Worldwide Pants Incorporated

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Worldwide Pants Incorporated is an American television production and film production company owned by comedian and talk show host David Letterman. Current television productions include Late Show with David Letterman (1993-present) and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005-present).

The company is headquartered at the Ed Sullivan Theater Building in New York City. The president and CEO is a former Late Show executive producer, Rob Burnett; Peter Lassally, a former Tonight Show and Late Show executive producer and current Late Late Show executive producer, is a senior vice-president.

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[edit] Past television productions

The first Worldwide Pants production was Late Night with David Letterman, produced in partnership with NBC and Carson Productions.

Subsequent productions for CBS include:

The company also produced The High Life (1996) for HBO, Ed (2000-2004) for NBC, and The Knights of Prosperity (2007) for ABC.

In April 2005 the Sci Fi Channel announced Barbarian Chronicles, a half-hour animated ensemble comedy from Brendon Small, which will be produced by Worldwide Pants.

A 2002 Forbes article comments on the approach Letterman takes for Worldwide Pants television productions:

Letterman's approach is to nurture an idea with seed money from his production company, then get someone else to pay for the rest of it. He isn't particularly hands-on once the programs get past the initial stages, but his imprimatur carries weight with network buyers. "They've got a point of view about everything they do," says Chris Albrecht, president of original programming at HBO. "These guys are making television every night and have been for a long time. You feel more comfortable with them."

[edit] Film production

The company has produced its first film, a movie prequel to the TV show Strangers with Candy, also called Strangers with Candy. The film had its world premiere at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, within the "Park City at Midnight" category. Warner Independent Pictures subsequently signed up as North American distributor of the film, before ThinkFilm acquired the rights from Warner, scheduling a limited release of the film in summer 2006.

[edit] Worldwide Pants logo

The Worldwide Pants card following The Late Show With David Letterman is usually accompanied by a one-liner somehow involving pants. Examples of this include "Nice pants, Pepe", "Time for pants!", "Take off the pants, Penny", "Mmmm...Deep-Dish Pants!" and "Did you say 'pants?'" Sometimes the voice-over is odd or bizarre, for example, "That's damn good mayo," "I hate bread" and "Nice Shoes, Big Shot." The stranger lines are performed by show announcer Alan Kalter, while the mock-serious versions are usually voiced by freelancer Jay Gardner. If the logo appears on a show besides The Late Show, it is usually overridden by the closing music of the preceding show (the most common instance of this is on Everybody Loves Raymond reruns in syndication and on TBS), or generic network music (which is primarily used to override logo music in the first place).

The card first appeared when older Late Night with David Letterman episodes were briefly rerun on the A&E cable network. In that case, the logo aired at the beginning of the show, was more elaborately animated, and featured a consistent voiceover from Gardner:

"Worldwide Pants! The leader in pants and entertainment... and pants."

[edit] Origin of the Name

 This section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (December 2007)

The reason for Letterman using the word pants in his production company's name probably dates back to an early incident on Late Night. While playing a piece of film Dave read a joke essentially consisting of the line "Guess what's in this guy's pants". However, when the piece aired that evening the NBC censors decided to mute the word pants from the punchline. Letterman, more amused than annoyed, talked extensively on-air about the absurdity of the word pants somehow being considered offensive or risqué. Letterman used pants humor extensively for two or more weeks; creating an hilarious footnote in censorship history.

Pants humor returned during the first Late Show episode of 2008. Letterman was ready to activate a pair of electric underpants, an accessory Letterman said was necessary to fight back the biting winter weather picketing writers faced, when he was interrupted by a member of his writing staff; Bill Scheft. Scheft noted that, although Letterman was on the air with his writers, the writers strike remained unresolved. Scheft then berated the media moguls for "spending all [their] money on cufflinks, cocktails, and whores" and urged them to bargain in good faith so that maybe "America won't be denied seeing David Letterman hold up a pair of flaming underpants."

[edit] 2007 Writers Guild of America Strike

Production of new episodes ceased on November 5, 2007 when the Worldwide Pants writers joined the strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the trade association to which Worldwide Pants is a member. During the first part of the strike reruns of Worldwide Pants shows were aired.

This changed due to an extraordinary development on December 28, 2007 when Worldwide Pants broke ranks with the AMPTP by negotiating an independent, interim collective bargaining agreement with the Writers Guild of America in which Worldwide Pants essentially agreed to operate in accordance with the contract demands of the WGA for the duration of the labor dispute. The agreement allowed both The Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson to return to the airwaves with their full writing staffs on January 2, 2008.

The agreement gave Worldwide Pants and CBS a perceived advantage over their rivals at NBC. The latter network was unable to make similar arrangements for its late night programming because NBC has retained control of production operations for both The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Unlike CBS, NBC would have had to negotiate an agreement covering the entire network in order to have writers work on the two late night shows. NBC aired new episodes of its late night shows on the same night as CBS, but without writers. This meant, among other things, that Leno and O'Brien were unable to perform their traditional monologues without violating strike rules (as the WGA had determined Leno did with monologues he claimed to write) and were unable to secure the appearance of many A-list celebrities, since most SAG celebrities refused to cross a picket line.

The granting of complete control of The Late Show to Letterman was originally a condition CBS accepted in exchange for Letterman's agreement to switch networks in 1993.

[edit] External links and sources

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