‘Late Shift’: It Isn’t Over Until It’s Over

“The Late Shift,” HBO’s movie about the backstage wranglings of Jay Leno, David Letterman and a gaggle of slick-suited executives over who would succeed Johnny Carson as host of NBC’s “Tonight Show,” was supposed to end where Bill Carter’s 1994 book did: with Letterman losing the battle but winning the war with his rival show on CBS.

Reportedly, the initial draft of the script finished with the declaration that the NBC executives who made the decision to go with Leno over Letterman had cost their network about $500 million.

But just as “The Late Shift” crew finished shooting the picture late last summer, the truth fell out from under the ending. Leno halted Letterman’s two-year winning streak and moved into first place, where he has remained. To boot, his show won the Emmy last September for best variety program.

In accepting the trophy, Leno quipped to a national TV audience: “I guess they’re going to have to change the ending of that movie.”

And so they did. In a way.

“The problem one always has in telling this kind of true story is that it doesn’t have a neat finish. Things change,” said Ivan Reitman, the executive producer of the film, his first for television. “The major story of the movie was who got the job taking over for Carson and how that came to be. And that was a fixed event in television history that Bill Carter documented and we tried to re-create.

“But after that, Carter and I were struggling with a proper way to finish the film, something that would give it a sense of ending, of the consequences to these events. And we always thought it should be some kind of coda that would bring us up to date, and we waited until just about a month ago to lay that out specifically.”

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Reitman, the director and/or producer of such blockbuster features as “Ghostbusters” and “Twins,” insisted that there was never any intention of shooting a definitive ending with actors, one that might have to be scraped and redone if the ratings situation changed. The drama ends with NBC executives Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia watching Letterman’s first press conference at CBS in January 1993 and hoping they hadn’t made the wrong decision. Then there is a wrap-up: Over pictures of each major player, there is a written explanation of what has happened to them since.

That’s where the dig at NBC’s lost revenue was to have gone. But now, thanks to Leno’s success and the network’s soaring prime-time performance, the caption reports that Littlefield and Agoglia have kept their jobs and NBC’s profits have risen to a record $700 million.

Through an NBC spokeswoman, Littlefield and Agoglia declined to comment on their depiction in the film.

But neither Letterman nor Leno has been reticent with their own barbs. Although Leno mostly has been “indifferent” to the matter and has no intention of watching the movie, his spokesman said, he did react rather negatively to the way the actors who played both him (Daniel Roebuck) and Letterman (John Michael Higgins) looked on screen.

“From the pictures I’ve seen, they don’t look like us or even real people as much as they do members of the Duracell family,” Leno said through his spokesman, a reference to the shiny figures used in battery commercials.

Letterman, who has been on the publicity circuit recently to tout his prime-time special on CBS earlier this week, went even further. He called the whole thing “moronic” and “the biggest waste of film since my wedding photos.” He also scoffed at the fact that the film depicted him with red hair when he in fact isn’t a redhead.

“Couldn’t they get a picture or a piece of video?” he asked in an interview with “Entertainment Tonight.” “It’s not like I’ve been in the trunk of a car in Guatemala for the last 15 years.”

He added, however, that he felt grateful compared to what he had seen of the way the movie represented Leno. “Elephant man,” he quipped.

Reitman responded that such reactions are inevitable.

“These guys make fun of people on every show that they do, and I figured they would have to deal with this in some kind of humorous way,” he said. “It’s tough, I’m sure, for them, because no one wants to see themselves portrayed on television in any film, especially in a piece that is funny and satirical like this is. But I thought we did pretty good at getting these actors to look like those guys. I mean, Leno and Letterman are extraordinary talents, both of them, and it’s very hard to find that in anyone.”