Entertainment

Dave vs. Jay: Now it’s on

Jay Leno is taking over “The Tonight Show” again March 1 — and David Letterman is sharpening his knife.

The two late-night hosts have been hurling rocks at each for the last two weeks in a feud so bitter and so personal, no one in TV can remember anything like it before.

“When they all come back, this whole story needs a third act and that’s going to be addressed on March 1,” says Syracuse University media professor Robert Thompson.

NBC SHOULD SELL DVDs OF CONAN’S FINAL WEEK

LENO GOING ON OPRAH TO REHAB IMAGE

CONAN STILL TRASHING NBC (VIDEO)

It has gotten so bad, both Leno and Letterman are dragging each other’s wives into the mudslinging.

The battle for late-night supremacy is a whole new game now.

When Leno left last spring, he had been No. 1 for 15 years.

Now, Letterman is on top — if you don’t count the ratings bump Conan O’Brien has gotten in his final week on the air.

“In the end, this isn’t a referendum on Dave,” said someone who knows Letterman. “This will be a referendum on Jay.”

And Letterman will not let viewers forget quickly that Leno is, in Dave’s eyes, to blame for Conan being pushed off the “Tonight Show.”

“Stuff like that will get old,” warned Thompson. “I don’t expect it to last much longer.”

But insiders in both camps yesterday predicted that the pointed and personal jokes will only escalate once Leno is back at 11:30.

Meanwhile, Conan finally signed a separation agreement with NBC early yesterday after a week of torturous negotiations.

In the last hours, Conan’s reps were able to pry an additional $4.5 million in severance out of NBC for his top three guys — sidekick Andy Richter, bandleader Max Weinberg and exec producer Jeff Ross, according to sources.

In all, Conan’s non-union staff of about 100 people will split a $7.5 million in severance — mainly to cover the costs incurred when they followed O’Brien from New York to LA last year.

NBC programming chief Jeff Gaspin yesterday suggested that, in the end, it was cheaper to buy out Conan’s contract than to keep him on the air.

O’Brien’s ratings had fallen so far — nearly half of Leno’s — that the show would have lost “millions” in the year ahead, sources said.

“We had to come up with a solution,” Gaspin told The Post.

Conan is allowed to jump to another network after Sept. 1 — but it is by no means sure he will be able to get another job quickly.

Fox is interested in him but it will be difficult for the network to create a brand-new late night show from scratch.

Talks with other networks could not begin until Conan had signed off on an exit deal with NBC.

“He just wants to get back on the air as quickly as possible,” Gavin Polone, O’Brien’s longtime manager, told reporters.

In his final hours at NBC, Conan joked that he was going to spend as much of NBC’s money as possible before leaving.

Standing next to a Bugatti Veyron, called the most expensive car in the world, Conan led “Tonight Show” viewers to believe he’d bought the automobile for a comedy routine, costing NBC $1.5 million.

Turns out that, like so much else in the late-night wars, that was an exaggeration.

Bugatti officials say he borrowed the car for the night from an anonymous “private owner.”

But he did jack up the cost by playing the Rolling Stones’ version of “Satisfaction” — the most expensive song to license — in the background.

IT’S NO JOKE

Letterman: Five years ago when NBC said to Jay, ‘You know that Conan is going to take over your job in five years,’ that’s when you say, ‘Okay fine, no hard feelings. You call ABC, you call Fox, you try to get my job, you leave, you don’t go, ‘Okay, I’ll be in the lobby if you need me’!

Leno: Boy, remember the more innocent days of late night TV, when the only thing people cared about was what intern the host was nailing? What happened to those days?

Letterman: Last night on the Jay Leno 10 p.m. NBC variety show, Jay Leno said that this NBC ‘Tonight Show’ mess is not his fault … and I said, ‘I know. I know it’s not his fault. But [isn’t it] funny that he always turns up at the scene of the crime?’

Leno: Letterman has been hammering me every night. You know the best way to get Letterman to ignore you? Marry him.

With additional
reporting by David K. Li