by Roger Ebert NEW JERSEY SAFARI WITH DAVID LETTERMAN One day last summer, David Letterman, Gene Siskel and I spent an afternoon wandering up and down a street in East Orange, N.J., knocking on people's doors. ``Hi, I'm Dave Letterman,'' Dave would say. ``I have Siskel and Ebert right here. Do you have any questions about the movies?'' Usually they didn't. One man said he hadn't seen a movie since ``The Last of the Mohicans,'' and I had the strangest feeling he was talking about the 1936 Randolph Scott version. A woman said she was on her way to a funeral. Letterman asked if we could do any yard chores or clean out her gutters while she was gone. A crew from the Letterman program was taping this door-to-door visit for later use on ``The Late Show.'' As a TV viewer, I'd always been half-convinced that such epics were setups; that the residents of the street were not selected entirely at random, and might even in some cases be actors. I was surprised to discover that Letterman was indeed winging it. The New Jersey street was chosen so much at random that Letterman almost didn't find it. We set out in a caravan from the Ed Sullivan Theater in mid-Manhattan, and by the time we were in New Jersey the parade had gotten separated and the drivers were calling each other on their cellular phones. David Letterman is one of the more endearing enigmas on television today. He seems to live his life in public; we see him sitting at home, fretting over a cable TV installer who's late. But it's ``Dave'' we're looking at -- a TV character in a nightly sitcom that also stars his friend, the bandleader Paul Shaffer, and his producer, Robert Morton, forever bobbing and smiling from the shadows, a telephone glued to his ear. The real Letterman is not so easy to see, and although I have appeared on his program perhaps two dozen times over the years, I don't have any clues about his reality. The origins of the Letterman program can be found, I think, in the old Jack Benny program -- which, both on radio and TV, was a program about the making of a program. The cast was made up of Benny, his wife Mary Livingstone, his valet Rochester, and his employees. A typical show involved Jack in meetings with his announcer, Don Wilson, or his sponsor, Lucky Strike. Or he might get involved in the problems of the members of his band. Sometimes guest stars would be misfits in his band, especially the drummer, Frankie Remley, who was said to have a drinking problem. Letterman (and to various degrees Jay Leno and Johnny Carson) ported the same formula over to TV and applied it to a talk show. On ``The Late Show,'' Don Wilson is played by Paul Shaffer, Robert Morton is the authority figure who the puckish star has to pretend to obey, and the eternally at-sea Calvert DeForest is like all of those annoying characters played on Benny by Mel Blanc. The real subject of the Letterman show IS the Letterman show, and ``Dave'' is a character on it just like the others. That's why it was fascinating to be able to spend a whole afternoon in East Orange with Letterman. It was a rare opportunity to meet him offscreen. I've had a few dressing-room chats with him before TV appearances, but they were cursory good-will exchanges. Letterman, I suspect, doesn't believe in leaving his performance backstage. He finds the show plays better when his ENTIRE relationship with a guest is in front of the cameras. I doubt if he knows his perennial favorite guests, like Teri Garr or Charles Grodin, any better than he knows Gene Siskel or me. (In fact, the last time I had lunch with Teri Garr, she asked me what I thought Letterman was really like -- although, with Garr, that in ITSELF might have been a put-on. You see what tangled webs we weave.) So there we were, on a lovely summer day in New Jersey, on a street that climbed up a hill so we could look over the river at the towers of Manhattan. The cars were unloaded, the crew began to prepare their gear, and Letterman and Siskel and I stood in the sun and chatted. What did we talk about? Michael Jordan, mostly. Why he retired from basketball. Why he was playing baseball. Whether he would ever return to basketball. What did male adults do for conversation before the invention of professional sports? Michael Jordan provided an instant frame of reference, shared expertise and knowledge, and a reassuring protection against conversational intimacy. By talking about him, we did not have to talk about anything else. We knocked on a door, and taped an exchange with the man and wife who lived in the house. I was quietly surprised at how calmly the couple accepted the presence of these strange creatures on their front porch. Decades of watching television has made us all into ``personalities.'' We walked across the street. Knocked on another door. What I began to pick up on, as we went from door to door like a trio of sitcom salesmen, is how quick Letterman's mind is. How he can find a comic angle in a situation by viewing it slightly askew. He had a writer along with him, and a segment producer, and they had ideas, too (so did Gene and I), but some of the best moments, the ones that made it into the final piece (four hours condensed to four minutes), were David's. ``I have to go to a funeral,'' that woman said. Another performer might have expressed his sympathy, and withdrawn. Not Letterman. ``Can we come along?'' he asked. And then he offered our services for yard chores. After the woman had agreed that the gutters could use some cleaning, she drove away in her car. We found ladders and baskets and climbed up to the gutters and filmed ourselves cleaning out the dead leaves. A great comic moment on TV, if I say so myself. But Letterman was not finished. Later, on our way back to Manhattan, we borrowed a funeral home, and shot low-angle footage of ourselves ostensibly filing past a coffin. Some of the residents of the street did not know who we were -- not Siskel and myself, which was quite plausible, but also not Letterman. One woman worked nights in an emergency room, and so never saw ``The Late Show.'' She was cool to us, and we repaired to the sidewalk to plan our next move. Then her mother-in-law explained who Letterman was, and she hurried out to offer him a gift: an original railway sign from her husband's collection. Then we talked to her about the movies. She hardly ever went. At another house, a middle-aged man and his adult son appeared at the door. Both were drivers for a local bakery. Their routes were run before dawn; they were home in the afternoons. No, they never went to the movies, because they were always in bed too early. ``Then can we offer you $100 to shave off your mustaches?'' Letterman asked. Gee, said the older man; he'd had his mustache since Vietnam. Letterman produced two crisp new $100 bills. Both men agreed. Walking into their house to help them shave off their mustaches, I had thoughts of my own. Was this a proper role for me to play? I take my film criticism seriously. I doubted that Pauline Kael, my heroine, would spend an afternoon like this in New Jersey and find herself shaving off any mustaches. And was the show somehow, in a subtle way, USING these two men? Letterman could spare the $200. So did that mean he was buying them -- buying their mustaches, even one that had been growing since Vietnam? By now, we were in the spotless kitchen of the home, and the men had bath towels around their necks and were applying shaving cream, while the cameras rolled. My eyes caught Gene's, and I guessed that he was having some of the same thoughts. But a few minutes later, as we were leaving, the man and his son were breaking up with laughter over the whole episode: You're sitting at home and David Letterman knocks on your door and gives you $100 to shave off your mustache! How are the guys at the bakery ever going to believe it? When is this gonna play on TV? And then I thought that I had taken the situation too seriously. It belonged to that genre of Letterman programming that could be described as High Goofy. It has absolutely no purpose other than the one it obviously achieved: to take the routine of an ordinary day, and inject a grin into it. Later on, Letterman gathered his cast and crew, and several of the neighbors, and we sat along a low stone wall and took off our socks and looked for ticks. After all, a visit to the countryside in wild East Orange can be dangerous, and who in Manhattan has not heard of Lyme disease? And then we headed back to Manhattan. There was one revealing moment. Inside one house (I will not reveal the details) we saw something that put us all in mind of mortality and the inexorable passage of time. Back out on the sidewalk, Letterman was quiet, thinking about it, and then he said, ``That's exactly how it goes. You're young and the whole world is ahead of you, and then one day you're not young anymore, and the whole world is behind you, and it's all over.'' Then we talked some more about the National Basketball Association. Did I get any other insights into the ``real'' David Letterman? Yes, I did. I got a few when the two of us exchanged minutely detailed arcania about the Steak 'n' Shake, a restaurant chain that is popular in his home town, Indianapolis, and in mine, Urbana-Champaign. We knew the slogans by heart: ``Four Ways to Enjoy: Car, Table, Counter, and TakeHomaSak!'' We knew that the chain ``uses only government-inspected choice cuts of meat, ground in our own commissaries.'' That the motto was ``In Sight, It Must Be Right!'' And that the founder of the chain was named A.H. (Gus) Belt, whose signature on the menu used to be preceded by the words, ``Thanks For Your Liberal Patronage!'' Talking with Letterman about the Steak 'n' Shake, I suddenly felt a connection over the years to his adolescence, in which he had sat with his buddies in those restaurants, and read the menus, and realized that they were very funny. Others saw them as merely menus, and ordered their Double Steakburgers and Tru-Flavor Shakes, and were satisfied. But I can visualize young Dave Letterman, his gap tooth revealed in a goofy grin, as he reads the menu aloud to his friends: ``MAN, OH MAN! Specializing in Selected Foods With a Desire to Please the Most Discriminating!'' And in that moment, I foresee his entire career, and I know all about the ``real'' David Letterman that I really need to know. COPYRIGHT 1994 THE EBERT CO. LTD. by Roger Ebert A NIGHTTIME TALK SHOW MYSTERY It is an open secret that the ``spontaneous exchanges'' on talk shows are somewhat planned in advance. What has surprised me is how often the hosts depart entirely from the script. In many appearances on the Leno, Carson and Letterman programs, I would estimate that less than half of what happened was foreseen, and in some cases entire appearances were ad libbed. The ``pre-interview'' is more like a safety net. The routine for a guest on one of the nighttime talk shows is that, a day before the planned appearance, you have a telephone conversation with the segment producer. He or she wants to know what's on your mind, what has happened lately in your life, what's funny or amusing. You try to think of interesting stuff. In the case of Gene Siskel and myself, the producers hold separate interviews, because we don't want to know what the other guy may be thinking of discussing. We find we work better together when it's spontaneous. That once led to an episode on the Letterman show that is still so cloaked in mystery that neither Gene nor I quite understand what happened. As nearly as I can reconstruct it, Gene suggested to a segment producer that it might be fun to tell David a story that Gene and I call ``The Buddy Hackett Story.'' (See sidebar below.) When the producer broached this idea to me, in a separate call, I was annoyed: ``That's MY story!'' I said. ``Gene shouldn't tell it. Also, I tell it faster and funnier than he does. He always gets bogged down in boring minutiae about where everybody was sitting when the episode took place.'' The next day, we arrived at the Ed Sullivan Theater to tape the show. The segment producer came to me privately and said, ``Gene is going to try to tell the story. But you should interrupt him and insist on telling it yourself. He knows you are going to interrupt.'' The producer then went to Gene and told him that when he started to tell the story, I would interrupt him. On the air, Letterman set us up with a straight line. Gene started telling the story. I interrupted him. He attempted to continue telling the story. I insisted that it was MY story, and I should tell it. Gene was getting annoyed, I could tell, and said something like, ``We're wasting a lot of valuable network time here.'' I pushed ahead, insisting that I should tell the story. Gene wouldn't let me. In my mind, I was fully prepared to do whatever was necessary to either (a) tell the story, or (b) prevent Gene from doing so. The situation at this point was off the map, and to the viewers might have seemed like genuine anger. And then Letterman broke in: ``Boys, boys, boys! I'LL tell the story.'' And he did -- perfectly. During the commercial break, Siskel was unhappy with me. The situation had gotten completely out of hand, he said. I had been bull-headed in my insistence on telling the story. I should have let him tell the story. But it was MY story, I said! After the show, Siskel, thinking it over, grew more objective. ``If I truly thought the situation was out of control, then I should have just let you tell the story.'' ``I thought I was doing the right thing,'' I said. ``I thought I was SUPPOSED to keep interrupting you.'' ``No,'' said Gene, ``I was supposed to finish the story.'' Our eyes met. We realized that in our separate briefings we had BOTH been told to tell the story. Neither one of us had been prepared to cave in to the other. Given our mutual stubbornness, it was inevitable that we would both insist on pressing ahead. So ... had we been set up? Was Letterman planning all along to tell the story? Had the segment producer deliberately given us instructions that would lead to a fight? Letterman had seemed so spontaneous as he told the story. It seemed like he had brilliantly defused a potentially unpleasant situation. Was this an example of skillful improvisation? Perhaps, but then again, he HAD been completely prepared. He knew the story by heart. Had he intended to tell it? Or was this just an example of his ability to think quickly? I don't know for sure. Neither does Siskel. ``That was great TV,'' the producer, Robert Morton, told us after the show. I still don't know who deserved the compliment, or exactly why. -- -- --SIDEBAR: THE BUDDY HACKETT STORY Jack Lemmon, Gene Siskel and I were sitting at a table in the Gaslight Club in Chicago, in the mid-1970s. At a nearby table, four women were celebrating a birthday. One of them headed our way with a menu. ``She wants an autograph,'' Lemmon said. He was right. The women looked straight at Siskel and said, ``Aren't you Gene Siskel? It's my friend's birthday, and she'd love to have your autograph.'' ``Why, sure,'' said Gene, with a big grin, signing the menu. ``You've made my day!'' the woman said. ``Your day is far from over,'' Gene said. ``Did you notice who is sitting right here next to me?'' ``JACK LEMMON!'' cried the woman, ``Oh, my God! Mr. Lemmon -- I'm so sorry I didn't notice you! We see Mr. Siskel on our local TV, and I never thought I'd see you in Chicago!'' ``Think nothing of it,'' Lemmon said graciously, signing the menu. ``This has REALLY made my day!'' the woman said. ``AND,'' said Siskel, ``your day STILL isn't over! Look who's sitting right here!'' He pointed to me. The woman's face broke into a delighted smile. ``Why,'' she said, ``if it isn't Buddy Hackett!'' COPYRIGHT 1994 THE EBERT CO. LTD. AP-NY-11-15-94 1822EST