An Oral History of Late Show With David Letterman’s Final Episode

“That is pretty much all I got. The only thing I have left to do for the last time on a television program: Thank you and goodnight.”  Those were the final words spoken by David Letterman on the final episode of Late Show with David Letterman on May 20, 2015.

On that night—ten years ago today—Letterman wrapped thirty-three years in late night with the confidence and ease we’d come to expect from him. But while the show’s host seemed to go out effortlessly, the behind-the-scenes story of how that final episode (just barely) made it to air is one filled with unexpected twists and turns.

As told by the show’s producers, writers and staff, it forms the climax of Scott Ryan’s excellent book The Last Days of Letterman, an oral history of the show’s final six weeks. We’re grateful to him for granting us permission to republish it here.

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Director Jerry Foley: I don’t know what you can compare it to. Maybe the last day of high school? There was this awareness from the minute I woke up that people that I cared so much about were about to disperse. That is a pretty emotional way to start the day. 

Writer Bill Scheft: The final show had been lovingly built brick by brick by Barbara Gaines over the last six months. Her title was executive producer. Her everlasting credit will be my best friend. By the time we all turned up for work Wednesday, there was almost nothing to do.

Writer Joe Grossman: That last day we came in, the show was all done. We didn’t have to pitch anything. It was in the can for days if not weeks. There wasn’t a lot of stress. It was more, “We are walking the plank here.”

Jerry Foley: I did realize very early in the day that this was maybe the single biggest performance of Dave’s life. So much of his legacy would be defined by the last couple of things he does on that stage. There was not gonna be a do-over. There was burden there. You didn’t want him going home that night second-guessing himself.

Bill Scheft: I wanted to wear the same suit that I wore on the last day of the NBC show. That was my thing. Because we had done the monologue the night before, everything else was kind of set-up. There was nothing to do for any of us. We were just sitting there, “Let’s go.”

Jerry Foley: I am a sensitive guy, and separation ways heavily on me. It wasn’t a hug at the airport. It was all day long, this euphoria and cloud competing with each other.

The Cold Open: In archival footage from 1974, President Gerald Ford says, “Our long national nightmare is over.” This is followed up by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama saying the same sentence, plus “ . . . Letterman is retiring.” President Obama is taped standing beside Dave, who says, “You’re just kidding, right?” Obama shrugs. That is how the final episode of David Letterman’s late-night career begins.

Senior Producer Mike Buczkiewicz: We started working on that last episode shortly after Dave announced he was retiring. We were trying to come up with cold-open ideas. Barbara and Jude asked me who could I get. I think Matt Roberts said, “It would be great if we did ‘Our long national nightmare . . . .’” Barbara and Jude thought it was an awesome idea. I had to figure out how to best approach it. The White House had told me to call them as soon as I knew when the final show would be, and then they would backdate it and figure out how to get President Obama there. I reached out to them and said, “Here is the idea. If we can get everybody, would you do it?” They said, “Yes, we will do something while we are there.” Then I sent an identical email to Carter, Clinton, and both Bushes. I had pretty good relationships with all of them. I was pretty sure that Clinton was going to do it. His guy asked, “Who else do you have?” I said, “President Obama will do it if everyone else will do it.” He asked, “What about President W. Bush?” I said, “I haven’t heard from him yet.” The guy said, “I have. We are all gonna do it. You will hear from him soon.” I just laughed after I hung up. Of course they talk. It’s a pretty exclusive club. Obama and Clinton filmed theirs right before their appearances, and the Bushes filmed theirs on their own and sent it in. President Carter was up to do it, but I think he was ill at the time. They said, “Look, we can’t really get this together.” We completely understood. We left the door open for him. That didn’t come through. I was glad that I could deliver those presidents. It was a high point.

“And now . . . a boy from a small town in Indiana . . . David Letterman.” The audience cheers as Dave runs across the stage. They are on their feet even before we see them.  They start chanting “Dave.” Some in the audience are jumping up and down as the cheering goes on and on. Dave unbuttons his jacket and shows the left and right insides of his suit. He all but shimmies his tie back and forth, not sure what to do, as there is no in sight for this ovation. Dave says, “Please be seated. I don’t know what to do.” They continue paying tribute to the last time Dave will stand center stage and give a late-night monologue. “All right, that’s it. Stop it right there. Sit Down. Thank you.” After they finally start to settle Dave says, “Now we don’t have time for the giving-gifts-to-the-audience segment.”

Associate Producer Rick Scheckman: It was a regular audience. The only special people in there were his family — Regina, Harry, and Harry’s friend. People who were lucky enough to get tickets were in the audience. It wasn’t like you get a ticket because you wrote the most viewer-mail letters. He wanted a regular audience. 

Dave begins with a joke written by former Carson writers Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland: “I’ll be honest with you: It’s beginning to look like I am not going to get The Tonight Show.”

Writer Jim Mulholland: We did write that joke. We did various versions of that joke. I don’t think we ever insulted Dave with those jokes. That is one thing about Johnny and Letterman: they liked self-deprecating jokes. 

Writer Steve Young: We started to work ahead a little bit on the last show. Everybody wanted to have a piece of that action. We wrote well ahead of time. I wrote a couple pages. Bill Scheft wrote a couple pages. Old times: staffers and former monologue writers submitted jokes. 

Bill Scheft: The Tonight Show joke was always going to be first out of the chute. In twenty-four years, I remember a handful of times when the opening remarks had been set a few hours before the taping, but never the day before. 

Dave rolls a videotaped piece in which he says goodbye to the staff. The group gathers, waiting for Dave to stop in the office; instead a hologram appears and waves goodbye.

Writer Jill Goodwin: I did the bit where Dave says he gathered the staff together to say goodbye. Like most bits, we taped it with whoever was not busy at the moment. Some of the staffers around the table were Steve Kaufman, Pam Narozny, Jeanine Kelly, Neal Fessler, Eddie Valk, and Sarah Eyde. I think we taped it the second-to last-day. There was a lot of school spirit that week, so everyone was wearing their Late Show shirts.

Bill Scheft: The non-monologue writers on the show are really writers/producers. They put together their own pieces. They write them, edit them, and put them together. These guys, like Lee, Jeremy, Steve, Joe, and Jill, have a lot of skills. They cut together a lot of those packages that we saw on the last shows.

Dave does a bit about having to retire because they can’t make the lettering on the cue cards any bigger, runs a taped piece called “Comedy We Could Have Done Tomorrow,” talks about having to now go on other shows to apologize, and does a joke about his family.  He says, “It has been hard on the family. My son asked, ‘Why does Daddy have to go to prison?’”

Bill Scheft: We were putting the monologue together and we didn’t have a joke about Harry. I said, “Steve had a beauty about your kid. I don’t remember the set-up, but that your kid doesn’t understand what is going on, he keeps saying, ‘Why does daddy have to go to prison?’” To me only Dave can do that joke. I was a stand-up for thirteen years and my late wife was a stand-up, and she told me really early on, “The best comics do material that only they can do. Nobody else can steal the joke because it’s of them.” 

Steve Young: It did feel like it was a special occasion, and we knew the family would be in the audience and there would be this added dimension to it. There were natural points to seasonally mention Dave talking about his son. It felt appropriate. 

Dave finishes the monologue by rolling clips created by The Simpsons and Wheel of Fortune. Alan Kalter is given a moment to say goodbye, and is intentionally cut off by an ad for Ford Motors. 

Rick Scheckman: It would have been fun if we could have had Tom Brokaw come out and do that first bit from the first Late Show about intellectual property during the monologue. I had not thought of it at the time. We had so many grandiose ideas for the final show. Thank God they all got simplified. You saw what Dave wanted. It was a perfect show. We did a very simple show. We didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot.

Jim Mulholland: It was a good companion piece to the final Tonight Shows. I don’t think anything can ever top those last two episodes of the Carson show. It was pretty close. Dave did a very good monologue. It was one of his best monologues, and it was the last one. 

Bill Scheft: My last effort looked no different in format than my first, which I typed on an IBM Wheelwriter and turned in Monday, October 21, 1991, except that just under “Opening Remarks  Scheft  5/20” I wrote the last line of Catullus poem #101 (“Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale”). In the makeup room, Dave asked me to translate the Latin, and I managed to not choke up when I said, “And into eternity, brother, hail and farewell.” 

Act 2 begins with a clip from the morning show from August 27, 1980, when there was a fire on the set. Dave begins his desk piece by wishing his successor, Stephen Colbert, the best of luck. Dave runs a classic video piece in which he interacts with children. The next bumper, from the morning show, is Andy Kaufman talking about Taxi and having snot coming out of his nose.

Dave then announces the final Top Ten List: “Things I’ve Always Wanted to Say To Dave,” presented by ten longtime friends of the show. He calls them to the stage one by one to deliver the star-studded Top Ten.

Jill Goodwin: We had interns, old employees, and the staff writing for that Top Ten.

Supervising Producer Sheila Rogers: I was backstage for the Top Ten. I was hanging out with their publicists and making sure everyone was happy with their lines. We had a tiny dressing-room situation, so when we had all of those people we had to have trailers. It wasn’t A+ accommodations, but everyone was good about it.

Joe Grossman: I wrote the entry for Alec Baldwin. I wrote a version of Chris Rock’s joke, but maybe every writer wrote that, because it was an obvious area. 

Bill Scheft: Being on the show was really important to Chris Rock, and it certainly didn’t have to be.

Supervising Producer Brian Teta: The Larry Sanders finale was all I thought of while we were doing the last shows. That last episode was so great when Jim Carrey comes on and does that number to Garry Shandling. What is that gonna be for us? And then we also got Jim Carrey in our last episode.

Writer Lee Ellenberg: I think I wrote Jerry Seinfeld’s entry. I liked the idea of him doing a little acting in it. He is one of those guys that it is hard for him not to be funny. I wrote that pretty late in the game. It is not really a joke. It is contingent on how the line is delivered, and that isn’t a worry with Jerry. 

Sheila Rogers: That was, “Just get the best names you can get.” I think I booked them all but Peyton. 

Brian Teta: I was involved in the booking part of it and brainstorming names. We had a lot of people that you would expect and couple were surprises. Peyton Manning was the one I was the most involved with. I spent that whole day with Peyton getting him ready. It was a big deal for him to clear his schedule. Dave knew who was coming, but he didn’t give any thought to it. He seemed happy and surprised when Peyton came out. Dave can tell a joke as well as anyone, but he can’t win a Super Bowl. 

Lee Ellenberg: We all knew that if we had to go twelve rounds over a normal Top Ten List, we knew that this one was going to be a long process. It was pass after pass. The only thing that worried me was that there is a law of diminishing returns. If it is Seinfeld, it seems like I want to write a joke about these three or four things, but the fifteenth pass I am going way off course here. At one point R.J., Zac, Mike, and I were just writing jokes and drinking beer. We knew the celebrities involved would want a say in what they said. It turned out great, but it took a couple of weeks to make everyone happy. 

Steve Young: That seemed to be something that was going back and forth for quite a long time. You had to not only please Dave, but whoever the celebrity was. There were more layers and filters than usual.

Brian Teta: I was wondering if Tina Fey was gonna wear a dress. The premise of her last bit was that she wasn’t ever going to wear a dress again. Tina had a hard time deciding. She said, “I wasn’t sure, because I was still on Letterman, so it would be okay.” She opted out of wearing one. I am gonna hold her to it. I have watched her on other late-night talk shows; she has never wore a dress. She has committed to the bit.

Bill Scheft: Tina’s line was written by Caroline Schaper, a writer’s intern. On the last day of the last show, she scored the final two entries on the final Top Ten. She had Bill Murray’s line. We were all genuinely thrilled for her. This 21-year-old has all the resume she needs going forward. 

Lee Ellenberg: When Julia Louis-Dreyfus saw her joke, which I had written, by the way, she said, “I don’t like this joke, I want a different joke.” She was right. I think it was a joke I had written while we were drinking. I think she turned to Seinfeld and said, “This is a joke they gave me.” He said, “Don’t do that joke, it sucks.”

Joe Grossman: We all agreed it was terrible. We didn’t fault him for that because you write so many jokes; they are not all gonna be great. It had something to do with, “You are like the brother I never had, but I never had any siblings,” or something like that. So Seinfeld and Julia went to the head writer and said, “Can we get a better joke, because this is going bomb?” He said, “No, it will be fine.” Jerry said, “I know a few things about jokes; this joke is gonna die.” 

Bill Scheft: Julia settled on a line written by Mike Leech, which the next day was proclaimed the winner of the Top Ten. 

Lee Ellenberg: It was the joke that got the biggest laugh. I was just very happy that joke got on, because we all loved it so much. It got on through sheer happenstance. I was thrilled, because Mike’s joke was better. You can put it in bold: it sucked. 

When the segment ends, Dave walks over and says something to each person. Dave says, “Thank you, Alec, good to see you. Barbara, God bless you. Steve, thank you very much. That was wonderful. Jerry, nice job. Jim, thanks for everything.” Carrey says, “I love you, so much.” Dave continues, “Chris, how you do, Buddy? Julia, oh my God, your show is tremendous this year, so funny. Mr. Manning, oh, my God, look who it is. That’s unbelievable. Tina, again, thank you for everything. And Bill, I saw you on TV last night, are you all right?”  He turns and announces, “It’s our friends here at the Late Show.”

The next act includes the famous videotaped piece of Dave working at Taco Bell from 1996. The bumper is a classic clip of Larry “Bud” Melman dressed as Santa struggling to read Twas the Night Before Christmas. Next up is “A Day in Dave’s Life” — a backstage look at what a typical day of work is like for Dave and his staff. It begins with Dave arriving at the 53rd Street entrance early in the morning and takes him through audience Q & A just before taping.

Creative Director Jay Johnson: In the last few weeks of the show, Walter Kim and I were approached by Barbara Gaines and Dave’s executive assistant, Mary Barclay, to create a “day in the life of Dave” piece for the final broadcast. They asked us to come in and shoot footage with Dave and edit the piece ourselves with Dave’s input. This was probably the highlight of my time with the show. It was an opportunity to work with Dave and create something unique for his final show, but we had little time to actually prepare for it. 

Rick Scheckman: Jay and Walter did the day-in-the-life piece. Jay was my intern back in ‘86. He was the only intern we ever hired on the spot. He worked all over the place — one of the nicest men you are ever going to meet.

Jay Johnson: Very quickly we found ourselves shooting staff meetings with Dave, following him down to the studio, filming his pre-show conference with producers in his dressing room, and covering various activities around the offices. We would shoot something with Dave, then run back to our office, quickly throw together a rough cut, then send the footage to Dave for notes. For the beginning of the piece, we got up very early in the morning to shoot Dave’s arrival at the theater, which was normally around 6 a.m. We had to be poised and ready with our cameras for the moment he arrived. We actually ended up shooting Dave’s arrival twice because he didn’t like a hat he was wearing the first time around. The second version was shot just two days before the final show.

Brian Teta: I watched the show in the green room with all these titans of comedians from the Top Ten. I made one joke during the show when they were showing the day-in-the-life piece. It’s an idealized version of working at the Late Show. I said under my breath, “Gee, that looks like a fun place to work.” I got a big laugh in that room and I thought, “I can die now.”

Bill Scheft: It was a long, long last break as they set up for the Foo Fighters. The band must have played Ian Hunter’s “Central Park and West,” Dave’s favorite New York City song, for ten minutes. Around minute ten, Paul looked at Nancy Agostini and pointed to his watch. Nancy is staring at stage manager Eddie Valk, waiting for him to give the thirty-second cue. Todd is holding the last cue card, “THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT,” which Dave will utter at the end of his final remarks. Me? I’ve already said the last thing I will say to my boss: “You know how to do this.” 

The final act is Dave’s goodbye to his fans, viewers, staff, and family. Dave says, “The last six weeks, it’s been crazy. People have been saying lovely things about us and it’s really been over the top, and I can’t tell you how flattering, embarrassing, and gratifying it has all been. I have two things to say about this. We have done over 6,000 shows, and I was here for most of them. I can tell you a pretty high percentage of those shows just absolutely sucked. And also, in light of all of this praise, merited or not, save a little for my funeral. I’d appreciate it.”

Brian Teta: Paul had that great joke on the last episode. “Dave, I know you’ll hate this . . . . ” That is what they all said. That was right on the money. Every conversation started that way. I am hoping he hated it less as it went on. It was important to me, as a fan of the show, that Dave got what was due to him, that these guests did say these things. It was important, whether Dave wanted to hear it or not. They were things that needed to be said.

Dave says, “The crew, what a tremendous crew we had here. The people you see on the stage, the people you don’t see on the stage. The people you see upstairs, the props department, the audio, the cameras, makeup, wardrobe, scenic — it goes on and on. These people night after night put up with my nonsense and have taken great care of not just me, but everybody on the show.”

Stage Manager Eddie Valk: I was close to a lot of people on that show for a long time. It was nice to kind of have that special moment. It wasn’t until after the show was actually over that the “holy shit” thought came into play. At that time, it was still, “Things will be okay.”

Dave: “The staff, what a tremendous staff. We have researchers, and these poor people work in some kind of a subterranean pit. There is no natural light there, and yet they come in day in and day out and they do the work.”

Rick Scheckman: The final show was one of the best shows we ever did. We talked about so many grandiose plans in those weekly meetings, and then finally it became very simple. Do a monologue, roll some clips, tell some memories, thank some people, and run Barbara’s montage. 

Vice President, Human Resources Worldwide Pants Janice Penino: That last episode we all had the opportunity to stand in the back and watch the second half of the show, which we never had the ability to do. All of us stood along the back wall. 

“The talent coordinators, they bring the guests in. We have segment producers, producers, we have people in the control room. I’ve never been in the control room. Can we have a shot of the control room? Let’s keep it to three drinks today.”

Jerry Foley: As far as directing opportunity goes, you are not gonna get another one like that. You will do other things, but you are not gonna be wrapping up an icon’s career. It was Dave’s show when he started, and it was Dave’s show when he ended. He was pretty clear in communicating how he wanted it to go. I think it was just as good as it was supposed to be. Art is never finished; it is abandoned. I thought it was done gracefully.

Sheila Rogers: I was standing right by Barbara at the podium. I had no idea what Dave was going to say. 

“The writers, throughout the years of this show and the show at NBC, I have been blessed and lucky to work with men and women who are smarter than I am and funnier than I am. I have always been interested in doing the show that the writers have given me. Now these people collectively that I have just now mentioned and introduced, believe me this is absolutely the truth, deserve more credit for this show than I ever will. Thank you to all of these people.”

Jill Goodwin: It was exciting, crazy, and packed. It felt like so much electricity in the room. I think I made the right decision to watch in the back of the theater. It was supercool. I mostly watched Dave and tried to think about what he was feeling and thinking. There was so much lead-up to the last show that I think he had gone through so many ranges of emotions. I think he was just trying to soak it in and enjoy the moment. At the end of the day, it’s the end of a TV show, but not the end of the world. I think he was trying to be in the moment rather than make it a big, heavy thing.

Lee Ellenberg: It felt like more than a show was ending — something that was so important in my life — and a man who had in one form or another been a part of my life since I was a kid was gone. To me David Letterman was always on the outside. He was still on at 12:30, when he would say the only people watching television were prisoners and shut-ins — that guy, a guy that if you liked the show you thought you were in on some inside, secret society. “Oh, you watch Letterman? So do I.” To go from that to where we were now, that he had come to be the respected figure in broadcasting and he was now saying goodbye, it was wild. 

Dave continues, “Now folks we see every day. Thanks to Alan Kalter. A guy who has been with me for thirty-five years, and mostly every day he and I have been involved in making television shows, Biff Henderson. Thank you, Biff, God bless you. Here is what I will miss most about this show, and we will start with Felicia Collins, Sid McGinnis, Will Lee, Anton Fig, Tom Malone, Franke Greene, Aaron Heick, and my good, good friend — as good a friend as you can have on television, as good a friend that you can have in life, absolutely a musical genius, Paul Shaffer. It is the CBS orchestra.” Paul Shaffer says, “Thank you, Dave. You’ve changed our lives. We’ve loved every second of it.” 

For those who set their DVRs to record the finale, their recordings cut off here, as the show was extended an extra sixteen minutes. This was not advertised or relayed to any of the cable companies.

Associate Director Randi Grossack: I think it was a mistake that we made that night not flooding Twitter and Facebook to say the show is running long — “Set your DVR for the right length” — because a lot of people who taped it missed the end. 

Dave goes on to thank his mother, and a picture of Betty White shows up on screen, before it is replaced by a photo of Dorothy Letterman. He thanks his wife, Regina, and son Harry. They get a standing ovation from the audience, seated around the Letterman family. It is a wonderful, human moment. His wife smiles, beautifully, soaking it all in. Dave says, “Seriously, just thank you for being my family. I love you both, and really nothing else matters, does it?” Regina blows him a kiss.  Dave continues, “Before the show Harry wanted me to introduce his buddy, Tommy Roboto. Here’s Tommy. Go get ‘em, Tommy.” Dave laughs and the audience applauds as the two young boys are shown in the audience.

Jerry Foley: When he introduced his wife and son in the audience and his son’s friend, Tommy Roboto, what if we didn’t have cameras in the area? Or they were pointing the wrong way and you weren’t able to get the shot of Harry’s friend? I remember a couple of days afterward having that thought, That would have been a disaster. 

Dave thanks the fans at home and then tells the story about the Foo Fighters and his heart surgery. He tells how the band flew from South America to perform when Dave came back from his surgery. The band is back tonight to play the same song. Dave wraps up his thirty-three years of late-night television with: “That is pretty much all I got. The only thing I have left to do for the last time on a television program: thank you and goodnight.”

Following Dave’s final remarks, The Foo Fighters perform “Everlong” set to an epic montage of moments from Dave’s late night entire career. It was the grand finale of the last show, but the work started way before the final show, final week, or even the final month.

Barbara Gaines: A few years ago I was talking to Dave on the phone. He was driving home, and I remember pacing in my closet on the phone. I remember vividly that he said, “If we ever end the show, we are going to have to end it with some kind of big montage or something.” I said, “When that day comes, of course, we will do that.” He said, “No, don’t just say that. It will be such a big project that we are going to need someone else to do it. We will be too busy doing the show. There is someone who does that kind of thing. Find that person and have them start it now, so if it ever happens, we are ready to go.” This was years before. I looked around and found a person who was very famous for doing that. We had him start working on it. I didn’t tell him it was for Dave’s retirement. I told him it was for an anniversary. 

Randi Grossack: I put together several reels of the show for him to get an idea of what the show was like. He was working on it, then the anniversary comes and goes and that piece doesn’t air. We never heard anything about it.

Barbara Gaines: When Dave said he was going to retire, I checked in with the person and said, “Let’s see what you got.” I saw it and I didn’t like it. I showed it to Rob Burnett. When it ended he was very quiet and said, “I hate it.” I went to Dave and said, “It’s no good.” He said, “Do others think that?” I said, “Yes, others think that.” I said, “I’d like to give it a try.”

Randi Grossack:  Barbara asked me to work on it with her, which I was thrilled for. Mark Spada was the editor. I was the associate director on it. Mark has amazing patience and poured his love into it, like we all did.  

Barbara Gaines: The three of us would go into a little room. I could only work on it on Fridays because I was doing the show. I was using regular clips with audio. Hillary Clinton saying, “Was that you?” — the regular clips that people have seen over the years. 

Randi Grossack: It was all on actual tape. Once we had our reels done we would transfer them to a digital file for the edit session. We called NBC, and they opened the vault for us. I think most of it we had in house.

Barbara Gaines: Dave called the editing room and asked, “How’s it going?” I said, “I am trying out this thing with Joaquin Phoenix just staring and then you say, ‘Wish you had been here.’” Dave interrupts, “Wait, wait, wait, I thought this was all stills?” I said, “What? Stills? No. This is TV and that is moving pictures. What do you mean, stills?” Dave said, “I thought it was stills, boom, boom, boom, a flash and an explosion of images.” I said, “You did? [laughs]. Did we have that talk?” He said, “Gaines!” I said, “Great, sure, yes, that is what we are doing.” I hung up and I said to Randi and Mark, “Everything we did, scrap it.”  They just looked at me. We had been doing this for months. 

Randi Grossack: We had to rethink the whole concept.

Barbara Gaines: I started taking pieces of videotape and freeze frame. Freeze. Freeze. Freeze. It was tedious. That is how we would have to get the stills. 

Randi Grossack: During the week, I was in the tape area and we started pulling different clips. Everyone would have ideas of what should be in the video. 

Barbara Gaines: I took my senior producers —Jude Brennan, Nancy Agostini, Kathy Mavrikakis, Matt Roberts, Sheila Rogers — and I said, “Tell me stuff you remember that you like,” and they gave me lists. The writers also gave me lists. I looked through their stuff to pick things that I thought might work. You would look through something and sometimes you couldn’t catch the right still or it was really blurry. Some of the early stuff was very grainy.  I think somewhere in there Dave said it should be to the Foo Fighters song “Everlong.”

Randi Grossack: It was very collaborative. We would go into the room and work on little sections. “Lets focus on comedians, the stuff we did on 53rd Street, or musical acts.” We would work on that and make sure we didn’t missing anybody. We went through so many different versions and kept tinkering with it. Barbra would take it home overnight.

Barbara Gaines: I was cutting it to the Foo Fighters. I am trying to cut it really fast, where the drumbeats are. Mark is editing it perfectly to the song. I finally get a version I think is alright. I show it to the staff in my office. It ends and the room is silent. They look at me and say, “It’s nice.” Jerry says, “You can’t end the show with that.” I am like, “Oh, no.” So I go back to the edit room, and in the meantime this is costing money. Dave keeps saying, “What are people saying?” I said, “I need just a little more time.” I make people work over Christmas. Every year without fail after February sweeps week we all had the first week of March off. I took that away, because I said, “You are gonna have the rest of your lives off.” Mostly because I was editing. 

Randi Grossack: Once we started to set it to music it started to fall into place. Some of the riffs in the music were very fast and the stills became very quick, which makes it interesting, and you can’t blink or look away for a second because you will miss something. We started working with different effects.

Barbara Gaines: We decided to put the explosions at the end. Somehow it just came together. I am not sure how. So I showed it to the staff again. This must have been around the end of March 2015. They said, “Gaines, you’ve got it. It worked.” So I went to Dave and said, “We have it. It’s OK.” He said, “Really? Who said it’s OK?” I worked with the guy my entire life, I still talk to him, but he would still ask, “Did the elevator guy also like it?” “Yes, the elevator guy also liked it.” Then he said, “And you’ve got the Foo Fighters to play live to it?” I said, “Wait, what? No. I edited it to the song, so perfectly. Live? That is never gonna work. How can you have it live? I have edited it perfect.” He said, “No one wants to see that. It has to be live.” I said, “OK, great. Of course it’s live. That is exactly what we were thinking.” 

Supervising Producer Kathy Mavrikakis: It was not Barbara’s first stab at it. Dave kind of knew from the beginning what he wanted, but he wasn’t being clear about it. He had a different montage in mind than the one we thought he had in mind. When he finally made clear what he wanted, it was more obvious. I think that was what he intended in the beginning.

Barbara Gaines: So I say to Sheila Rogers, “Can we get the Foo Fighters to do this live? If we have them live, we will barely see them. I don’t want to cut back and forth. I have been working so hard on this video. It is all these quick images.” Sheila says, “They are going to have to fly in, cancel a gig, and they won’t be on camera?” I said, “Right, that is what I want.” She said, “I don’t know. That seems like an insult to them. I can’t ask them that.” I said, “Send the DVD to Dave Grohl and see what he says, because this really is what Dave would like. Just see what happens.”

Sheila Rogers: We wanted to give Dave exactly what he wanted. Word came to me he wanted the Foo Fighters to do “Everlong.” The Foo Fighters are sweethearts. They were great about it. We explained we were gonna show this montage. They didn’t say, “What? You aren’t gonna show us on TV?” They were so cool about that they didn’t care. I can’t say enough great things about the Foo Fighters, the band, Dave Grohl, and their management.

Barbara Gaines: They said, “It would be an honor. We would love to play behind that.” Finally,  great. We have stills, we have Foo Fighters live. We had it.

Bill Scheft: Barbara worked with Randi and Mark for six months. It was her masterpiece. I am no help. I saw the first version of it, cried, and said, “Don’t change anything.” They did another fifty versions after that. I am no help.

Randi Grossack: We had twenty-one versions. It was version twenty-one that aired. We started doing stills in November 2014. I think prior to that we were working with moving video. Once we moved to stills, it all changed and we started over. I think we worked on that video from November 2014 and we stopped working on it on May 18, 2015. 

Sheila Rogers: I can’t even image the hours Barbara put in for that montage. We were all given a database and given certain years, to be sure that we didn’t miss anyone. She put that whole thing together with Randi and Mark. I always find music is what touches the nerve the most, a melody. The combination was pretty overwhelming emotionally, in a good way. I was really proud to be a part of this.

Writer Jeremy Weiner: The live element of the music was so important. It really helped underscore the moment. Gaines’s knowledge of the history of the show was incredible. Randi and Mark’s cutting of it was really a special thing.

Randi Grossack: In rehearsal, we rolled the video with a live version we found online for the Foo Fighters. I see Dave Grohl has a giant smile on his face as he hears his music as all those images roll for the first time. They got what we were going for and knew how to do it.

Eddie Valk: I remember in rehearsal a lot of people taking pictures of people because it was the last show. I have fun, happy memories of that day. That was the first time I saw the montage and to see how close the Foo Fighters were to nailing it. They had to time it perfectly to when Farrah Fawcett says, “Wow.” The first pass at that was so cool, to see them come up with how much time they had to shave off to hit that perfectly. You knew Dave’s affection for the Foo Fighters.

Barbara Gaines: They played at rehearsal. It was close. It was nothing like I had it when I edited it within an inch of its life and perfect to the drumming, but it was good and close enough. One of the times they rehearsed they had Farrah perfect and one of the times nowhere near it. 

Randi Grossack: They got a count to where Farrah happened, but they knew how to hit it properly. They are that good. They knew when and we opened the pod so they could hear it off the track.

Kathy Mavrikakis: I just remember running up onto the stage while it was happening and watching everyone’s faces. Being there was amazing. The Foos were playing. It was just great. 

Janice Penino: I remember trying to see as many musical rehearsals as I could. I have a son who is in college, and they needed a lot of bodies to pack things up and move stuff. So we hired all our kids to help move stuff. So he and his friends were working that last day, and we went down and watched the Foo FIghters rehearse. I remember Barbara running up to Dave Grohl and give him a big hug because she had worked so hard on that montage and it worked so perfectly in rehearsal. It was just a moment.

Bill Scheft: The first time the Foo Fighters performed it, Barbara threw herself at Dave Grohl. I remember Barbra saying to me, she is my best friend, I remember her saying to me with about two weeks left: “I am just living these last shows. This is all there is.” It had to be that way. That montage was her baby. 

Barbara Gaines: When they had it perfect, I ran up on stage and hugged Dave Grohl. I don’t know him, but I screamed, “That was so amazing!” He’s like, “Who? Why? Get this woman off me.” I was beyond excited. Someone took a picture of me hugging him. I don’t know how, but people were taking pictures everywhere.

Randi Grossack: It all seemed to work beautifully. It was just magical watching it roll. It was like a love letter. All this work that I loved all these years, it is all there.

Brian Teta: Barbara’s montage was like an epic undertaking. She spent so much time and energy on it. Everybody on the staff watched a hundred different versions of it. The rehearsal was emotional for everyone. It was a great day. Everybody was on set. That show could not have gone any better. It really was just a perfect show. Very rarely do you get to stick the landing. 

Joe Grossman: I had not been there as long as everybody else. Most of the images were things I had seen as a viewer when I had watched the NBC show in high school. To see it all condensed into a video, it made an impression, and it was hard not to get emotional. It was such a huge part of our lives. All these people you work with every day, you see them on the screen. I saw my picture go by a couple times. It was very well done. It was a good way to end the show. I remember finding out they were just gonna do stills and thinking, “That is a terrible idea; why would you do that?” I was entirely wrong about that. It was very well done.

Jeremy Weiner: It was unbelievable. It was this flood of memories rushing back, and the music is so great. It was like watching your life flash in front of your eyes, literally. You would see classic stuff and stuff you just hadn’t thought about in years. It was a compelling moment way to end it.

Jay Johnson: I thought it was fantastic. She worked so hard on that, as did Randi and Mark. The fact that they were able to pull that off was amazing. Pouring through three decades of footage is no small feat. To find all those highlights and to create a package that was emotional and exhilarating — watching it brought up so many different emotions and memories in anyone who watched it. I thought it was fantastic.

Lee Ellenberg: All the writers were in the writers’ conference room. There were all these shots of Dave at the desk. I don’t know. I didn’t have a wave of nostalgia come over me. I was more struck with — this is it. We are pulling into dock. It is over. 

Rick Scheckman: They finished the show with the clip of Dave and Harry skiing. This meant something to Dave personally, and that was how he wanted to finish the final show. I find it difficult to revisit these things. We did it. It’s done.

After The Show

Janice Penino: Everyone took one last look around. I don’t remember lingering all that long. We went to the wrap party.

Lee Ellenberg: We had a party. We were told our offices had to be cleaned out by Friday. I knew I didn’t want to come back. So I had taken care of everything. When we left for the party, I knew that was the last time I was ever going to walk through those doors. I remember leaving very soon after the closing credits came on. I picked up my bag and left. I went out the doors I always went out, the side door by Rupert’s. My friend, RJ, was taking a picture of the marquee, and he happened to catch me exiting for my final moment, crossing the street.

Eddie Valk: We went to an after-party for the staff at the Museum of Modern Art. Everyone was there, mostly just the staff. We had a blowout. It was a big party. It was the grand finale of it all.

Jill Goodwin: It was a fun party. I was scared that all this excitement would end and it would feel like falling off a cliff. There was a letdown after that. It was like the drinking blues. You had this great time and then had to wake up the next morning and continue on. I am happy for Dave that everything wrapped up as nicely as it did. The last couple months were great. I can’t imagine he would have wanted anything different.

Brian Teta: We had a wrap party at MoMA. All the guests were there from the Top Ten. Regis, Keith Olbermann, and people who were friends of the show. Dave was there and being social and warm. A lot of the staff after that went to McGee’s, which was kind of the office hangout. It was the How I Met Your Mother bar. We watched the show there together. It played even better watching it air.

Randi Grossack: It was very emotional. It was a big part of my life — people I spent twenty-two years with and loved like family, and it was coming to an end. You hit that last Worldwide Pants, then people headed to a party and I’m heading to an edit room.

Barbara Gaines: The show ends and everyone goes to the wrap party. I go to the edit room. I have to fix the Farrah thing in “Everlong.” When the Foo Fighters did it on the show, they didn’t get it. It was close, but it wasn’t perfect.

Randi Grossack: We wound up having to do a little tweaking because certain effects didn’t render properly. So when it rolled it had to be fixed in post. That was a little more involved than we were hoping it would have to be. 

Barbara Gaines: They said, “We would like to go to the wrap party.” I said, “How long can it take? It will be so great for her to say, ‘Wow’ where I put it.” My one little cutesy thing. Besides that we were seventeen minutes over. SEVENTEEN. The network says, “We’ll see what we can do.” 

CBS Network Executive Vincent Favale: I was really pissed at Barbara for that one. I was telling anyone who would listen. This was going to be f*cking epic. Let me give you an extra half-hour. They kept saying, “No, we can do this in an hour.” What happens? They go long and Barbara wants the extra time. It is a big difference when we are giving it to them a month in advance and when they want it right then.

Randi Grossack: It was not a focused edit room because everyone was keyed up and emotional. Everyone was coming to say goodbye. There was a lot of stuff going on, so we didn’t get moving as quickly as we would on a normal night. We had permission from CBS to run long, so we weren’t taking anything out. There was a problem with a couple of the render effects. Instead of using the version that ran through the control room, the editor wanted to use the cleanest version. So he was just placing the original version on top of it, but then some of the other effects weren’t rendering properly.

Barbara Gaines: We were done at 5:30. It had to air at 11:30, but it was taking us hours and hours. It took us a little time because we got rolling a little later because I went to a meeting after the show. So I probably didn’t get down there till 6:30. I started late. Then they had to push everything to re-edit the montage to make it hit for Farrah, which took a long time.

Vincent Favale: I had James Corden already doing a show. It was really fucked up. Whatever she was going through was just as hard for me because I had to navigate those waters. I had to call the West Coast. They had to move a lot of stuff to make it happen. It was so much that I didn’t even bother going to the party. I was annoyed, frustrated, and it was late.

Barbara Gaines: We are editing. An hour in CBS says they want to add in a commercial. So we had to start from the beginning. It was such a, excuse me, pig f*ck. As always happens, the machines crashed, so there are five guys just standing looking at a machine. They are just standing there looking! It is getting later and later. None of us got to the wrap party. We are just standing there as the clock tick, tick, ticks. This will be cute. We are not going to air the last show.

Randi Grossack: He had to keep re-rendering, and it kept taking longer and longer. Then it was becoming a little more stressful. CBS called at 9:30 and said, “You can’t just put the extra time at the end. There is going to be more commercial time in the show now.” I had the whole show laid out except the final act. Then I had to relay the entire show to tape, and that is over an hour. Now it is getting close to 10:30, and people are coming back from the party saying, “What are you still doing here?”

Vincent Favale: I am waiting for confirmation for what I already knew, that they were gonna need the extra time. It was a domino effect, because Corden had to collapse his show. Now the guest that was going to be in Corden’s first spot is now going to be on during Letterman’s final show, so we need this much commercial time. Then it gets into the minutiae because we need a certain amount of segments. It all worked out, but it was a totally appropriately f*cked up way to end the show. I say it with all peace and love.

Barbara Gaines: They gave us the OK at 9:30, but they added another commercial, which then we had to fit in. We already felt like we had acts one, two, three down, but then we had to fix that to do the extra commercial. It ended up 16:27 over. 

Randi Grossack: We needed to get a car waiting to run the tape over to the network. On the last night of the show, I am running down the hall as if it’s the scene in Broadcast News, with the tape on my chest, because it is such a big moment. Am I gonna get hit by a car taking it over to the broadcast center? It was all much more exciting than it needed to be.

Vincent Favale: I had nothing but a hundred percent confidence with these guys. They were total pros. There was some nights when they didn’t deliver the show till 11:30, where we fed the show to the affiliates from the Ed Sullivan. I knew they would get it done. We lost a lot of time scrambling to make this happen. You can’t make that decision at 6:30. The drama ended on my end once we figured out the economics and break structure. I knew they would deliver the final show.

Barbara Gaines: We finished at 11:20. Randi took the tape, like in Broadcast News, and ran down the street to a car and brought it to the broadcast center, and we made it to the air. 

Randi Grossack: We were still handing it in to the network in 2015. They may be doing it digitally now. It’s not as fast as you might think. If you send it digitally, someone on the other end has to sit and watch it because you don’t know if there is going to be a glitch. So it needs a tech check on the other side. I am old school. I like knowing it is something I can put my hand on to know it is actually there. 

Vincent Favale: This could have been planned better, had all this happened months before.

Barbara Gaines: It was complicated. They wanted us to do what they wanted us to do. They wanted us to do a primetime special. They wanted us to do an hour-and-half-long show. We ended up going seventeen minutes over. We didn’t want to plan for an hour-and-a-half-long show, because then in the end you are still seventeen minutes over. I love Vinnie, but CBS was awful. I will stand by that. They were cutting our financing. They were not making things easy. I did not feel like we were getting a respectful send-off. I know Vinnie was upset that I was ruining his party, but I don’t care. They should have said, “We are sending out a show of thirty-three years, and we will do whatever we can to help them.” Maybe if I had gone to the party, it would feel different and I would have felt like I got closure. That wasn’t how it went. As I sat in the edit room instead of the wrap party, listening to the Foo Fighters over and over, I wondered if anything could ever be this good again. I rushed home to see that it got on the air. I walked in as Alan said, “David Letterman.”

—

Watching along with Barbara Gaines that night were 13.76 million viewers, making the finale the second-highest rated episode of Late Show with David Letterman ever. (The highest rated episode aired during the 1994 Winter Olympics when the nation was in the fever grip of the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding scandal.)

Though some thought at the time that Letterman would ride off into the sunset much like his idol Johnny Carson—never to be seen back on television in any significant way—he ended up writing his own post-retirement script, much as he did in late night.  Asked by GQ in 2024 whether he considered himself semi-retired, Letterman responded “Retirement is a myth.”

“As long as you are healthy, you still want to produce,” he explained. “And you will find ways to, once I stopped doing the show, it took me a couple of years to figure out that, oh, this is a completely different rhythm,” he said. “And without the rhythm that you’re accustomed to, largely unsatisfying. So you got to find something that’s important to you.”

The now-bearded Letterman (he stopped shaving the day after Late Show’s finale) is no longer a nightly fixture, but he remains in the public eye, hosting the Netflix long-form interview show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, guesting on other late-night shows, and taping original content for his own YouTube Channel, which is lovingly curated by former staff members.

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