Days after revealing that CBS was forcing The Late Show staff to quickly vacate their home of 11 years, Stephen Colbert led a despondent tour of the legendary Ed Sullivan Theater.
“Now it’s, in my opinion, the best broadcast space in New York City. And the fact that nothing’s going to come in here breaks my heart,” Colbert, 62, said during a set tour for Architectural Digest on Monday. “Been here for 11 years and tried to never take it for granted.”
“And of course, now every time I walk out on stage, I look around and try to drink it in because you’re never going to get this again,” he continued. “Because we’re not being replaced by a late-night show.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to the Ed Sullivan Theater,” he continued. “But something should happen. It’s too beautiful a space.”
Following his final May 21 episode of The Late Show, Colbert and all of his staff will be immediately “fired” by CBS and required to vacate the theater within a week, the late-night host revealed last week.
“No one’s got a job after that night,” Colbert said during a special Strike Force Five podcast episode with his fellow late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, and John Oliver, on Friday. “I think the next day, everyone’s fired. I think maybe the crew has some time to clear out like the studio, but the staff all has to be gone.”
“We got to get our s--t out of here,” he added.
When a confounded Kimmel pressed further, Colbert explained CBS’s rapid takeover plans.
“I think they’re going to start tearing s--t out immediately,” Colbert said. “I know my staff is not paid, like the next day. I’m already packed. I’ve already packed my office.”
The Ed Sullivan Theater has been a cultural hub since it was converted into a CBS TV studio in 1950 and has hosted some of the most iconic TV performances of all time, including those from The Beatles and Elvis Presley.
“The girls screaming for the Beatles were hiding away up there because Mr. Sullivan didn’t want them down here,” Colbert said, pointing up to the theater’s upper deck.
“Supposedly, the historian, when we first got here, said that Elvis essentially performed right around here, where the desk is,” he said, adding, “and then the Beatles, being a larger group, were up center.”
The late-night host was fired by CBS soon after its parent company’s $16.5 million lawsuit settlement with Donald Trump and in the midst of its merger with the Trump-friendly company Skydance, for “purely financial reasons,” according to the network. Colbert has had a cavalcade of supporters come to his defense.
David Letterman, the theater’s previous tenant for 22 years, scolded CBS during his Late Show appearance last week, saying, “You can take a man’s show, you can’t take a man’s voice.”
Letterman, 79, even helped Colbert move out some of the theater’s furniture.
“Who owns this stuff?” he asked, inspecting the blue guest chair. Colbert replied, “CBS owns everything.”
“This is nice, it would be a shame if something happened to this,” Letterman said, before he and Colbert went to the theater’s roof, chair in tow, where the late-night hosts proceeded to throw the chair and other items off the building, and watched as they crashed into a giant CBS logo on the ground.
They shook hands before Letterman gave the final send-off in the style of the network’s news icon.
“To the folks at CBS, in the words of the great Ed Murrow, good night and good luck, motherf---ers,” Letterman said directly to the camera.
