Money Matters, Simplified.
Jay Leno, David Letterman team up for Super Bowl spot
by Samia Sehgal - February 8, 2010 - comments
The beginning of the ad shows Dave sitting on a couch, and complaining: “This is the worst Super Bowl party ever.” The frame widens to include Oprah, sitting beside Dave on the same couch, who says, “Now Dave, be nice.”
Los Angeles, February 8 -- Super Bowl viewers were treated to a surprise on their screens last night. Late night rivals Jay Leno and David Letterman, along with Oprah Winfrey, shot together for a commercial promoting CBS's ‘Late Show with David Letterman.’
It was rather interesting since Leno and Letterman have recently been involved in a bitter fight relating to Conan O'Brien’s exit from NBC that again left ‘The Tonight Show’ with Leno. Letterman took a series of pungent shots on his arch rival, but CBS managed an apparently cordial commercial.
While Oprah played the intermediary between the two, everybody was left wondering how did it happen? Rob Burnett, executive producer of ‘The Late Show’, tells all in an interview with CNN:
“Dave got this idea. My first call was to Oprah -- she got it right away -- and then I called [CBS Corp. Chairman] Les Moonves to make sure he was OK with Jay being on CBS,” he told CNN.
After getting Moonves’ approval, Burnett approached Debbie Vickers, the executive producer of Leno’s show. On hearing the idea, Vickers was quite amused.
“'Dave and Jay, in the same room?' She laughed for a good minute and said Jay would want to call. I hung up, and two minutes later it was Jay. He said ‘This is the way show business should be’,” revealed Burnett.
The captivating commercial
Letterman and Winfrey had done a similar commercial in 2007, so it was a kind of follow-up for them – but with a considerable add on.
The beginning of the ad is similar to the previous one, with Dave sitting on a couch, and complaining: “This is the worst Super Bowl party ever.”
The frame widens to include Oprah, sitting beside Dave on the same couch, who says, “Now Dave, be nice.”
The frame is then widened further to include Leno, sitting next to Oprah on the other side. “He's just saying that cause I'm here,” says Leno in the commercial.
Shooting cordially
And how was the shoot with two rivals in one ad? “It was great,” says Burnett. “Very professional, very cordial.”
“There was no frostiness. We were focused on trying to execute the joke. It would have been a more taxing event had it been us all going out to dinner. If anything was awkward, it was how it wasn't awkward,” he said.