David Letterman: Wants to Extend Late Show Hosting Beyond 2010!!!!!!!

by **J The Kidd** Thu Sep 04, 2008 12:03 am

While David Letterman only has a year and a half left on his
contract, the Late Show host wants to extend his hosting duties beyond
that, according to a Rolling Stone interview featured in the latest
issue.

“The way I feel now, I would like to go beyond 2010, not much beyond,
but you know, enough to go beyond,” David Letterman tells Rolling
Stone. “You always like to be able to excuse yourself on your own
terms. If the network is happy with that, great. If they wanna make a
change in 2010, you know, I’m fine with that, too.”

The late night landscape is about to get a bit of a shakeup in the
coming year - Jay Leno steps down from the Tonight Show on May 29,
2009, when he’ll be replaced by Conan O’Brien. Jimmy Fallon will take
over the seat Conan O’Brien leaves behind.

David Letterman has something to say about Jay Leno leaving his post
too, saying, “Unless I’m misunderstanding something, I don’t know why,
after the job Jay has done for them, why they would relinquish that. I
guess they thought it was a less messy way to handle what happened to
me at NBC. I don’t know.”

And what about Letterman’s new competition, Conan O’Brien? “It will be
weird to see Conan at 11:30, don’t you think? Which is not to say he
can’t succeed, but, no, I don’t know what the competition will be like.
I hope we’re able to do okay.”

The Rolling Stone article also has David Letterman reminiscing about
some of the memorable guests he’s had on the show, like Madonna, Oprah
Winfrey and Howard Stern. His memory of musician Warren Zevon, who
appeared on the Late Show shortly before his 2003 death from cancer,
was particularly moving.

David Letterman says of meeting Warren Zevon in a dressing room after the show:

“Here’s a guy who had months to live and we’re making small talk. And
as we’re talking, he’s taking his guitar strap and hooking it, wrapping
it around, then he puts the guitar into the case and he flips the snaps
on the case and says, ‘Here, I want you to have this, take good care of
it.’ And I just started sobbing. He was giving me the guitar that he
always used on the show. I felt like, ‘I can’t be in this movie, I
didn’t get my lines.’ That was very tough.”