Tonight Show: The Pre and Early History
Tonight Show: The Pre and Early History
This short clip is from the opening of the very first episode of ‘Tonight’ with Steve Allen. It explains a lot so take a look.
‘Tonight’ began on the NBC network in September 27, 1954, and originated from the Hudson Theater at 141 West 44th Street in midtown Manhattan. The announcer was Gene Rayburn and the bandleader was Skitch Henderson. For most of 1953, Allen had been doing ‘The Steve Allen Show’ locally on NBC’s, WNBT which is where network president Pat Weaver saw the show. Allen had developed what became the ‘late night’ format that included the audience, interviews, music and comedy in Los Angeles on his CBS radio show.
In 1953, his local show on WNBT came from an NBC studio on 67th Street and later Studio 6B at 30 Rock. When the show went to an NBC network show in September of ’54, it moved to the Hudson Theater. In 1956, NBC offered Allen a new, prime-time, Sunday night variety hour, ‘The Steve Allen Show’, aimed at dethroning CBS’s top-rated The Ed Sullivan Show. For a while, Allen was doing both shows, but using guest host Ernie Kovaks on Monday and Tuesday on Tonight. At the end of ’56, Allen left Tonight to give more attention to his Sunday night show. From January of ’57 till June 21, 1957, ‘Today’ sidekick Jack Lescoulie did an entertainment and news formatted show called ‘Tonight-America After Dark. From June 24 till July 26, Al ‘Jazzbo’ Collins was the host.
Finally, on July 29, 1957, Jack Paar took over and brought the talk show format to ‘Tonight – Starring Jack Paar’. The show was still coming from the Hudson Theater. In late 1958, NBC decided to sell the Hudson but to get top dollar, it had to be restored to it’s original Broadway theater status so the show would have to move.
Interestingly,on January 12, 1959, the show began to be videotaped for broadcast later that day. I believe that coincides with the date that the show moved back to NBC Studio 6B at 30 Rock. Color broadcasts began on September 19, 1960. Jack left the show March 30, 1962 for a one hour weekly show on NBC called ‘The Jack Parr Show’.
After six months of guest hosts, including Groucho Marx, Merv Griffin, Bill Cullen and Jerry Lewis, Johnny Carson took over on October 1, 1962.
Steve and Johnny were at home in front television cameras and large audiences but they were uneasy socializing at parties. Steve told a story about feeling uneasy at a party one evening so he went into the host’s study and began browsing through his books. As he was browsing Steve bumped into another person doing the same thing. You guessed it- the other person was Johnny Carson.
Paar’s Friday’s show was magical at times. Here is a side of Richard Nixon we seldom saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x-ihI5_Vg6A
I met and briefly talked with Steve Allen, late one night in the early 1990s. (He was a guest on a show emanating from a studio down the hall from where I was doing my show.) I can only echo Mark S’s statement above.
Descent man. Kind man. Generous in his praise of others. Absolute genius.
Studio 6 b is now jimmy Fallon
Somewhere between that first Allen version and the Paar version, NBC added 15 minutes to the show that was shown in some cities but not others. That fifteen minutes remained into the Johnny Carson era. Sometime during that period, only Ed McMahon and the band leader (I don’t remember who was leading the band at the time) did that segment, often referred to as “the first fifteen minutes,” and Carson didn’t show up until the rest of the network joined at 10:30 CT. (I’m in the midwest, so I go by the times I saw the shows.) Soon after that New York, Chicago, and any other cities that were showing the first fifteen minutes switched to a half hour of local news, and the first fifteen minutes were quietly dropped.