a three-year movie contract. He reportedly projected a pleasant personality onscreen, but filmmakers had difficulty figuring out what kind of characters he could play.

Sexy apartment neighbors Jack Paar and Marilyn Monroe in "Love Nest"

In his 1983 autobiography, P.S. Jack Paar, he recounted being cast in “Love Nest,” a 1951 romantic comedy: “I was to play the part of the sexy boyfriend opposite a new young starlet.” He remembered his costar, Marilyn Monroe, “as a handful and very difficult to know…She was always late and never knew her lines, yet everyone was very careful in their relationship with her.”

Paar admitted he was “quite surprised that this sad, shy, arrogant loner became a star.” He guessed the secret of what she “later dazzled the world with was something that ‘happened’ only on the screen. On the set she was just another Hollywood starlet, not as attractive as many and not as likable as most.”

 

Marilyn Monroe was late (typically) to pose with
Jack Paar for publicity photos for "Love Nest."
When she finally arrived, she went directly to the
telephone. Finally, Paar said, "Tell that broad to
get her peroxide butt over here - I am leaving in
half an hour." The photographer pleaded, "Come on,
Jack, you'll simply have to act like you like her...
Please help me!" Paar remembered, "So I hugged
and kissed her, bit her ear, breathed down her neck...
left the set, and never spoke to the poor darling again."

“After ‘Love Nest,’” Paar wrote in P.S., “there weren’t many film offers…I was up for a few important pictures, but Jack Lemmon always got them.” By the early 1950s, Jack Paar made the transition to television, hosting game shows.

 

Jack Paar interviews U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy
of Massachusetts on "The Tonight Show" in 1959.

In 1953, shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Johnny Carson hosted his first television show, “Carson’s Cellar,” a low-budget sketch comedy show. From 1955 to 1956, he hosted “The Johnny Carson Show,” a half-hour prime time variety program on CBS. In 1957, he hosted the daytime game show “Who Do You Trust?” on ABC, until he was hired by NBC to replace Jack Paar on “The Tonight Show” in 1962.

 

A rare gathering of the "Tonight Show" triumverate:
Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Jack Paar

The year 1957 saw Johnny Carson’s sole attempt as a dramatic actor, on the CBS live television anthology series “Playhouse 90.” Based on a chestnut of a play from the 1930s and directed by Arthur Hiller, “Three Men on a Horse” is a comedy about a timid, henpecked husband-bored greeting card verse writer named Erwin Trowbridge (Carson) who discovers he has the supernatural ability to pick winning race horses and ends up being abducted by a trio of unscrupulous horse players.

A quarter of a century later, when director Martin Scorsese was casting “The King of Comedy,” a darkly satirical tale of an aspiring standup comic (Robert De Niro) who stalks and kidnaps a popular talk show host, his first choice for the latter was, of course, Johnny Carson. Paul D. Zimmerman, who wrote the screenplay, said that part of the idea for the story was inspired by an article in Esquire “about a man who kept a diary in which he assessed each Johnny Carson show: ‘Johnny disappointed me tonight,’ he would write…I started to think about the connections between autograph-hunters and assassins. Both stalked the famous – one with a pen and one with a gun.”

In the 2003 book Scorsese on Scorsese, the director recalled, “Johnny wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘Listen, you know one take’s enough for me.’ I said it would be one or two takes at the most, but he knew what filming would be like.” (Scorsese subsequently considered Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop – the “Ocean’s 11” Rat Pack - before the part went to Dean’s onetime show business partner, Jerry Lewis.)

 

In "Looking for Love." Johnny Carson (as himself) interviews
aspiring singer Connie Francis on a "Tonight Show" set
apparently designed by aliens from "The Outer Limits."

Perhaps Johnny Carson’s disdain for motion picture acting stemmed from his cameo role as himself in 1964’s “Looking for Love,” a featherweight romantic comedy featuring chart-topping recording artist Connie Francis as a struggling singer whose career takes off after an appearance on “The Tonight Show.” Producer Joe Pasternak had “introduced” Francis three years earlier in “Where the Boys Are,” several costars from which pop up in “Looking for Love,” namely Jim Hutton, George Hamilton, Yvette Mimieux, and Paula Prentiss. Johnny Carson would joke that the movie was so bad that it was transferred to flammable film stock.

 

(Left) Johnny Carson as a royal herald in the 1968 epsiode "The King Lives?"
of "Get Smart"; (right) as the Guest Train Conductor in the 1965 "Get Smart"
episode "Aboard the Orient Express"...Mel Brooks, who created "Get Smart,"
with Buck Henry, reportedly asked Johnny Carson if he wanted to play the
Waco Kid in "Blazing Saddles," a role Brooks also allegedly offered John Wayne.

Johnny Carson did perform a couple of cameos for his pal Don Adams in the 1960s secret agent comedy series “Get Smart,” but they were self-aware winks at the audience. In 1966, Carson provided the charming narration for the Peabody Award-winning short “The World of Stuart Little.”

In 1993, a year after his retirement, Carson voiced himself in the final episode of the fourth season of “The Simpsons” titled “Krusty Gets Kancelled” (above), which also featured the voices of Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Midler, Betty White, Hugh Hefner, Luke Perry and members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

 

(Above) "The Merv Griffin Show"...(Insert your own caption here...)

Entertainment media mogul Merv Griffin, whose legacy lives on as the creator of game show icons “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune,” hosted “The Merv Griffin Show,” at various nighttime and daytime slots, from 1965 to 1986. His show business career started as a singer on radio at 19 in 1944. He later toured as a big band vocalist and had a chart-topping hit in 1949 with “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” (“There they are, all standing in a row / Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head…”).

After seeing Merv Griffin’s nightclub performance, Doris Day arranged for his screen test at Warner Bros., which led to supporting roles in such musicals as 1953’s “So This Is Love,” which stirred controversy when he shared an open-mouthed kiss with costar Kathryn Grayson. In his 2003 memoir Merv: Making the Good Life Last, Griffin noted, “At the time, it was a big deal. Really.”

Griffin, who appeared unbilled as a radio announcer in the 1953 giant dinosaur cult classic “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” portrayed a French medical student in 1954’s “Phantom of the Rue Morgue,” a loose adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe tale about a murderous orangutan, featuring Karl Malden’s over-the-top tour de force as a crazed zookeeper.

He was the unlikeliest of costars in a pair of westerns, “Cattle Town,” with “Gunsmoke’s” Amanda Blake and Rita Moreno, and “The Boy from Oklahoma,” with Will Rogers Jr., Lon Chaney Jr., and Slim Pickens, and directed by Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian-born filmmaker who made Errol Flynn a superstar in such movies as “Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and “The Sea Hawk.” When Griffin admitted to Curtiz that he needed practice to ride a horse, the director, in his thick East European accent, declared, “Anybody can ride, my daughter can ride, my wife can ride. Don’t be chicken. Get up there and do your job. You’re actor. Actors ride. Go be actor and ride.” After Griffin displayed his lack of equestrian skill, Curtiz grumbled, “Actor bum stinking on goddamn horse.”

It didn’t take long before Merv Griffin grew disillusioned with movies, and he bought out the remainder of his contract with Warner Bros. to concentrate on the new medium of television. In 1983, however, he made a triumphant return to the silver screen as the serial Elevator Killer in “The Man with Two Brains,” a mad scientist parody starring Steve Martin (who co-wrote the screenplay with George Gipe and director Carl Reiner), Kathleen Turner, and David Warner.

Merv Griffin as the Elevator Killer in 1983's "The Man With Two Brains":
"I've always just loved to kill. I really enjoyed it. But then I got famous, and -
it's just too hard for me - I mean, everybody recognized me. I couldn't even
lurk anymoe. I'd hear, 'Who's that lurking over there? Isn't that Merv Griffin?'
So I came to Europe to kill. And it's really worked out very well for me."

Like Merv Griffin, talk show host Mike Douglas started out as a big band singer, with Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. It was Kyser who gave the Chicago-born Michael Dowd Jr. his show business name, “Mike Douglas.” In 1950, Douglas dubbed the singing voice for Prince Charming in Disney’s animated classic “Cinderella.”

Mike Douglas welcomes Yoko Ono and John Lennon as his co-hosts.

“The Mike Douglas Show,” which originated as a daytime talk show in Cleveland before moving to Philadelphia and aired for two decades, from 1961 until 1981, became well-known for an eclectic array of weekly co-hosts, including Barbra Streisand, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Don Rickles, Cher, Rod McKuen, and Charlton Heston.

In 1976, Mike Douglas had a cameo role in “Gator,” a Southern-fried sequel to 1973’s good-ol’-boy action flick “White Lightning,” which pitted moonshine runner Burt Reynolds against redneck sheriff Ned Beatty. In the sequel, Douglas portrayed the governor of Georgia, who strong-arms paroled Gator McKlusky (Reynolds) into nabbing corrupt racketeer Bama McCall (Reynolds’ “Smokey and the Bandit” good buddy Jerry Reed). Roger Ebert dubbed “Gator” “yet another Good Ol’ Movie.”

First-time director Burt Reynolds directs
first-time actor Mike Douglas in "Gator."

As a college student, Oprah Winfrey landed a TV newscaster’s job at a Nashville affiliate of CBS. At 22, she accepted a news anchor position at a Baltimore station, where she remained for seven years before moving to Chicago to host a half-hour talk show, “AM Chicago.” Ratings soared, and Chicago-based movie critic Roger Ebert encouraged her to sign a syndication deal for the hour-long “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which began broadcasting nationally in 1986. Her program was soon drawing in twice the viewers of her Chicago daytime talk show rival, Phil Donahue, and the rest is history, as the Mississippi-born daughter of an unmarried teen mother transformed herself into the “Queen of All Media.”

Oprah Winfrey interviews David Letterman on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

No small part of Oprah Winfrey ’s success as the “Queen of All Media” was her seemingly innate desire to act. According to one biographer, Norman King, “She really wanted to be an actress – a person whose job it was to show emotion and to live a story. She never really wanted to be outside things that were happening, an observer equipped with cold-blooded objectivity.”

Oprah Winfrey made an auspicious screen debut in director Steven Spielberg’s sentimental take on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, earning an Oscar nomination for her performance as the abused, long-suffering Sofia. “The Color Purple” tied 1977’s “The Turning Point” for most Academy Award nominations – 11 – without a single win.

Oprah Winfrey as Sofia in "The Color Purple"

Oprah Winfrey subsequently acted in the socially conscious films “Native Son” (1986), based on the controversial 1940 novel by Richard Wright, and “Beloved” (1998) – which she also co-produced - based on Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker as
Gloria and Cecil Gaines in "The Butler"

In 2013, Oprah Winfrey starred opposite Forest Whitaker in the critically acclaimed “The Butler,” a depiction of an African American’s experiences during his 34 years as a White House butler. Loosely based on the life of the late Eugene Allen, the film featured a star-studded cast, including Mariah Carey, Vanessa Redgrave, Clarence Williams III, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lenny Kravitz, Robin Williams (as President Dwight D. Eisenhower), Liev Schreiber (as President Lyndon B. Johnson), James Marsden (as President John F. Kennedy), John Cusack (as President Richard Nixon), Alan Rickman (as President Ronald Reagan), and Jane Fonda (as First Lady Nancy Reagan). Oddly, the movie was completely overlooked when it came time for Oscar nominations.

A photo for "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" was a toss-up:
either a picture of Ferguson and robot sidekick Geoff or a picture of Ferguson
interviewing leggy Maggie Grace, Liam Neeson's costar in the "Taken" films...

Craig Ferguson’s show business career started in his native Scotland in music (as a drummer in a rock band called Exposure and then in the punk band The Bastards from Hell) and comedy theater. Two years after migrating to the U.S., he enjoyed small-screen success on “The Drew Carey Show” as the title character’s boss, Nigel Algernon Wick, a role he played from 1996 until the series’ finale in 2004. Ferguson exaggerated the man’s British accent to, in his own words, “make up for generations of…actors doing crap Scottish accents.” He particularly singled out James Doohan’s role as Scotty on “Star Trek” as the basis of for his “revenge.”

Brenda Blethyn and Craig Ferguson in "Saving Grace"

In 2000, Craig Ferguson co-produced and co-wrote “Saving Grace,” a singular comedy set in an English coastal fishing village, about a middle-aged widow, played by Brenda Blethyn (who won the Best Actress in a Motion Picture Golden Globe Award for her role in the 1996 drama “Secrets & Lies”), faced with financial ruin until her pot-smoking gardener (Ferguson) urges her to grow and sell marijuana to save her family home. (The character of an obstetrician in the movie inspired the popular British TV series “Doc Martin.”)

Charlotte Church and Craig Ferguson in "I'll Be There"

Ferguson made his directing debut in 2003, with the offbeat romantic comedy “I’ll Be There,” which he also wrote and starred in as a former rock star who discovers he has an adolescent love child (played by childhood classical singing sensation Charlotte Church) from a one-night stand in the 1980s. Jemma Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave’s niece, portrayed the mother of the Welsh teen who wants to follow in her father’s musical footsteps.

Craig Ferguson provided the distinctive voices of blacksmith Gobber the Belch (below) in the 2010 DreamWorks animated “How to Train Your Dragon” and the 2014 sequel, and of Lord Macintosh in the 2012 Disney-Pixar fantasy “Brave.”

In January of 2005, Craig Ferguson succeeded Craig Kilborn as host of CBS’s “The Late Late Show.” (Prior to “The Late Late Show,” the smarmy Kilborn was the original host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” until an off-color oral sex joke about the program’s head writer, Lizz Winstead, led to a suspension and speedy departure from the basic cable network. Kilborn made his acting debut as a nurse in a 1999 episode of the daytime drama “The Bold and the Beautiful,” but that’s a subject for a different time.)

Craig Ferguson had decided to leave “The Late Late Show” before David Letterman announced his imminent retirement but agreed to delay airing the news until reaction to Letterman’s decision died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler noted that Ferguson had “infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues on television.”

After winning an impression contest at a Poughkeepsie comedy club, Jimmy Fallon studied improvisation at The Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles, which led to an audition for “Saturday Night Live.” His knack for celebrity impressions landed him on the show as a featured player in 1998, and the following year, he moved up to full cast member.

Popular "SNL" Weekend Update news anchors Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon

In 2000, Jimmy Fallon had a small role in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s semiautobiographical “Almost Famous” and joined the ensemble cast of Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Stockard Channing, and Danny DeVito in Allen’s 2003 romantic comedy “Anything Else.” Fallon left “Saturday Night Live” in 2004, presumably to concentrate on his film career.

For this Ann-Margret came out of semi-retirement?
...to portray Jimmy Fallon's mother in "Taxi"?...

In 2004, Jimmy Fallon mugged his way through “Taxi,” a buddy cop comedy, as a bumbling detective paired with Queen Latifah as a hotshot cabbie who dreams of being a NASCAR racer. Despite being universally loathed by critics (Roger Ebert deemed it “wall-to-wall idiocy”), the movie was a box-office hit.

Then Boston outfielder Johnny Damon joins Jimmy Fallon
and Drew Barrymore in a staged photo for "Fever Pitch."

Fallon portrayed a diehard Boston Red Sox fan in 2005’s “Fever Pitch,” a sweet romantic comedy costarring Drew Barrymore and directed by Peter Farrelly and Robert Farrelly, brothers best known for raucous comedies like “Dumb and Dumber,” “Kingpin,” and “There’s Something About Mary.” Leonard Maltin called it “a departure from gross-out absurdism for the Farrelly brothers; the stars couldn’t be more likable.” Fallon and Barrymore reunited onscreen in Barrymore’s directing debut, 2009’s “Whip It,” a girl-power comedy-drama about a roller derby league, featuring Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, and Juliette Lewis.

Jimmy Fallon returned to the safety of television in 2009 as the new host of NBC’s “Late Night,” succeeding Conan O’Brien, who had assumed he had inherited “The Tonight Show” from Jay Leno, only to be rudely elbowed aside the following year when Leno wanted his toys back.

Before the "Late Night" wars, Jay Leno and David Letterman were best of friends.

Jay Leno, in his 1996 autobiography Leading with My Chin, noted, “I had no pretensions about becoming an actor, but other comics told me that I’d probably make a good character in commercials, TV shows, movies…” One casting agent, however, told him his face “could be frightening to children.” Leno retorted, “I’ve got nieces and nephews. I play with them and they’re not frightened.”

Fellow standup comedian Jimmie Walker got Leno a bit part on “Good Times,” as a man at a venereal disease clinic. He subsequently portrayed a “dumb and benign street-guy thug” on “Laverne & Shirley” and Mackenzie Phillips’ biker boyfriend on “One Day at a Time.” His first screen role (as a carpenter) came in 1977. “If you don’t blink,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I can be spotted in the George Segal-Jane Fonda movie ‘Fun with Dick and Jane.’”

Mookie puts the moves on Sheryl: Fran Drescher
and Jay Leno in "American Hot Wax"

In 1978’s “American Hot Wax,” a fictionalized portrait of noted, and notorious, Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, who popularized rock ‘n’ roll music in the 1950s (and who is credited with coining the phrase “rock ‘n’ roll”), Jay Leno played Freed’s chauffeur, Mookie, “a likable lug,” as described by Leno, “with the hots for Fran Drescher, who played the secretary.”

Leno remembered, “The director let us improvise a lot, which helped me expand my screen time with Fran…I grabbed her boobs, under the lame pretense of admiring her garments…Then she slugged me….We also had a big kissing scene.” In her 1996 memoir, Enter Whining, Fran Drescher recalled, “It was the best stage kiss I ever got. That Jay Leno is one damn good kisser. Maybe it has something to do with the chin.” Leno wrote, “Unfortunately, professional kissing was never much of a career option.”

Also in 1978, Jay Leno joined an ensemble cast that included Michael Caine, Cybill Shepherd, Louis Jourdan, David Warner, Martin Balsam, and Tom Smothers in a caper comedy called “Silver Bears,” directed by Ivan Passer, a European filmmaker often associated with Milos Forman in the Czechoslovak “New Wave” of the 1960s who defected to the West after the Soviet invasion in 1968.

"Silver Bears" costars Michael Caine, Jay Leno, Tony Mascia

After Passer had seen Jay Leno’s act at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles and approached him outside the club, Leno thought, “Uh-oh, not another one of these guys! Do I really look like a male prostitute?” Leno was cast as mob boss Martin Balsam’s son, “an extremely stupid thug,” in Leno’s words. The film featured dazzling international locations, but what Leno particularly recalled was, “Michael Caine and I hit it off from the start. More than anything else, we enjoyed playing tricks on Louis Jourdan, the great, classy French actor.” One memorable prank involved recording Leno’s voice for a pet parakeet doted on by Jourdan to seemingly repeat the phrase, “Louis is an asshole!”

“Americathon” (1979), a comedic misfire based on a play by Firesign Theatre members and narrated by George Carlin, featured John Ritter, Harvey Korman, Peter Riegert, Fred Willard, Chief Dan George, Meat Loaf, Elvis Costello, Tommy Lasorda, Howard Hesseman, Cybill Shepherd, and Jay Leno. “I played a guy who fights with his mother in the ring – boxing gloves and all…And yes, I decked her. Very funny script, but not a very good movie.”

“Mine would be a negligible film career,” Jay Leno remarked in his book, “but embarrassing evidence exists nonetheless.” Which brings us to “Collision Course,” a buddy cop comedy pairing Leno with Pat Morita (best known as Master Miyagi in the “Karate Kid” movies and as the owner of Arnold’s Drive-In on “Happy Days”).

Jay Leno is a wisecracking, ladies-man (yeah, right) cop in Detroit who teams up with fish-out-of-water Tokyo cop Pat Morita to track down a top secret Japanese prototype of an automobile turbocharger. Murder and mayhem ensue, not to mention a barrage of racist jokes about Morita’s character, including tasteless cracks about Kabuki Theater and Godzilla. Of course, Leno, being a noted car and motorcycle collector, gets to drive a glistening, black ’57 Corvette, and, in the almost-exciting chase climax, he races a motorcycle onto the streets of the Detroit Grand Prix, all accompanied by an ‘80s-disco, pseudo- “Beverly Hills Cop” score.

Buddy cop comedies have remained a rite of passage for comedians from the 1980s to the 2010s (see Jimmy Fallon, above, in “Taxi”): Eddie Murphy in “48 Hrs.”; Billy Crystal, “Running Scared”; Jim Belushi, “Red Heat”; Joe Piscopo, “Dead Heat”; Dan Aykroyd, “Loose Cannons”; Martin Lawrence, “Bad Boys”; Whoopi Goldberg, “Theodore Rex” (don’t ask); Adam Sandler, “Bulletproof”; Chris Tucker, “Rush Hour”; Will Farrell, “The Other Guys”; Tracy Morgan, “Cop Out”; Kevin Hart (Chris Tucker’s heir apparent), “Ride Along.”

You know they don't like each other, you know they're going to be pals...
Pat Morita and Jay Leno bond over the buddy cop comedy ritual of
getting drunk together in "Collision Course."

The aptly titled “Collision Course” was actually shot three years before its 1989 release. At least five directors, at one time or another, worked on the troubled production, including Bob Clark (“A Christmas Story,” “Porky’s”), John Guillermin (the 1976 “King Kong”), and longtime Hollywood journeyman Richard Fleischer (“The Vikings,” “Fantastic Voyage,” “The Boston Strangler,” “Amityville 3-D,” “Conan the Destroyer”). The director who ended up with onscreen credit was Lewis Teague, whose résumé includes “Cujo,” “The Jewel of the Nile,” and “Navy SEALS.”

When Pat Morita appeared on “The Tonight Show” in 1989, with Jay Leno guest-hosting for Johnny Carson, the two recalled that the production had run out of money on the last day of shooting, with key scenes left to be filmed and no budget for editing or post-production. Clips from the film were often played for laughs on “The Tonight Show,” “The Late Show with David Letterman,” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Leno made no secret that he hated the movie and was embarrassed that he ever agreed to be in it.

Speaking of secrets, it was no secret that Johnny Carson unofficially ordained David Letterman as his successor on “The Tonight Show,” even though Jay Leno had served as Carson’s permanent guest host for a number of years. In his retirement, Carson occasionally appeared on Letterman’s show in taped comedy bits and as a guest, as well as regularly sending Letterman jokes for his monologues; Carson never visited “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

In a rare post-retirement appearance, Johnny Carson brought his own,
prop fold-out host desk as a guest of Devid Letterman's.

David Letterman has always been an acquired taste. You either like him or you don’t. In his high school yearbook, his classmates at Broad Ripple High voted him “Class Smart Aleck.” He started his broadcasting career at a Ball State University student-run radio station, where he was fired for treating classical music with flippant irreverence. His stint as a weatherman on an Indianapolis TV affiliate of NBC was marked by on-air unpredictability. He congratulated a tropical storm for being upgraded to a hurricane. He predicted hail “the size of canned hams.” He announced, “From space you can see the border between Indiana and Ohio has been erased – I’m not in favor of this.”

Lasting all of 90 episodes, NBC’s daytime “The David Letterman Show” aired from January to October of 1980.  Guests included Steve Allen, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis, Dinah Shore, and Judy Collins. Despite the talk show’s brief lifespan, it won two Daytime Emmy Awards, for Outstanding Host and Writers.

The previous year, 1979, David Letterman made a rare acting appearance, on a first-season episode of the Robin Williams-Pam Dawber sitcom “Mork & Mindy,” portraying an arrogant, est-style self-help guru who turns out to be a hypocritical fraud.

Tom Poston confronts David Letterman in "Mork Goes Erk." 

In 1977, David Letterman was turned down for a role as a news reporter in the sketch comedy film “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” scripted by Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker. Letterman unsuccessfully auditioned for the part of Ted Striker, the unlikely heroic aviator in 1980’s “Airplane” (written and directed by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers), a role that went to Robert (“Whatever happened to…?) Hays. As a guest on NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman,” Jerry Zucker brought the tape of Letterman’s “Airplane” screen test. Reportedly, Letterman was not amused.

Not one to be discouraged, David Letterman ultimately made his big-screen splash in 1994’s “Cabin Boy” (above), a skewed seaworthy saga starring Chris Elliott. Elliott, like David Letterman, is an acquired taste. One either gets him or doesn’t get him. On NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman,” Elliott literally popped up in various guises – as “The Guy Under the Seats,” “The Fugitive Guy,” “The Conspiracy Guy,” “The Panicky Guy.”

Chris is the son of Bob Elliott, half of the legendary comedy team Bob and Ray (Goulding), whose five-decade career of deadpan, off-the-wall interviews encompassed radio, television, theater, and recordings. Bob Elliott portrayed Chris’ father on “Get a Life,” a surrealistic, often unsettling sitcom about a 30-year-old paperboy. The shortlived Fox Network series was created by Chris Elliott, David Mirkin (the director of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion”), and Adam Resnick, a “Late Night with David Letterman” writer who scripted and directed “Cabin Boy.”

A delirious goof on Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, Homer’s The Odyssey, and Voltaire’s Candide. “Cabin Boy” was co-produced by Tim Burton, a fan of “Get a Life,” who was going to direct the movie before he was offered “Ed Wood.”

The crew of The Filthy Whore welcomes aboard a world record-setting trans-global
swimmer in "Cabin Boy": Ritch Brinkley as Captain Greybar, Brian Doyle- Murray as
Skunk ("Kid,we're just here to catch fish and stink!"), the late Brion James (best known
as the replicant masquerading as a waste disposal engineer in "Blade Runner") as
Big Teddy, Melora Walters (Bill Paxton's venomous sister-in-law Wanda Henricksen
on HBO's "Big Love") as Trina, Chris Elliott as the titular cabin boy, Nathanial
Mayweather, and the late James Gammon (gravel-voiced Cleveland Indians manager
Lou Brown in the "Major League" films) as Paps ("You've been the drunken,
abusive grandfather I never had")..."One big happy, pungent, dysfunctional family."

“Cabin Boy” still bears Burton’s unmistakable imprint, particularly in the strange, intentionally cheesy production design, the eye-popping color schemes right out of a child’s storybook, and an eclectic assortment of odd characters: Calli, a blue-skinned, six-armed seductress (performance artist Ann Magnuson) who cleans Elliott’s pipes; Calli’s jealous husband Mulligan, a giant in a white-collar suit (Mike Starr, a hulking presence known for menacing roles in “Goodfellas,” “Dumb & Dumber,” and “The Ice Harvest”); Chocki, half-man, half-shark, “a complete gentleman” (Russ Tamblyn, best known for his roles as Riff in “West Side Story” and as Dr. Jacoby in “Twin Peaks”), and the ship’s expressive figurehead (Emmy Award-winning television host Rikki Lake).

Andy Richter, Conan O’Brien’s longstanding sidekick, is a hilarious scene-stealer as the stone-faced Kenny, an ill-fated “human tree stump” of a first mate whose dying words are, “Tell the captain we’re out of margarine.” Alfred Molina appears unbilled as Elliott’s professor at the finishing school for “fancy lads,” and Bob Elliott wears a ridiculous wig as Chris’ father at film’s end.

"Would you like to buy a monkey?" The Old Salt in Fishing Village delightedly
rattles off a litany of girlie names for the periwig-pated Chris Elliott, including
"honey," "Jennifer," little girl," and "Suzy"..."Man, oh man, do I hate them fancy boys!"

As for the Old Salt in Fishing Village, David Letterman, who is listed in the credits as Earl Hofert (the name of his maternal grandfather), used the pseudonym as the voice of a Motley Crue roadie in “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.” He appeared as himself in the movies “Private Parts” and “Man on the Moon,” as well as on the TV sitcoms “Murphy Brown,” “The Nanny,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Seinfeld,” and "Spin City.

Postscript:

OK, it doesn’t count as acting, but outside of the box, David Letterman was featured in the pages of a couple of comic books from the 1980s. In a 1984 issue of Marvel’s “The Avengers,” the title characters appeared as guests on “Late Night with David Letterman.”

Frank Miller’s 1986 comic book series “The Dark Knight Returns” featured a spot-on parody of Letterman in the character of David Endochrine, who, along with his bandleader, Paul, and the studio audience, is gassed to death by the Joker.

Post-Postscript:

On May 13, 2013, 84-year-old Barbara Walters announced her retirement from television hosting and interviewing, while continuing to serve as executive producer of the daytime hen party “The View.” Seemingly, her acting experience didn’t extend beyond interviewing Sully, the hardhat Muppet, on “25/25,” a 25^th anniversary Sesame Street takeoff of Barbara Walters’ TV newsmagazine show “20/20.”