Talk, Talk, Talk

For the past two years, most CBS stations have been gamely running late-night movies, while NBC and ABC have done nothing but talk, talk with Johnny Carson and Joey Bishop. But movies no longer automatically grab a big audience and, more to the point, talk shows are cheap to produce and show large profits. Last week it became talk, talk, talk as CBS offered its own late-night interviewer, Merv Griffin.

Griffin's show, went the pitch, was going to be different. Maybe so, but his premiere appearance did not exactly inundate the audience with originality. First there was Jackie "Moms" Mabley, an oldtime black comic of the Pigmeat Markham variety and hardly a nationwide favorite of the post-11:30 p.m. crowd. At the same time, Carson was cracking wise with Bob Hope, and Bishop was encouraging the Smothers Brothers to pour out their souls on camera. Moms was followed by a curiously subdued Woody Allen, Leslie Uggams, who is taking the Smotherses' place on CBS this fall and Hedy Lamarr. Pleasant personalities, but hardly show stoppers.

Middleman. In the end, what Griffin's first week amounted to was more of Carson and Bishop. Any differences were subtle, to say the least. While Carson has Ed McMahon as his sidekick on the Tonight Show, and Bishop has Regis Philbin, Griffin uses his longtime TV majordomo, Arthur Treacher, as a kind of Jeeves. Carson prefers to stand out as the star of his own show, throwing out quips and gags, staging frequent offerings from the Mighty Carson Art Players, and frequently upstaging his guests. Bishop, on the other hand, uses his Los Angeles base to good advantage. He concentrates primarily on show-biz types, often letting them perform spontaneously.

Griffin prefers to be conversational, a listener rather than a doer. "My most important task is to open people up verbally and extract information from them," he says. "I sit there as the middleman between guest and audience, asking questions I think the viewers would ask if they were in my place." While Carson is content to operate from New York City studios, with only occasional expeditions to the West Coast, Griffin insists that he will continue to get out of the studio and out of New York. "We want to show the viewer other parts of the world than a desk and three chairs," says his producer, Bob Shanks.

For all the differences, Griffin is still presiding over the same sort of desk-and-sofa setup that Dave Garroway, Steve Allen and Jack Paar popularized years ago. As Griffin sees it, "With three of us in there every week night, it will be a game of 'Pick Your Host.' " Or more likely, "Pick Your Guest." During premiere week, a dial spinner could have tuned in Carson confronting Groucho Marx, Bill Cosby, Romy Schneider, Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, and Rowan and Martin. Bishop trotted out such West Coast Establishmentarians as Ruth Gordon, George Burns, Tony Bennett, Milton Berle, Eddie Fisher, Rick (ne Ricky) Nelson and Ed Ames. Griffin went for such familiar names as Woody Allen, Dinah Shore, and Sonny and Cher. But Griffin also offered a few surprises: Max Yasgur (the New York dairy farmer who rented his land to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair) and Billie Young (who as Penelope Ashe "wrote" Naked Came the Stranger).

1,470 Guests. For producers, the big problem of the new talk season is obviously going to be: get the guest. To do this, each show employs a guest scout, complete with his own staff, who combs through lists of Who's in Town and Who's Doing What (or more cynically, Who's Plugging What). Prime sources: new movies and new books, since stars and authors are usually available to chat about their products. Then there are the so-called talk-show "regulars," Hermione Gingold, say, or Nipsey Russell. Between now and year's end, however, Griffin, Carson and Bishop will churn out 294 shows: at an average of five guests a program, they will need at least 1,470 people. Obviously, some familiar faces are going to become overfamiliar.

Behind the competition for guests lies the competition for ratings. Where, oh where will Griffin's audience come from? NBC thinks that he will steal from Bishop, and ABC thinks that he will steal from Carson. All three networks--particularly CBS--hope that he wins the viewers who used to watch movies. There may be a good chance, since prime time this year will be so full of movies that viewers who stay up past the 11 o'clock news might just be sick of them. Then, too, despite the plethora of talk shows, there is always the lion-and-Christians impulse, which may make viewers tune in to see Truman Capote call Jacqueline Susann a "truck driver in drag" or Don Rickles find a new way to insult Johnny Carson.

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