Tom Snyder (1936-2007)
Sometime around 1996, I remember watching some documentary, probably on E!, about late night talk shows. What I remember is finding out that the conversations with the guests were all planned out beforehand. There was someone working on the show (this was the position held by Janeane Garofalo's character on The Larry Sanders Show) whose job it was to interview the guest beforehand, find out what they wanted to say, and write down all the setups for the host. Somehow, finding this out just pissed me off completely. How fucking lame that these people can't even have a conversation on TV without setting it all up!
That's about the time I started watching Tom Snyder's show, which came on at midnight, or maybe 12:30, during the last period of time that I didn't have a job that required me to get up in the morning and prevented me from watching late night talk shows.
Snyder was a weird host. As he was getting the show underway, he'd always say "so fire up a Colortini, sit back and enjoy" or something. Was that a joke he'd started in the 60's the first time he had a show in color, and for some reason kept it going? I don't know, because I'd never seen any of his previous talk shows, and only really knew about him from seeing Dan Akroyd's impersonation on SNL. And why that strange choice of verb? You don't "fire up" a martini. And he'd tell these long jokes, and pause before the punchline to ask someone off camera, "You know where I'm goin' with this?" (a phrase that I started using myself) But the one thing you can definitely say is that he didn't do scripted interviews. He talked. Sometimes you wondered what the hell he was talking about, but there was no question that you were listening to a real conversation.
Snyder died a week ago, so it's kinda lame that I'm just getting around to this, but I wanted to say something about him because he was an interesting guy (and I'm not gonna front like Ingmar Bergman or Antonioni were big enough parts of my life to write about). So tonight, let's fire up a colortini (or whatever you like to fire up) for Tom Snyder.
That's about the time I started watching Tom Snyder's show, which came on at midnight, or maybe 12:30, during the last period of time that I didn't have a job that required me to get up in the morning and prevented me from watching late night talk shows.
Snyder was a weird host. As he was getting the show underway, he'd always say "so fire up a Colortini, sit back and enjoy" or something. Was that a joke he'd started in the 60's the first time he had a show in color, and for some reason kept it going? I don't know, because I'd never seen any of his previous talk shows, and only really knew about him from seeing Dan Akroyd's impersonation on SNL. And why that strange choice of verb? You don't "fire up" a martini. And he'd tell these long jokes, and pause before the punchline to ask someone off camera, "You know where I'm goin' with this?" (a phrase that I started using myself) But the one thing you can definitely say is that he didn't do scripted interviews. He talked. Sometimes you wondered what the hell he was talking about, but there was no question that you were listening to a real conversation.
Snyder died a week ago, so it's kinda lame that I'm just getting around to this, but I wanted to say something about him because he was an interesting guy (and I'm not gonna front like Ingmar Bergman or Antonioni were big enough parts of my life to write about). So tonight, let's fire up a colortini (or whatever you like to fire up) for Tom Snyder.
posted by Chris Oliver at 2:36 PM
1 Comments:
Amen and Good Night.
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