Heeeeere’s Johnny!

Carson’s late-night legacy is recalled in a hefty DVD box set

Midnight mirthmaking hasn’t quite been the same since gabfest kingpin Johnny Carson left the airwaves in 1992 after a 30-year run, triggering a conga line of supposed successors and would-be heirs that has often resulted in more headlines than one-liners. So the monster DVD box set Tonight: Four Decades of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (Respond2 Entertainment) returns viewers to a seemingly simpler time when guests kept moving themselves down the couch as new stars entered through the curtains to plug projects and get subjected to Carson’s bedside manner of grilling.

Some hardcore Carson fanatics may be annoyed that entire episodes are not available in this set; instead, abbreviated half-hour sections from 56 broadcasts are presented, with four cut-down shows per disc. Even so, that’s nearly 30 hours of material sprawled across 14 DVDs, stretching from a 1965 New Year’s show with Woody Allen and the Muppets to a 1990 segment with Bob Hope, plus a 15th disc with extras mostly culled from the 1960s, when a clueless NBC was still erasing videotapes of the show for reuse on other network series.

Jeff Sotzing is the curator of Carson Entertainment, the guy responsible for spearheading this video tribute, one of this year’s more conspicuous Christmas stocking-stuffers; Sotzing is also Carson’s nephew, and was part of The Tonight Show staff since the late 1970s. Sotzing has kept his uncle’s legacy alive through the website www.johnnycarson.com, where anybody can watch selected clips from the show, while broadcasters can get special privileges to access even more material. Sotzing spoke to the Syracuse New Times about the site, the box set and the many Tonight Show programs, which are not stored on Funk and Wagnall’s porch in a mayonnaise jar since noon today, but rather deep down a Kansas City salt mine that is 54 stories underground.

Q: You’ve obviously been to the salt mine. What is it like?

A: It’s a facility that was created by this company that actually mined salt and put it on the roads in your part of the country and they ended up with these giant caverns in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and then they said, “What can we do with this?” And because it was temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled, fireproof, flood proof--it’s encased in salt--I believe they initially stored magnetic computer tapes. And it just turned out to be a great place for us to put the entire Tonight Show library and we did that after Johnny retired in 1992. It’s pretty impressive. I went out there and you have to go down in a working mineshaft.

Q: What types of shows were you looking for that made the cut for the box set?

A: We were trying to find examples of shows that were entertaining from each decade that we were on. So there’s not very much material from the 1960s, but there are shows from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The show was originally 90 minutes and it was cut down to 60 minutes {in September 1980} and it has a different pace and feel throughout the years and I was hoping that these would be really entertaining examples of what the show looked like.

Q: The box set offers half-hour distillations of the 60- and 90-minute versions. Were there huge rights clearance issues? I mean, every time Doc Severinsen played a song, you probably had to pay X amount of dollars for that, right?

A: I think from a business sense you just have to calculate how much music you need to have and still make a buck.

Q: Are some of the live commercials in the box set, like Johnny and Ed McMahon doing an Alpo dog food spot?

A: They do not; that would have been a clearance nightmare. But if you go to the licensing site and you look at the shows, all the commercials are in there. An ad for Pong from 1981 is hysterical!

Q: Most of the shows from 1962 to 1972 are lost. So the Ed Ames tomahawk throw {from April 1965}, is that entire show gone except for that clip?

A: Yeah. NBC reused the {videotape} material, so they took the show after it aired and recorded over it for the NBC Nightly News or whatever else was on the air at the time.

Q: So they were doing this as the show was continuing. Did Johnny know this at the time?

A: No. When the show moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1972, they wanted to do a 10-year anniversary show and they said, “Let’s get this segment from 1962 and one from 1967 and one from 1968,” and guess what: It wasn’t there. There are a few shows that were saved--the Tiny Tim wedding {from Dec. 17, 1969, and seen by 35 million viewers} is one show--but there are less than a dozen.

If you were on the show in the 1960s and you wanted to have a copy, you’d have a film made, a kinescope, and you’d take that film home and pull out a 16mm projector and thread it up. So we found black-and-white negatives of those segments and that’s where the old clips with Ed Ames or Flip Wilson come from.

Q: Have there been attempts to reach out to private collectors who might have these kinescopes?

A: You know, every year when we did our anniversary show Johnny would make this plea and we just have not had any response.

Q: It’s weird that game-show producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman had the foresight to kinescope nearly all the episodes of What’s My Line? for 17 years and yet many Carson shows are gone. And it’s doubly weird because NBC was airing repeats of The Tonight Show during the AFTRA {American Federation of Television and Radio Artists} strike in spring 1967 {Carson famously walked off the show for several weeks when NBC aired the reruns without his consent, claiming the network violated his contract}. So they still had some episodes then.

A: Well, the Armed Forces Radio Network also broadcast the show on film and we always hope that maybe we’ll get a phone call from someone at a storage facility in Guam that has some Tonight Show episodes. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Q: What are your personal favorite shows?

A: I like people who came on who were really prepared, like Steve Martin, David Letterman and Bette Midler. But I’m also a big fan of things that just kind of happened and weren’t planned, like the woman with the rooster that was supposed to crow on cue and instead relieved itself on Johnny’s desk. {Carson’s response to his guest: “We didn’t bring him 1,800 miles so he could take a dump on my desk.”} It’s great, classic live television.

Q: Do you have the shows with the guest hosts?

A: There were not many that were kept, but we have some. Right when I started Burt Reynolds was one of the guest hosts, around 1977 or 1978.

Q: When Johnny came back to work after several weeks following the untimely passing of his son Richard {a car accident claimed the photographer’s life in June 1991}, it was heartbreaking to watch, especially when he was showing all the pictures that his son photographed at the end of the show. Doing that show must have been difficult for everyone.

A: It was really tough. I put those pictures together as a montage, which he didn’t want to do at the beginning of the show. (Long sigh.) He decided to just face it head on, and he did the monologue and the interviews--I think Magic Johnson was a guest--and there was a studio audience during the montage. But it was very, very tough.

Q: How is the website going? Sunday-morning news shows are using clips from 20-plus years ago, and those clips are still as funny and relevant as ever. It seems like politics never change.

A: We digitized all this material as part of our clip licensing site, and if you’re a broadcaster or are in the industry you can log on and search. In the case of The Chris Matthews Show, for example, they were doing stories on Gerald Ford and the recession and they got jokes on both subjects and used them in a montage. I just love it; it’s a great use of the material.

Q: Did Ed McMahon say “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” from the very beginning?

A: I’m pretty sure he did but I’d have to go back and listen to it. I’ve never been asked that question!

Q: After his 1992 retirement, did you know Johnny was writing jokes for David Letterman?

A: I did! In fact, he’d write them and actually dictate them over the phone to someone at Letterman’s show. He’d just do whatever came to his mind; he wasn’t like a staff writer. And Letterman would send him checks, so Johnny had a stack of checks that said, “Johnny Carson, joke writer, 59 dollars, one joke.”