Night of the Lepus: Better Than It Has Any Right To Be

There was a lot going on in the 1970s. People hit the disco, dropped acid, laid back and mellowed out; Tricky Dick was so tricky, he ended up tricking himself right out of office; Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds were the reigning kings of the box office and Jack Tripper was the pretend queen of TV; the drugs were so good that some brilliant entrepreneur was able to convince people that rocks were pets; President Gerald Ford became a comedy sensation on Saturday Night Live; and the animal kingdom went apeshit crazy. Fortunately for all of us, that last one only happened in the movies.

It was a trend that spanned the entire decade – the “nature strikes back” genre, in which animals turned on humans, sometimes after growing to gigantic sizes. Most of the citizenry was safe, fortunately, because these animals tended to attack only actors and actresses who specialized in B-movies or one-time stars whose glory days were behind them – although there were a few exceptions. Many people mistakenly assume this genre was started by Steven Spielberg’s megahit Jaws, but that was in 1975, midway through Hollywood’s crazy animal phase.

I might have overlooked a few, but I’ve managed to come up with 20 titles in this genre between 1971 and 1979, a few of which were made-for-TV movies. It all started with the very modest a-boy-and-his-rat tale, Willard, starring Bruce Davison, Elsa Lanchester and Ernest Borgnine. It was such a surprise runaway hit that it required a sequel, Ben, the following year, and inspired the animal-themed horror trend that lasted the entire decade. If watching rats eat peanut butter that’s been slathered on Ernest Borgnine’s writhing body sounds like a good time to you, then you must see this movie.

Ben was followed by Frogs in 1972, starring Ray Milland. In her review in Andy Warhol’s Interview, Fran Lebowitz called it, “The best bad movie I have ever seen in my life.” Many others followed. Strother Martin turned Dirk Benedict into a big cobra in 1973's Sssssss. Robert Culp and Eli Wallach dealt with creepy, murderous chimpanzees in the 1973 TV movie A Cold Night’s Death. Ants got pretty cocky in Saul Bass’s brilliant and little seen 1974 thriller Phase IV, probably the most intelligent and creative movie of this entire lot. 1975 saw both the genre’s zenith and its nadir. The zenith, of course, was Jaws, the A-list blockbuster shark movie that so frightened audiences that some people actually switched from baths to showers because they were too afraid to sit in the water. The nadir was the $250,000 home movie The Giant Spider Invasion (my apologies to home movie-makers everywhere). Shot in the glamorous hot spots of Wisconson, like Gleason and Merrill, it featured Volkswagen Beetles dressed up to look like giant spiders. The genre seemed to escalate after that. Titles like Squirm, Grizzly, Day of the Animals and Kingdom of the Spiders stampeded across America’s drive-in screens. In 1977, producer Dino De Laurentis joined the fun with Orca, in which Richard Harris tried to forget how respected he was and Bo Derek’s leg was chomped off. The genre wrapped up in 1979 with Prophecy, directed by the great John Frankenheimer and written by The Omen scripter David Seltzer. It brought more quality to the genre than usual. Critics attacked it, but I enjoyed it.

Two beloved purveyors of schlock got involved. William Castle produced Bug in 1975, in which Joanna Miles’s head was set ablaze by fire-starting cockroaches on the set of the Brady house from The Brady Bunch, which had been canceled the year before. The king of movie gimmicks, Castle wanted to equip theater seats with little brushes that would scrape moviegoers’ legs to simulate the feeling of a bug crawling on them, but nobody would go along with that idea. Bert I. Gordon certainly wasn’t going to be excluded from a trend so ripe with schlocky potential. Known as Mr. BIG both for his initials and for his 1950s movies about giant people and giant bugs, Gordon holds the record for having more movies shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 than any other producer-director. In 1976, Gordon directed Food of the Gods, in which former faith healer Marjoe Gortner went head-to-head with a giant cock (what is it with these evangelists?). The next year, he followed that with Empire of the Ants, featuring giant ants and an angry Joan Collins (I’m not sure which is scarier). Both movies were allegedly based on books by H.G. Wells, but the resemblance ended with the titles.

The award for the most popular crazy creature in the 1970s eco-horror movie fad goes to the humble bee, starting with the genuinely creepy 1974 TV movie Killer Bees starring Kate Jackson and Gloria Swanson. 1978 brought two more bee movies. The Bees was an ultra-cheapie starring John Saxon and John Carradine (both of whom have probably appeared in more bad movies than any other Johns in the history of cinema). Of course, The Bees was so cheap that one glance at it told you it was going to be bad. Really bad. The other bee movie that year was a different animal entirely. It was glossy and slick with big-studio cache and an all-star cast – and yet it almost makes The Bees look like a respectable effort. Disaster king Irwin Allen gathered together some big Hollywood names and threw bees at them in the fat-budgeted turd The Swarm. It starred – get comfortable because this will take a while – Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Bradford Dillman, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda, Cameron Mitchell and a swarm of bees so powerful that it blows up buildings and knocks a train over a cliff. Michael Caine had to deliver groaners like, “That’s a complicated story. It begins years ago. But let’s skip that.” And my favorite, “We've been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years, but I never thought I'd see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friend.” If you’ve never seen this movie, watch it as soon as you can. I promise you’ll swear it was made by Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker.

But I want to focus on one particular movie in this genre. Released in 1972, it was an early entry, but it stands out simply because it’s so ... well, unlikely. Mention the title in a group and you’ll get a lot of laughs as people remember it and discuss how absolutely awful it was. But I disagree. And so do they – if you press them a little, you’ll find they probably saw it as children and that they remember being frightened by it. It is by no means a great movie, but when you consider it in the context of the animals-gone-bad movies of the 1970s, you have to admit that it was different, even bold, and if you set aside its reputation long enough to take a serious look at it, you’ll probably see that it was better than it had any right to be. I am referring, of course, to the only movie ever made about giant man-eating bunny rabbits, Night of the Lepus.

Not many people are familiar with the novel upon which this movie is based. It was Russell Braddon’s 1964 Australian political satire The Year of the Angry Rabbit. No, you didn’t misread that – political satire. I’ve never read it, but as far as I can tell from what I’ve read about it, there are no giant rabbits in the novel. In fact, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the monster movie it became. The website Trash Fiction, which provides the following description:

“This is great fun, a wild political satire set in the late-1990s that spirals off into all sorts of odd directions. We start with the emergence of myxomatosis-resistant rabbits posing a potential threat to Australian farming. The government decides to research a more powerful virus to put an end to the problem once and for all, and the scientists come up with Supermyx. Unfortunately it doesn’t harm the rabbits, but is instantly fatal to humans. At which point the Aussie Prime Minister realizes he has the most powerful biological weapon ever on his hands, and quite reasonably decides that it’s time for his country to take over as the rulers of the whole world.”

Somehow, this became a story of biologists Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh trying to help a farmer get rid of a destructive horde of rabbits and inadvertantly turning them into giant bloodthirsty monsters. Imagine you’re director William F. Claxton and screenwriters Don Holliday and Gene R. Kearney and you’ve been given the job of making a horror film about giant killer rabbits. How would you approach it? How would you make such an idea work on the screen?

Claxton was a veteran director of movies and TV shows, mostly westerns. Kearney had written mostly for television, and Holliday had written nothing before Night of the Lepus and never wrote anything ever again. His IMDb entry contains no information at all. It’s almost as if he didn’t really exist. Maybe they made him up so they’d have someone to blame.

If Night of the Lepus were made today, I imagine it would be very self-conscious and jokey, filled with snark and probably more than a few references to “fucking like rabbits.” In fact, I’m kind of surprised the 1972 version wasn’t made that way. But Claxton, Holliday and Kearney did something that I think was kind of ballsy. They decided to play it straight. There are no gags, no smirking asides. Just giant rabbits, their screaming victims, and the people desperately trying to solve the problem.

The cast certainly was game. Stuart Whitman was a busy actor who’d been working for 20 years and had appeared in nearly a hundred movies and TV shows by the time he signed on to fight giant bunnies. Not all of those movies and TV shows were blue-ribbon projects, so a low-budget monster movie didn’t make him flinch. But Janet Leigh had been a big movie star in the studio system during the ‘40s and ‘50s. She once said of Night of the Lepus, "I've forgotten as much as I could about that picture." But she added that she’d agreed to do it only because it was close to her home in California and wouldn’t keep her away from her family for long. DeForest Kelly was on hand, too, in his final non-Star Trek performance. They remained straight-faced for the cameras, but I wonder how many times either of them said between takes, “You’re kidding, right?”

I’ve found that horror movie fans are among the most forgiving human beings on the face of the earth. All the Christians I’ve ever known could take a lesson in forgiveness from horror movie fans. If you love horror movies, the fact is you have to sit through a lot of garbage to find the good stuff. Given the nature of horror movies – where far too many people think it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be horror – the good stuff is rare and the garbage is overflowing. It’s kind of like panning for gold, except instead of water and sand and gravel, you’re mostly sifting through shit. This is one of the reasons I seldom watch horror movies anymore. The older I’ve gotten, the more aware I’ve become of the fact that life is short – too short to waste time sifting through shit. The genre exhausted me, and one day I decided I’d seen enough. When enough people whose opinions I trust tell me a new horror movie is good, I give it a look. Now I judge movies – all movies – by the same standard. When you’re a forgiving horror movie fan, the bar is set lower for horror movies than it is for movies outside the genre. It’s not uncommon to hear a horror movie fan say something like, “Well, it was a lot better than Friday the 13th 4.” When you judge all movies by the same standard across the board, you realize that hemorrhoid surgery is a lot better than Friday the 13th 4. But for the sake of this article, I am going to revert back to my old ways and do exactly that.

When you focus only on the fact that Night of the Lepus is about giant bloodthirsty man-eating rabbits, it’s pretty hard not to laugh your ass off. I mean ... rabbits? Bunny rabbits? Where’s the threat? Even if they were gigantic, it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but eating foliage and dropping pellets. It’s the idea of the movie that trips everyone up. It’s hard to get past the fact that it’s about giant killer bunnies. But if you can do that, you’ll see that it’s really not so bad after all. Not great by any means, but not the awful dreck so many claim it to be. It certainly wasn't as bad as much of the awful dreck released in that genre during the 1970s.

The special effects are pretty good. Rabbits storm through miniature sets, slowed down enough to give them weight and size. Occasionally, a guy in a rabbit suit is used, but very infrequently, and he’s never shown clearly enough to spoil the illusion. The movie was made with some care, with an occasional attempt to build tension. One of my favorite scenes shows a woman peering through a window curiously when she hears a strange sound. Outside, we see rabbits stampeding toward her, we see her horrified reaction, then they burst through the window and one of them attacks her, making her bleed 1970s movie blood, which was always too bright. There was an effort to generate suspense and fear in that scene. These guys took their story seriously and I think that seriousness translates well to the screen given the fact that it’s a low-budget drive-in “animals go batshit crazy” movie – if you can get past the idea of giant killer rabbits.

In movies of this kind, a trick often employed is to avoid giving the audience a good look at the monster until the climactic scenes. This has been a staple in movies with limited budgets and even in big-money movies like Jaws. But Claxton did not take this route. The rabbits are revealed early on. They aren’t a secret. While this may have been a miscalculation on Claxton’s part, I see it as a rather brave move. He seemed to think that people would either buy it or they wouldn’t, and had no desire to screw around with keeping the creatures from the audience as if they were too dumb to figure things out. So he said, Here they are, folks – take ‘em or leave ‘em.

MGM knew it had a very tricky movie on its hands. They suspected that if moviegoers knew it was about giant killer rabbits, it would become a joke before anyone saw it. So they tried to conceal that fact. It was played down in the trailer and there were no rabbits in the poster art. The original title was Rabbits, but somebody at MGM wisely nipped that in the bud. Night of the Lepus sounds much creepier and was much more effective because few people knew that “lepus” was Latin for “rabbit.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Night of the Lepus is a great movie. It’s not even a particularly good movie. While made with more care than one would expect in such a movie, it wasn’t enough. There are moments that could have been milked for suspense and tension but instead are passed by almost dismissively. There’s no conflict between the characters – everyone pretty much agrees they’re dealing with giant killer rabbits and they have to do something about it, and that’s it. And there are lines like this: "Attention! Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way and we desperately need your help!" Night of the Lepus was absent at the Academy Awards that year, and its absence was eminently inconspicuous. You won’t find it on Roger Ebert’s list of great movies.

But I’ve always thought it’s gotten an undeserved reputation over the years. It’s often called “campy,” which it most definitely is not. There’s no camp in Night of the Lepus. The whole enterprise is approached with a straight face, with no wild overacting or tongue-in-cheek flourishes. It is the subject of much derision, while truly crappy fare like The Giant Spider Invasion and Irwin Allen’s godawful The Swarm are given a pass – mostly because, unlike our killer bunny movie, they have been completely and deservedly forgotten.

Night of the Lepus made the leap to television pretty quickly. After its theatrical release in 1972, it hopped directly to The CBS Late Movie, which is where I first saw it the following year. I spotted the movie in the TV listings, and while I didn’t know what the hell a lepus was, a whole night of them sounded interesting and possibly scary. I was a faithful viewer of The Tonight Show, but that night I switched over to CBS to give the movie a look. When I realized what was happening – that rabbits had grown to enormous size and were wreaking havoc across the countryside – I laughed. Out loud. Even at the age of 10. But I kept watching, and I got involved, and after a while, my grin dissolved and I was hooked, thinking, Holy shit, they’re serious ... and this is kinda scary. I loved the movie. Loved it! The next day, I wanted to talk about it with others who’d seen it, but I didn’t know anyone who’d seen it because all my fellow 10-year-olds were pussies who were in bed by nine. When I tried to describe the movie to them, they laughed. When I told them it actually had been scary at times, they laughed harder. I alone knew that I had seen something totally unique and wildly entertaining. Goofy, yes, no doubt. But unique and entertaining.

And that, I think, is the secret to the success of Night of the Lepus. Go ahead and roll your eyes if you want, but yes, I said success. It’s a success because we’re still talking about it 38 years later. Most of the other movies I mentioned – the yawnfest that was Frogs, the slapped-together turkey Grizzly, the silly and overblown Orca, the cinematic abominations The Giant Spider Invasion and The Bees, and that big-budget all-star shitstorm The Swarm – have faded into obscurity. But mention Night of the Lepus in almost any group and you will get an immediate and enthusiastic reaction. Everyone remembers it. How could they not? It’s the only movie ever made about giant man-eating bunny rabbits! And aside from the fact that, yes, it’s about giant man-eating bunny rabbits, it’s really not as bad as most people think.

It’s on DVD. Grab some carrots and a bowl of lettuce, pull up a nice comfortable pile of sawdust and give it a look. It’s not boring, it’ll make you smile, and it’s better than it has any right to be.

From Carson to Craig: My Lifelong Love Affair with Late Night TV

I’ve always been a night person, even when I was a kid. It used to annoy my parents that it was such an effort to get me to go to bed and stay there long enough to get to sleep. I’ve just never had much interest in sleep. It takes up a lot of time and gets absolutely nothing done. I’m always afraid that while I’m sleeping, I’ll miss something. I don’t know what, but whatever it is, it’ll be something exciting and important and rare, and it’ll happen while I’m curled up in bed drooling on my pillow.

When I was very small, I remember getting sick once and being up late with my mother because I couldn’t stop throwing up. She turned the TV on and I got my first glimpse of The Tonight Show. I’d never seen Johnny Carson before and had no idea who he was, but he was making an audience laugh pretty hard, and that interested me. I liked to laugh, so this seemed like something I would enjoy. Mom quickly changed the channel and said, “Oh, we don’t want to watch that dirty late night show.”

Dirty? I thought. To me, that could mean only one thing: Naked women. At that point in my life, naked women were the definition of “dirty.” My uncle Morton, a smelly, coarse man with an enormous gut and only some of his original teeth, had a tattoo of a naked woman on his right arm that Mom always called “dirty.” So obviously, “dirty” meant naked women. But I didn’t think naked women were allowed on TV. Of course, at that time, I’d only watched TV during the day and in the evening. I knew nothing about late night TV. It occurred to me that perhaps late at night, once all the kids had gone to bed, TV changed. Maybe that was when they brought out the naked women. That made Johnny Carson and his late-night talk show even more appealing. Somehow, I had to look into it. But I was not allowed to stay up that late. So I did something I ended up doing a lot in my childhood and teen years – I got sneaky. All kids are sneaky, of course. That’s part of being a kid. But in my Seventh-day Adventist household, nearly everything was considered wrong, bad, sinful or dirty, so my childhood required a good deal more sneakiness than most.

One night not long after my first taste of The Tonight Show, I went to bed and only pretended to sleep. After my parents went to bed, I got up and very quietly went to the living room. We lived in a tiny house, so stealthiness was a must. I was a ghost floating over the floor as I moved through the darkness to the TV. I turned it on and kept the volume so low that I had to sit directly in front of the TV with my ear near the speaker to hear.

I loved the bouncy, upbeat theme music the first time I heard it. Written by Paul Anka and performed by Doc Severinsen and the band, that song was to become a part of the soundtrack of my life for the next two decades. A big, hefty guy in a suit with a booming voice – Ed McMahon – read a list of names from a card. I didn’t recognize all the names at the time, but Ed read them as if they were a cure for cancer. Then he said, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Everybody in the studio audience seemed thrilled to see Carson, so I was, too – even though I wasn’t yet sure what I was watching. I didn’t get Johnny’s jokes – he was a topical comedian who poked fun at politics, current events and celebrities, none of which I’d begun to follow yet. But I liked him. He was affable and charming, and the studio audience clearly held him in high regard. After the monologue (a word I hadn’t heard yet), he moved to his desk and Ed joined him on the couch. They spent a little time chatting, joking around, and sometimes Doc was brought into the conversation. The rest of the show was a parade of guests, some of whom performed musical numbers or did stand-up comedy before sitting down and talking with Johnny. These were all famous people, I knew that much, even if I didn’t recognize all of them, and it seemed they were ending their day by dropping in on Johnny and talking and laughing with him while the privileged studio audience and TV viewers eavesdropped.

Watching The Tonight Show that night felt a little naughty. After all, according to my mother, it was “dirty!” The only real disappointment I felt after watching that first full episode of The Tonight Show was that there had been no naked women. Where were the naked women? I almost felt as if my mother had promised me naked women! Was it their night off? Did they only come out on certain nights of the week?

In spite of that one frustrating letdown, I liked the show a lot. Because it was on so late at night, I had the feeling I was being shown something rare, that I was being gifted with the chance to observe members of Hollywood’s intimate family of celebrities – all of whom knew each other and were good friends, of course – as they relaxed and did a little breeze-shooting while a camera captured it all. By the end of the show – which at that time ran from 11:30 to 1:00 – I was more than ready to go to sleep. But I knew I’d be sneaking out of bed to watch it again, whenever possible.

As I became a regular clandestine viewer of the show, I got familiar with the in jokes, running characters and regular comedy bits. For one bit, the camera focused on random audience members as Johnny read funny summaries of characters and plots from a soap opera called The Edge of Wetness. Audience members would suggest songs that the band had never heard of and would then attempt to improvise in a bit called “Stump the Band.” Occasionally, sketches poking fun at movies, celebrities or current events would be performed by a group of stock players called “The Mighty Carson Art Players” (a nod to legendary radio comedian Fred Allen’s “Mighty Allen Art Players”).

Johnny had a stable of characters he played now and then in sketches that never quite went as planned, which managed to make them funnier. The craziest, I think, was Art Fern, who hosted The Tea Time Movie, an afternoon movie show, with his attractive assistant, Matinee Lady (portrayed by four different actresses, the most well known being the late Carol Wayne, who had the role for 11 years). Art did his own commercials and in every Art Fern sketch, he’d give directions to a sponsor’s location by saying, “Go to the Slauson Cutoff ... and cut off your Slauson.” Not a great joke, I know, but Carson’s delivery was funny, and the line became so beloved that the audience often recited the last five words along with him.

As the turbined Carnac the Magnificent, Carson would reveal the answers to questions tucked away in envelopes that had been “sealed in a mayonnaise jar under Funk & Wagnall’s porch since noon today.” Once Carson gave the answer, McMahon would open the envelope and read the question. It would go like this:

Carnac: “Camelot.”
McMahon: “Where do Arabians park their camels?”

Carnac: “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.”
McMahon: “Name three things that have yeast.”

Carnac: “Sis boom bah.”
McMahon: “Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes.”

Shamelessly ripping off Jonathan Winters’s character Maude Frickert, Carson would appear in drag as Aunt Blabby, who was extremely self conscious about her age. If in the course of their conversation McMahon said something like, “When did you check out of the hotel?” Aunt Blabby would say, “Never say check out to an old lady.” Carson played a befuddled bumpkin named Floyd R. Turbo, who responded to TV editorials by stammering through his memorized speech. During Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office, Carson often did a sharp impression of the president.

This stuff put me on the floor. I had to stifle my laughter to keep from waking my parents and would often sit in front of the TV with my hand over my mouth and tears rolling down my cheeks as my body silently convulsed. I think I damaged myself doing that because to this day, every time I laugh, I instantly tear up. My habit of sneaking out of bed to watch Carson was finally discovered when I laughed so hard one night that I woke my mother. She told me that if I wanted to stay up late and watch TV, that was fine, but I couldn’t complain when I had to get up early to go to school. I never did.

The Tonight Show gave me a window onto a world that I could only imagine. Throughout my childhood, I had the nagging suspicion that everyone else was having lots of fun. By “everyone else,” I mean all the people who did not live in our tiny little house. My family felt about fun the way most families feel about things like house fires and cancer – it was something to be actively avoided, dreaded, feared. Fun was something that happened to other people. We didn’t have time for fun because we were too busy earning our place in heaven by being miserable. No dancing, no pork or seafood, no caffeine, no movie theaters, and from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the Sabbath, nothing at all – no TV, no radio, nothing. All those fun things we never did the rest of the week were especially forbidden on the sabbath. None of this seemed to make my parents happy. In fact, they seemed quite miserable – and my dad took out much of that misery on me in the form of spontaneous beatings that could occur at any time, like a sneeze or a Blue Light Special at Kmart. Somehow, my parents seemed to have confused misery with happiness. They had no interests, no hobbies, no curiosity about the world, and they tried to instill in me the same values. But I had Johnny Carson. Five nights a week, he took my mind off my fear of my dad, off the dread and horror I felt about the coming "time of trouble" that my parents’ apocalyptic end-time cult assured me could begin at any moment (not unlike the aforementioned sneeze and Blue Light Special). He reassured me that there was indeed a world patiently waiting for me outside my house where people had fun and joked and laughed, people who were witty and interesting and attractive. I was starstruck. I became a showbiz junkie and Johnny Carson was my fix.

Others tried to compete with Carson in the time slot that he owned for 30 years – Joey Bishop, Dick Cavett, Geraldo Rivera, Rick Dees, Pat Sajak, Chevy Chase, Joan Rivers and others. Like a Tokyo sushi bar during a Godzilla rampage, they were crushed by the King of Late Night. I had to look some of those names up because, to be honest, I was unaware of them at the time they aired. I was a loyal Carson viewer. It never occurred to me to see if there was anything else on at the same time. Why would I? What could possibly make such an endeavor worthwhile?

It was on The Tonight Show that I first saw David Letterman in the second half of the 1970s. He stood out. He wasn’t as jovial and ingratiating as most stand-up comics. There was something unsettled about him, a little cranky, maybe. I liked that. Letterman began to fill in on Carson’s nights off, which became more frequent as the years went on. I used to think that in the 1980s, Carson lost some of his edge, that he began to coast through the show. But now I know the change occurred in me, not in Carson. He just kept doing what he did better than anyone else before or since. I remained a faithful viewer, but something was missing. I didn’t even know what it was yet.

Late Night with David Letterman premiered in the timeslot following The Tonight Show on February 1, 1982. The first guest was an intoxicated Bill Murray. It was later revealed that Murray had shown up on the set that day with a few cases of tequila – enough for everybody. Letterman panicked. For a few months in 1980, he’d had a morning show on NBC that was critically acclaimed but tanked in the ratings and was quickly canceled. When Murray arrived with a supply of booze for everyone in the building, Letterman was certain everyone would get drunk, the show would be a disaster of epic proportions and be canceled even faster than his morning gig, and his career in television would be over. He was noticeably nervous during the interview, but he shouldn’t have worried. Murray’s appearance was fantastic television. He was exactly what one expected Murray to be in 1982 – absolutely nuts. He wrapped up his appearance by doing aerobics to the Olivia Newton-John hit “Let’s Get Physical.” The mixture of Letterman’s cranky, acerbic style, Paul Shaffer’s oddly mellow “Mr. Showbiz” flashiness and Murray’s guest spot on that first episode created a chemical reaction that made me high.

I was still a Carson loyalist, but Letterman brought something new to late night, something that more accurately reflected the person I was becoming. I had just come out of 20 years in the smothering, cloistered world of the Seventh-day Adventist cult – including 12 years in its batshit-crazy school system – and like Letterman, I was pretty fucking cranky. So after an hour of watching Carson chat pleasantly with his celebrity guests, it was a welcome and refreshing change to see Letterman greet his celebrity guests with an acidic, smartass edge that seemed to say, Oh, yeah? You’re not so great, so get over yourself.

Letterman seemed to be annoyed by the traditional, tried-and-true talk show format and went about the business of knocking it on its ass. He threw objects off of buildings, strapped a camera to a monkey -- the Monkeycam! -- and let it run loose, held elevator races at 30 Rock, put on a suit of Alka Seltzer tablets and got into a container of water, interrupted a Today Show interview by announcing with a bullhorn that he was the president of NBC and adding, “I’m not wearing any pants!” and engaged in playfully hostile exchanges with guests like Cher, Charles Grodin, and Shirley MacLaine, to name a few. At the time that I watched all this, I thought it was original. But Letterman was heavily influenced by Steve Allen, the first host of The Tonight Show, who was just as crazy. Even some of Letterman’s guests were strange. A regular was the bizarre Brother Theodore, who would launch into wild-eyed rants that were hard to follow because I was laughing so hard. Another regular was Dr. Ruth Westheimer. The hilarious spectacle of that tiny, sweet-looking lady talking explicitly about sex was matched only by Letterman’s squirming discomfort. One night, she discussed the many sex toys women could find lying around the house – like a cucumber. The next night, Letterman’s guest was, if I remember correctly, Ted Koppel. I’m certain it was some respected TV journalist, and I’m pretty sure it was Koppel. At one point during the conversation, Koppel said, “Could I insert something here?” and Letterman replied, “Sure, as long as it’s not a cucumber.”

Throughout the 1980s, especially during the show’s earliest years, there was nothing else on television like Late Night with David Letterman. It was unpredictable, caustic and riotously funny. I’m pleasantly surprised that I remember so much of it because I spent the ‘80s in a state of comfortable and carefully-maintained inebriation. With the publication of my first novel in 1984, the bottom fell out of my life. The Seventh-day Adventist cult teaches that all fiction is harmful – both spiritually and physically (yes, that’s right, physically) – and horror fiction is such an abomination that the cult’s teachings don’t even cover it. While my fondness for horror movies and horror fiction had always made my Adventist family, friends and teachers – or, as I like to call them, Sadventists – view me askance, actually having a horror novel published was a crime they simply could not allow to go unpunished. The reaction was swift and severe. My oldest friends stopped talking to me and I found myself the recipient of Christ-centered vandalism and threats. Even my own mother told me that, because of my history of reading comic books and watching movies, I had it coming.

I fled to southern California and took up residence inside a bottle of vodka. I wasn’t a falling-down drunk, I simply maintained a level of numbness that allowed me to ignore whatever emotional pain I was feeling. That doesn’t mean I didn’t at times get falling-down drunk, but I was usually alone when I did it. For a time, I lived in a little studio apartment in North Hollywood. Twice, I came very close to killing myself. Once, I spent a couple of hours with a loaded gun in my mouth trying to muster the courage to squeeze the trigger. I couldn’t do it. Another time, I spent an evening in that apartment leaning over the edge of the bathtub with a razor blade to my throat, intending to open myself up and bleed to death just so I could end the pain I was living with at the time. Again, I didn’t have the nerve. I was too afraid of pain, or of botching it, or something. By the time I finally stopped drinking in the early 1990s, I was consuming more than two litres of straight vodka a day, and yet people who knew me had no idea I had a problem. I quit drinking because my doctor told me if I didn’t, I was going to die, and soon. He explained to me in graphic detail what would happen, what I would experience and how I would die. He was very convincing. He scared the piss out of me.

With the support of my wife Dawn, who has saved my life in more ways than one, I put the bottle down for good. While I’m more than happy to express my feelings about the Sadventists in particular and religion in general with virtually no provocation whatsoever, I’ve been quite reluctant to discuss this part of my life because I’ve always feared I would sound like one of those daytime talk show victim-guests yammering on about his or her addictions and compulsions and dysfunctions and personal problems. I dreaded becoming just one more voice in the deafening national chorus of harmonizing sympathy-suckers. But then someone – a total stranger, someone I’ve never met – convinced me that mentioning it now and then might be helpful, that others going through some of the same experiences can benefit from knowing they are not alone. More on that in a moment.

Around the time I was trying to pull myself together, NBC’s late night juggernaut was falling apart. Carson announced his retirement. That was big. Presidential administrations come and go, wars begin and end, contagious diseases flare up and fade – but after three decades, Carson was leaving? He had been Letterman’s mentor and friend since the 1970s and privately had promised Letterman that he would inherit The Tonight Show. But NBC had ideas of its own – and given the fact that NBC is a television network, it must be understood that the word “ideas” in this case is used extremely loosely. The network wanted Jay Leno to take over the show, and they got their way. Letterman and Shaffer moved to CBS to helm Late Show with David Letterman in the historic Ed Sullivan Theater and Conan O’Brien took over the timeslot after The Tonight Show. Letterman’s new show aired at same time as Leno’s, and a ratings battle ensued. Leno beat Letterman in the numbers, but Letterman was the critical favorite and his audience remained passionately loyal. Whatever the ratings, Johnny Carson himself claimed that Letterman was his “rightful successor,” and even though Letterman didn’t get The Tonight Show, Carson’s declaration carried a lot of weight.

But Late Show with David Letterman most definitely was not a continuation of Late Night with David Letterman. Imagine you’re a teenager at an adult-free party with your friends where everyone is drinking and dancing to loud music and smoking pot and making out and getting laid. That was Late Night. Then the adults suddenly show up and everybody has to hide the booze and drugs, turn down the music and put their clothes on. That was Late Show. The unpredictable nuttiness, the irascible interview style, the fratboy prankiness were all gone. Letterman donned a suit and became more formal for his 11:35 timeslot. It took me a few years to admit it, but something was lost. That changed later, after Letterman’s brush with death. He returned from open heart surgery more relaxed, feistier, and things picked up. In the later years of Late Show, he’s had a tendency to throw caution to the wind and at times become more like his earlier self. And in the last few years, he’s been on fire – as funny and cranky as ever.

Johnny Carson finally retired permanently on January 23, 2005, more than a dozen years after retiring from television, and that night, I went into my office when no one was around and cried as if my best friend had died. In a sense, one of my best friend’s had died. I’d never met the man, of course, but he’d helped me through some pretty tough, scary times. He’d been an oasis in a desert of strangling religious dogma and fear, a friend in the loneliest of times. Others had come and gone in my life, but for a lot of years, Johnny had always been there, even if he was sometimes in reruns. David Letterman revealed that during his final years, Carson had sent jokes to Letterman. He’d used them in his monologues, and each time he delivered a joke Carson had contributed, Letterman executed the Late Night King’s signature golf swing. On Letterman’s first show after Carson’s death, his opening monologue was made up entirely of jokes written for him by Carson.

The timeslot after Late Night was occupied by Late, Late Show, first hosted by the late, late Tom Snyder, whose eccentric, laid-back, comparatively quiet (because there was no studio audience) style was a great way to end the day. After Snyder left, the show was given a studio audience and hosted by the sarcastic and cocky Craig Kilborn, the original host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. When Kilborn left to pursue a movie acting career (whatever happened to him, anyway?), Late, Late Show had a series of temporary hosts. I lost interest and switched over to Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, where it seemed the network had been taken over by a bunch of unsupervised troublemaking high school dropouts while the suits were home in bed. While I enjoyed Kimmel’s show enormously, I was never able to fully embrace it with the same love Carson and Letterman had inspired.

About this time, something very unusual was beginning to creep into my life. It was something so foreign to me that at first I couldn’t identify it, and once I began to see what it was, I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. What was this strange thing that was beginning to insert itself into my life like some bulbous-headed alien’s rectal probe? It was happiness. That was about the time I began to see that not being miserable and fearful was as simple as choosing not to be miserable and fearful. For those of you who’ve had your shit together for any extended period of time, this probably sounds as simple-minded as a session of fingerpainting in kindergarten, but for me, it was like early man discovering fire. I had found myself, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of a pretty good life. I had a wonderful wife whom I loved and who loved me. I was one of those few fortunate enough to spend my life doing work about which I was passionate. I had some warm and fascinating friends, and the internet had allowed me to connect with my readers, who are some of the most wonderful people on the planet. What the hell was there to be miserable and fearful about, anyway?

One night while Kimmel was in reruns, I switched over to CBS to see what was going on there. It seemed Late, Late Show had found a permanent host, Scottish actor Craig Ferguson. I remembered him in the role of Mr. Wick on Drew Carey’s hilarious sitcom. But was he late night talk show host material? It seemed unlikely, but I decided to give him a try. The first time I watched the show, Craig opened with this monologue. Please watch it before you continue reading.

I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing. My reaction was mixed. On the one hand, this wasn’t exactly the height of late night comedy. On the other, here was a man who not only had the guts to say, “I will no longer engage in the mockery of people with very serious personal problems no matter who they are,” but he also had the guts to say, “I was one of those people once.” I tuned in again the next night, and every night after that, and I haven’t stopped tuning in.

The more I watched, the more I learned about Craig because he has no problem talking about his life. He wasn’t just the kind of drunk who woke up in strange bedrooms – he woke up in strange garbage Dumpsters in strange towns. He’d spent the 1980s swimming in booze and sobered up in 1992. I was wrong in thinking he was only an actor. This guy has got talent squirting out of his pores. He has succeeded as a musician and composer, a stand-up comedian, an actor, a writer of fiction and screenplays, and a film director, and just this week, Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson won the prestigious Peabody Award. He did some of this while drunk, and even more of it after making a conscious decision not to drink himself to death. He became a citizen of the United States on February 1, 2008 and aired clips of the entire process, including his citizenship test and swearing in ceremony. He begins each show with the line, “It’s a great day for America,” speaks movingly about his love of this country and is more fiercely patriotic than most of the people I know who were born here.

The TV talk show, especially in late night, has become an institution and has been around so long that it’s hard to imagine anything new can be done with it. Craig Ferguson has proven otherwise. While he respects the institution, he has reinvented it to suit his talents and breathed new life into what has, for decades, been middle-aged guys in suits standing on a stage joking about current events and sitting at desks with microphones interviewing celebrities. Craig’s monologue is not a series of timely jokes about news and politics. It usually has an underlying, unifying story and occasionally veers off into unrelated territory involving such varied topics as penguins, tattoos and his own penis. Each time a guest sits down beside the desk, Craig tears into tiny pieces the blue card that typically holds the questions to be asked, tosses the pieces into the air, and from that moment on, totally wings it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything on TV with as much unpredictable, unrehearsed spontaneity as Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Craig is always complaining about how CBS neglects his show, which has, it seems, a minuscule budget. There’s no band, the lighting is bad, the roof leaks when it rains, and last Christmas the only decoration afforded Late, Late Show was a Christmas tree so tiny that it was difficult to see while it stood on Craig’s desk. Not surprisingly, Craig’s show features a regular series of characters and comedy bits: Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Prince Charles, who usually appear in their own individual sketches; Dear Aquaman, in which the superhero dispenses advice from under the sea; Hollywood suck-up Vance LaBrea; Angela Lansbury (aka Paul McCartney), who always wants to know, “Has there been a muuuurdaaaah?” and the occasional leatherboy raffle. When I first began watching the show, Craig referred to his audience as “cheeky monkeys.” Now he calls them “bribed hobos.” And there are puppets. Yes, that’s right, I said puppets. Can this be true? My god – a late night network talk show that features puppets! If Craig Ferguson had personally designed this show specifically to satisfy me and me alone, he couldn’t have done a better job! On top of all this, he feels the same way I do about the Twilight series and the new trend in romantic, sensitive vampires (some day I’m going to have to send him copies of my vampire novels, which I suspect he would enjoy). And did I mention he has puppets?

But as wonderful and innovative and funny as Craig is, it was that first monologue I watched that made me an instant fan. That revealed everything I needed to know about him. There’s always the chance that in his everyday life, Craig Ferguson is an egotistical jerk, a puppy-kicking sadist, an insufferable prick – but I really, really don’t think so. That’s not the man who vowed to stop making fun of celebrities with very sad, unfunny, life-threatening addictions, nor is it the man who exposes his vulnerabilities while making his audience laugh, the man who’s willing to discuss his failings so that others who may share them can see that one can be successful in spite of them. I’m convinced that he’s a decent guy, a guy who vividly remembers where he’s been and is wildly grateful to be where he is. He strikes me as a happy guy. His show is a happy show. He comments on news and politics like all late night hosts, but that is not the meat of his monologue or his show. The meat is pure, giddy, undiluted silliness. And he’s got the best opening theme on television (for purists, here’s the rarely heard extended version), which he wrote and performed. I often find myself humming or even singing that song at various times throughout my day. Ferguson makes me smile simply by stepping in front of the camera because I immediately anticipate the laughter to come. He can turn the most neutral, sexless comment into a lewd, extremely suggestive remark simply with his eyes Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson has become a part of my routine, a happy way to end my day, something that always makes me laugh – often very, very hard.

Does the fact that I have spent so much time watching and enjoying these three men for whom I’ve felt such affection over the years mean that I’m a shallow person? A bit pathetic, perhaps? Maybe. I don’t know. But if it does, you know what? I couldn’t care less. All three men are total strangers, but they have meant a lot to me and have enriched my life. Carson soothed my fears (and provided an escape from the very people who should have been soothing my fears but were instead creating them), Letterman helped relieve some of my anger, and now Craig reflects a new and somewhat astonishing stage of my life. Carson is gone and has left behind unfillable shoes, but Letterman’s still around, and he’s still damned funny. And now I have a new late night TV pal.

In recent years, I’ve tripped and fallen flat on my face in a big puddle of happiness, something I’ve never known before. And Craig has come along to help me enjoy it with silly musical numbers, Sean Connery sketches, puppets, and a little Salvador Dali. And he’s taught me that being what I’ve been is not only nothing to be ashamed of, but has helped make me who I am.

But still, all these decades of faithfully watching late night network talk shows has left me with one bitter disappointment: No naked women.