WGA Takes Leno To Task
Writers Say NBC’s Late-Night Host Violated Strike Rules In Return
By Linda Moss -- Multichannel News, 1/3/2008 4:22:00 PM
The Writers Guild of America Thursday, in a not-so-veiled warning, told NBC late-night host Jay Leno that he violated strike rules when he wrote his own monolog for his first night back on the air in several weeks.
Leno returned to the air Wednesday with his The Tonight Show with Jay Leno – without his writers --and referenced the fact that he had done his own opening monolog. But writers for Leno -- unlike David Letterman, who struck an interim deal with the WGA -- are still out on the picket lines.
The WGA took Leno to task in a terse one-sentence statement.
“A discussion took place today between Jay Leno and the Writers Guild to clarify to him that writing for The Tonight Show constitutes a violation of the Guilds’ strike rules,” the union, on strike since Nov. 5, said in a statement.
