hello I'm merrill markoe and i was the head writer on late night with david letterman which was the
nbc iteration of the letterman show when it started in 1982. we had a four-month pilot which
was the live morning show so we had a lot of ideas for the way the show was going to go right off the
bat so as the head writer i was also in charge of remotes which we did every week and i needed to
find places all around the city of new york where we would take the camera one way that i did that
was i actually sat and read the manhattan yellow pages for people who don't know what the manhattan
yellow pages are there used to be a thing called a phone book and it was the internet basically it
had everything in the city of new york listed in the manhattan yellow pages so i would go through
and just circle things that i'd never seen on tv before and then i would drag dave and the cameras
there on fridays what we looked for were repeat segments that we could do over and over again
or interesting people or just commentary that we can make about this the city of new york in
the last several years much has been said and written about alan alda the tv star and the
film star the motion picture director writer humanitarian champion of minority causes but
surprisingly enough we know very little about allen alda a guy who likes chinese food that's why
we're here at the hunan park restaurant what kind of food does he enjoy he likes stream beans and
he likes a cold noodle with a sesame sauce fried dumpling most food we have he liked it very much
well it's no secret that the newest pastime sweeping this country in 1982 is uh
somebody names a celebrity somebody else tries to guess what kind of business machine or typewriter
he or she uses walter cronkite i'm i'm just guessing here a manual i would assume so i'm
not really familiar with his particular machine okay this is melba moore and uh i guess from this
photograph it looks like she's just ready to type right there huh yeah she does celebrities
in their dry cleaning special problems how do they handle it that's why we're here at
the dupont dry cleaners now this was a pretty exciting paul newman that he don't come in here
but the two ladies of the rhythm do they're two janet and louise arters yeah they appeared in a
film with them and they bring in quite a bit of cleaning also there are celebrity restaurants in
town like the uh burger joint what about donnie most what can you tell me about his burger order
remember what he had i don't remember the names you know
you know masonry though he still comes in right
i told you i don't remember the names frederick seldman better known as the
mattress king is there a mattress queen yes there is there are also two princes
lumber boys very popular uh saturday morning kids program uh henry you're one of the lumber
boys what's the funniest thing that's happened to you since you've been uh with the company
last week my boss used that high low to take off some particle board off that same identical
truck and the particle board came off into the street my boss went up in the air and came down
is he still alive yeah he's still alive he had a little hemorrhoid problem but he made it all right
and uh you're so you're proud to be one of these uh lumber boys
no comment okay richard uh tell us about this one the fabulous section will lift bowling ball
here
yeah that's pretty impressive excuse me sir uh are you here to see the world's largest humidor
our largest one world's largest humidor have you ever seen the world's largest humidor no i haven't
any interest in that none whatsoever happy's parking lot
the happiest parking lot in town you happy no i'm eddie if you're eddie and this is happy's
parking lot where is happy he's about six feet under he died about ten years ago
the name of the store is just bulbs and that's exactly what we sell just bulbs okay so besides
bulbs what do you have here nothing how about shades could you get shades here no
we are just bulbs if you want shades maybe going places called just shades we sell nothing but mine
what uh what is the name of the store just shades
and uh what what can you get in here what can you get in here all these shades that's why that's
why our name is just shades but seriously what what can you get besides shades here
so i got completely geared around seeing all of new york as a potential talk show segment
one thing that was taking place on local news when the show started was an ongoing expose
about corruption called shame of the city and so we did a parody of that some of it was just stuff
that i saw on the way to work and we we we fitted into that four match not everyone survives in this
urban battlefield we call new york city this combination cityscape and war zone the crowded
landscape has claimed another gentle victim yes say goodbye to the once plentiful majestic pine
tree i'm here at 52nd and park once a thickly wooded forest right here in manhattan now
everywhere are the dead trees cut down in their prime victim of some mysterious blight was it
pollution maybe overcrowding perhaps forced out by too many delicatessens no one seems to know what's
killing our trees there are no simple answers only simple questions and simple people like myself to
ask them it's truly the shame of the city new york city center of culture of wealth of power
and victim of one of the highest crime rates in the history of mankind a crime rate that continues
to climb and shows no sign of stopping and you have to ask yourself is it really any wonder
when you take a look at the police department a population of 10 million and this is the police
department it's shocking horrifying tragic and yet nothing is being done about it excuse me sir
do you work here yes i do are you the only one who works here yes i am unbelievable yet it's true
i used to really look forward to when there were conventions coming into new york city
for instance there was the fancy food convention and then there was a repeat inventor's convention
my very favorite of all of the things that were as ever in the convention was this guy
who invented something called the casket alarm life detector to avoid being embalmed or buried
alive could you ask roberto um does this happen a lot uh yes uh he told me to tell you that he was
buried alive three times he got a little worried about it so now he develop this idea and uh it has
uh proved to be of a great interest to a lot of people after the third time that you were
buried alive it must have got to be annoying huh not just the mind it's the most terrible
feeling that you might experience you might you start carrying a card with you that just
says i'd kind of like another opinion one final question i can understand being buried alive once
you know sure everybody's going to make a mistake or even twice you know somebody's looking the
other way they close the lid but uh three times how how has it had happened to him three times he
says this is something that he can't explain just a run of bad luck then just to run above you well
congratulations on the invention and better luck to you another thing that was fun for
me when the show first started is we tried out a lot of conceptual stuff which i really enjoy
this was a segment which we did on the very first show and then we did a whole bunch of them with
different occupations i was calling it limited perspective and i got the idea from listening to
my relatives review movies which is that you know one of them who was a plumber would say
well you know yeah i like dt but god the plumbing in the second act was horrible
so we started bringing on people with a real specific point of view to review movies this
was the first one was a dentist reviewing the movie reds tonight i'd like you to meet
a dentist from here in new york city dr norman hoffman dr hoffman has been practicing dentistry
since 1946. we asked dr hoffman to attend warren beatty's new movie reds and let us know how it
looked from the dentist point of view how about diane keaton diane keaton has a high lip line
and she's showing a lot of teeth and gingiva
her two front central teeth are slightly elongated pretty much ruined the film for you
and it went all the way through to i think the the final one we did was a martial arts
expert reviewing gandhi uh first of all bill did you enjoy the film well i enjoyed it very
much uh how about from uh the point of view of a self-defense instructor well from a point of view
from self-defense instructor i thought it was i didn't like it at all i thought there was a lot
more that he could have done could have broken a few arms cracked a few heads okay uh let's take a
look at some still photographs from the production first of all gandhi himself could not really be
described as a heavyweight could he oh no he was he was a big man in a little body uh one of the
things that he he had in his favor was that uh he could have used the weight of the opponent
and use the the weight advantage so it's really not a disadvantage to be small uh-huh and also
being a pacifist he had the element of surprise on his yeah he did he did okay now uh one of the
most dramatic scenes i guess in the in the movie is uh takes place uh on a sidewalk in south africa
uh a conference confrontation between gandhi and some other gentlemen
yes well i like to demonstrate a move which he could have done okay all right uh uh hey gandhi
uh get off the sidewalk well there's room in the world my friend for both of us i said get off
the sidewalk i said there's room in the world for both of us okay and i i said get off the sidewalk
well that was fun
i'm fine i'll be i'll just i'll be fine thank you very much well thank you very much for that
insightful review bill thank you certainly enjoyed that perhaps they can use that for the sequel
um another segment that i i still think i've sort of fondly was a weird idea that i had called test
the sensors because we were always in trouble with the sensors for doing a little too much of
one thing or another we had a rule book we had to go by that said you couldn't do this this
this and such i mean obviously you couldn't show bare breasts and stuff like that and by the way
i can't get over the show euphoria where it's like dicapalooza there's penises in every frame
of euphoria but they wouldn't let us say the word orgasm in this segment what my idea was to just
do a bunch of things for the studio audience that broke every rule in the rulebook that the
sensors were working by and then just let the sensor censor it and then just put it on the
air so you could see what the sensors took out of things now our next category is one we call plugs
and slanders paul what did you have for lunch today uh well i had uh chicken and uh a lot i had
and uh i had uh and uh paul what about the that was a disappointment uh it was like lead it was
oily it was full of carcinogens this brings us now to our next test category graphic sexual material
what life forms can be shown mating on television
our first clip involves one celled sex between a paramecium and itself this is one celled sex
we'll see if we can get one celled sex we'll see if we can't get by with this there it is
okay
next we have bunny and the bedroom slipper
another segment that we did in an ongoing way that i used to enjoy writing was called etiquette
segments and we did a lot of those we everything you could ever think of that you ever did in
the course of the day we eventually made into an etiquette segment it started with something called
elevator etiquette and it i think it ended with one called lifeboat etiquette one of my favorites
of them was called job interview etiquette which you i have a little guest appearance in at the
front of it what really endeared me to it is calvert de forest or larry bud millman as you
may remember him really went the distance and committed at the end when he was
required to sing and dance now then why did you leave your last job the earliest arab
civilization emerged at the end of the second millennium in the watered highlands of yemen
rule number two listen carefully to the questions and answer only the question
you were asked thank you we'll give you a call did i say the second millennium
i meant the third millennium fine thank you very much rule number six oh excuse me
rule numbers
rule number six what an ugly family is that your family is that your wife she must be very rich
don't insult the interviewer's family thank you we'll keep your
resume on file and if there are any openings we'll certainly let you know
don't give me that you can't rush me off that easy
rule number seven don't touch the interviewer especially if you're this guy
i'm sorry that i touched you but you have to understand to fill your new position you'll
never find a better man and finally rule number eight break into song only as a last resort
i used to work in michigan at an automotive plan
i thought i could live on the salary but now i find my cats but never under any circumstances
and dance you don't all just stay here and dance and dance and
dance we're going to pause we'll be right back
i'd like to make a note of the fact that this is the last wardrobe change i'll be doing so so
enjoy it the last segment i'm going to show is called dog poetry and it was my dog stan
reciting a poem that i wrote for him called summer and here's what's weird is we were at the time
this was 1982 we were perhaps the beginning of dog videos because there wasn't anybody else on
television with access to cameras and editing equipment and an obsession with dogs that just
didn't exist there weren't cell phones people didn't have home editing bays on their desktops
so uh so we were making them before people were making them and now the rest is history
when the thing was first assembled the host of the show was less than enthusiastic about it and
didn't really want to air it so i slipped it into the show under a segment called
things you will never see on the show and it played really well and uh and then the
host started to like it better let me read you a letter we received recently from from monroe
michigan dear dave we've all heard of your dog bob and of course we've all seen his terribly creative
films but what about your other dog what's his name well his name is stan thanks for asking has
he made any films we might have seen and it comes to to us from diane and jessica martin from monroe
michigan well no and this is what we prepared took a look at and decided no we're not going
to show it but tonight we're going to show it to you no stan hasn't made any films stan's specialty
is poetry let's take a look now at some fine dog poetry
yes
little dog poetry
you