He brought his guitar through the audience to introduce each mass category (drama, comedy, reality, etc.), but he also whipped through three costume changes for a farewell song to departing dramas – where he portrayed, among others, Elton John.

“Goodbye, 24,” started Fallon as Elton John, in an updated version to “Candle In The Wind.” Sample line: “I would like to thank you for all the torturin’, for Jack and Chloe and CTU, and the first Black president.”

Then Fallon changed into a Boyz II Men look for a Law & Order-related “It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye” (complete with pouring one out for the loss) and followed that up with a Green Day inspired tribute to Lost. “The island it was mythical, but in the end they died, I didn’t understand it but I tried,” sang Billy Joe.

We’ll let these two tweets from TV critics sum up Fallon’s, and NBC’s, performance so far. Tim Cuprisin of OnMilwaukee.com: “Yeah, I’d say that, at least so far, Jimmy Fallon’s the biggest Emmy winner of the night.” Rick Porter of Zap2It.com: “This is *very* strange. The Emmys are both an entertaining show and awarding a lot of deserving people. You all are seeing this too, right?”

Here’s the full song:

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But it wasn’t just the host and the high schoolers – Fallon’s opening included a bevy of TV stars…and Kate Gosselin.

Tina Fey was recruited to join the glee club, then Jon Hamm (after he was pulled away from Betty White). Gosselin tried to lend her dancing talents but was passed over. Also involved were Hurley from Lost (Jorge Garcia), Joel McHale and more. Fallon got changed, with the help of Tim Gunn of Project Runway, and it was time to perform.

After the pre-taped opening was over the whole cast came out to sing some Bruce Springsteen live. Even Kate Gosselin. Also – Randy Jackson? One notable absence – Neil Patrick Harris.

Twitter reaction was almost universally positive. Check out the opening:

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NBC entered The Tonight Show with Jay Leno – which got zero nominations. This could get awkward when the Emmys air August 29 on, um, NBC.

The four nominations for Conan and crew included the two big ones, Outstanding Variety, Music Or Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing For A Variety, Music Or Comedy Series. The same five programs were nominated in each category – joining Conan’s Tonight Show are The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live and Real Time with Bill Maher. The writing nomination is for Conan’s final show (SNL‘s is for Betty White‘s turn as host.)

Then there were two more categories. The Tonight Show got an Outstanding Art Direction For Variety, Music Or Nonfiction Programming for the premiere, and fittingly, an Outstanding Directing For A Variety, Music Or Comedy Series nod for the final Tonight Show with O’Brien as host. Those two awards will be determined before the live broadcast on August 29.

Speaking of that live broadcast, just to make things even more awkward (and amazing), it isn’t just airing on NBC. It is hosted by Jimmy Fallon – the show that followed by Conan and Leno’s version of The Tonight Show.

We’ll have more in the coming weeks (just wait for Conan’s reaction tweet). For now, here’s all the nominees (a lot of Glee, a lot of The Pacific).

> Update: And here’s Conan’s tweet: “Congrats to my staff on 4 Emmy nominations. This bodes well for the future of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.”

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As the face of media evolves, it’s important to honor the figures who helped define, shape and set the standards in their industries. These are some of the most prominent members of the media who passed away over the past 10 years.  Take a look back with some snippets from their respective New York Times obituaries.

2000

Who: Charles Schultz
Major Accomplishment: His ‘Peanuts” strip reached readers in 75 countries, 2,600 papers and 21 languages every day. Schulz drew more than 18,250 strips in nearly 50 years.
Legacy: His saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus ”is arguably the longest story ever told by one human being,” Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, observed.

Who: Steve Allen
Major Accomplishment: In more than 50 years in show business, Allen demonstrated his talents in many areas. An accomplished pianist who never learned to read music, he composed more than 5,000 songs, some of them hits.
Legacy: Allen was keenly interested in social justice and wrote pamphlets on a variety of issues, including the problems facing migrant workers, as well as capital punishment and nuclear proliferation.

Editor’s Note: Mediaite has been rightly called out for a big, glaring error: On our list of 28 media leaders we’ve lost this decade there was not a single person of color. Not a one. Read Mediaite editor-at-large Rachel Sklar‘s entire mea culpa here and on page 11, we’ve added 5 of the deceased black media leaders that should have been mentioned initially.

>>>NEXT: In 2001 we lost William Hanna and Katharine Graham…

]]> http://www.mediaite.com/print/a-retrospective-28-media-leaders-who-died-this-decade/feed/ 7 http://www.mediaite.com/online/gossip-cops-firsthand-account-david-letterman-and-his-assistant-stephanie-birkitt-in-2005/ http://www.mediaite.com/online/gossip-cops-firsthand-account-david-letterman-and-his-assistant-stephanie-birkitt-in-2005/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:40:04 +0000 Joe Coscarelli http://www.mediaite.com/?p=30912 Gossip Cop's Michael Lewittes had a random encounter with David Letterman and his assistant, Stephanie Birkitt. Four years later -- in the midst of Letterman's affair/extortion super story -- the serendipitous encounter seems less like a charming coincidence and more like a priceless insider's anecdote.]]> In September 2005, Gossip Cop‘s Michael Lewittes had a seemingly random encounter with David Letterman and his assistant, Stephanie Birkitt. Four years later — in the midst of Letterman’s affair/extortion super story — the serendipitous encounter seems less like a charming coincidence and more like a priceless insider’s anecdote.

To hear Lewittes tell it, it was like any other Emmy night: Los Angeles traffic was clogged and Lewittes, an Access Hollywood producer at the time, was running late. And so, clad in a tuxedo, he ditched his ride and started making his way toward the theater on foot. To his surprise, he saw a familiar face:

About three blocks away, I saw David Letterman, dressed in shorts and smoking a cigar, briskly walking away from the auditorium. With him was a woman dressed in black. That was Stephanie Birkitt, Letterman’s former assistant, with whom he had a sexual relationship, and who later took up with “48 Hours” producer Robert “Joe” Halderman, the alleged exortionist who reportedly used her diary and e-mails as proof of her relationship with Letterman in an effort to squeeze the talk-show host out of $2 million.

Despite intermittent urgings from Birkitt, Letterman tried to resist attending the show and even agreed to a quick chat on a bus bench with Lewittes for Access Hollywood, probably in an attempt to procrastinate from the night’s elaborate festivities. Lewittes describes noticing a “closeness” between Letterman and the woman we would later find out was his lover, but the whole story is beyond bizarre. Only in Hollywood!

Check out the entire account exclusively at Gossip Cop.

Well, duh.  Dr. Horrible’s eponymous NPH is hosting the show.  Plus, his singing was pretty much the most bearable part of this year’s Tony Awards (which he also hosted). But wait, there’s more! The internet sensation won a Creative Arts Emmy in the Outstanding Special Class – Short-Form Live-Action Entertainment Programs category (a category that seems purpose built for its winner).  And NPH’s internet alter ego has been tweeting threats and promises (“I’ve got it! I’ll use my interceptorizor to highjack the Emmy broadcast!”) about tonight’s performance for the last 24 hours.

So the Doctor Horrible number tonight promises to be big.  But what is probably bigger is what this foreshadows.  During a TV broadcast the primary purpose of which is to laud and promote other TV broadcasts, a huge TV audience (a large portion of which is likely to be wondering what Doogie Howser is doing on stage) is going to meet the good (ok, bad, but I’m rooting for him) Doctor for the first time.

But here’s the thing: Dr. Horrible is all about the death of TV as a medium.  An indie labor-of-love created as a side project during the writer’s strike, launched on the web, it became an immediate critical and financial success — entirely outside the traditional network distribution model.

In its initial limited run online, Dr. Horrible was steamed over 2 million times in just five days (and that number would be higher had demand not crashed the servers); today, its Amazon sales rank is #66 for Bestsellers, Movies & TV; with top ten rankings across all its sub-categories.   And a sequel (maybe even a feature?) is in the works.

But as huge as Dr. Horrible is (at least in certain circles), the real story here is that it has reached the critical mass that has made it the likely centerpiece of tonight’s Primetime Emmys perfomance without ever before being televised in any way.

Said Joss Whedon in his Emmy acceptance speech: “This is our small proof not only that things can be done differently in this business, but that the greatest expression of rebellion is joy.”

Makes you wonder how hard the audience of TV execs, stars, producers, writers and the like will really be clapping.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

Joss Whedon Emmy Acceptance Speech for Dr. Horrible:


Ash Kalb is the general counsel of a New York-based telecommunications and technology company and an instrument-rated pilot. He writes about geeky things for Mediaite.

But Harris’ career has also been magical. In the past five years, Harris has both come out publicly and played a rough-around-the-edges lech on CBS’ How I Met Your Mother. And during his transformation from Doogie Howser to gay grown-up, Harris has magically remained somebody that straight men kind identify with and women can fall for.

That’s the angle of Emily Nussbaum’s cover story in this week’s New York magazine which catches up with Harris in the middle of his prepwork as a producer and host of this Sunday’s Emmy Awards.

Still, he’s trying to insert his taste into the proceedings. He’d love this year’s installment to be the “Classy Emmys,” he says, with self-mocking air quotes. Superb dancing. Uncheesy musical guests. He originally wanted the Muppets for the opening number—Statler and Waldorf up in the balcony!—but that plan proved too difficult to stage.

When she’s not discussing Harris’ maturation as an actor or involvement in Emmys, Nussbaum picks the brain of Harris, the cute child star who grappled with his sexuality for years before eventually coming out to his fans in People magazine in 2006. Since speaking out about his private life, Harris has maintained a five-year relationship that he doesn’t try to hide and somehow maintained his golden boy persona and protected, nay expanded, his professional possibilities.

The idea all along has been to acknowledge the fact of his sexuality, then change the subject to his talent. Still, there was a kind of alchemy involved. Maybe it was Harris’s easy style of masculinity, at once unthreatening and seductive. Maybe the timing was right, coming after he’d proved he was more than a Trivial Pursuit punch line. Or maybe he’d learned, from his own extended personal coming-out process, how to handle the expectations of a wider audience …

“One wants to be sexy to everyone.” It’s one advantage of coming out, [Harris] tells me: “As Barney, I get to make out with all sorts of girls. And I’m allowed to say that women are sexy and not have them say, ‘That’s not true!’ But I’m now in a really fun position, where I can tell a guy that he’s sexy, and most”—he raises an eyebrow—“aren’t put off by that.”

Harris went on the Late Show earlier this month, and Letterman was noticeably rattled by how sharp his guest was — even grumbling that Harris was doing his own segues. But we’ll have to wait until this weekend to see if Harris can maintain the hype, maintain his confidence, keep the magic alive. After all, the Emmys are no Tony Awards — and definitely no World Magic Awards.

Neil Patrick Harris’s recent Letterman appearance(September 4, 2009):

NPH on doing magic tricks (and wearing a sweater vest) on Ellen: