Turning Show Biz into News

By Richard Stengel

A glitzy hit, Entertainment Tonight, celebrates celebrities

Clever, those television programmers. In the late 1970s they were among the last to discover that news is not just news, it is also (Lights! Cameras! Banter!) entertainment. So if news can be entertainment, why not turn entertainment into news? Presto, Entertainment Tonight was born: news in form, entertainment in content, a TV hybrid. There may be no business like show business, but there's good business in show-business news.

Entertainment Tonight is a weeknightly half-hour show that breathlessly celebrates celebrity, giddily charting the ephemeral highs and lows of movies, music and television. Produced by Paramount Television Domestic Distribution in Los Angeles and delivered by satellite to 134 local stations, E.T. (not the extraterrestrial), with its weekly audience of nearly 21 million, is the hottest, and certainly the fastest-paced, syndicated show on television. Since its rickety start in 1981, the show has become slickly produced and expertly edited. It is about as light, nourishing and addictive as the popcorn one hungers for while watching it.

The format is that of a magazine show, a video descendant of the starry-eyed Hollywood "fanzines" of the 1940s and '50s. Accompanied by music that sounds like game-show themes speeded up to 78 r.p.m., the show revels in glitzy, vertigo-inducing computer graphics. Says E.T. Director Steve Hirsen, a veteran of CBS News: "We're not heavy journalists, so we have more freedom. We can use visual flips and 'up' music, which you can't use after a story on the bombing of Beirut." The rapid-fire items are introduced by Anchors Ron Hendren and Mary Hart, who are both perky and chirpy enough to have sprung fresh from the set of a vintage Andy Howar movie.

Each show begins with brief filmed reports on such goings-on as the opening of a new movie or a particularly star-studded party. Occasionally there is a lighthearted ''exclusive" like (hold your breath) a never-before-seen glimpse behind Johnny Carson's desk. The second section, called "Spotlight," is either a profile of a celebrity or a "behind-the-scenes" story by an E. T. correspondent such as vivacious Author Barbara Howar or former NBC News Reporter Scott Osborne. Recent example: a look at the making of Michael Jackson's dynamic music video clip Beat It. The formula consists of putting the possessive form of the word star in front of another word and making it a story: star's pets, star's cars, star's hairdressers. Linking the main stories are short takes like a celebrity birthday register or a "Paparazzi" section in which stills are flashed on the screen of, say, Olivia De Havilland out for Sunday brunch in Beverly Hills.

With an annual budget of more than $21 million, E.T. maintains a staff of 110 in Los Angeles, plus a bureau of 15 in New York City and reporters in Nashville, Atlanta, Miami and London. E.T. staffers and executives are sensitive about charges that the show is all puff and fluff, a p.r. agent's dream. "We're not curing cancer," says Co-Anchor Hendren. "We want to have fun with it." John Goldhammer, senior vice president at Paramount agrees: "We're not out there to nail people." And except for an occasional sitting duck like Pia Zadora, they never do.

Since Jim Bellows, former editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, was brought on in late 1981 as "managing editor" of E. T., the show has become newsier and more credible. Now when E.T. attends a media party, asserts Bellows, "we're not there to taste the shrimp." Bellows has made it clear to the staff that he wants to break, not inflate, stories. E.T. closely followed the recent slander trial of Dr. Carl Galloway vs. Sixty Minutes and Dan Rather, telecasting outtakes from unedited CBS interviews. Last month a new E.T. investigative team did a four-part feature about the National Enquirer that was both balanced and informative. That same team is currently working on a report called "Where Does Your Money Go?," a rundown on where your $5 movie-ticket price goes.

Bellows is reportedly negotiating a move to ABC to produce a new fall newsmagazine. The latest force behind the show is Executive Producer George Merlis, who was hired last month. As the former executive producer of both CBS Morning News (which he is credited with resuscitating) and ABC's Good Morning America, programs featuring an informal style, celebrity interviews and light stories, Merlis helped create not only a precedent but an appetite for a show like E.T.

E.T. itself is now a precedent. This summer ABC is trying out a limited series called Eye on Hollywood, which will report on life among the glitterati. Last March, Cable News Network started a weekly series called Hollywood Journal. A syndicated show called Ebony Jet Celebrity Showcase, featuring profiles of black stars, premiered in 62 markets around the country in April. Andy Warhol, the celebrity's celebrity, palely presides over his new syndicated program, which since May has followed the frolics of the beautiful and the damned.

Like all of these shows, E.T. is a part of the phenomenon it covers, another wheel in the publicity machine it seeks to explain. Many of its features perpetuate rather than puncture Hollywood myths. Notes a senior segment producer, Helaine Swerdloff: "There is a fine line between hype and news." The question for E.T. is which side of that line it will settle on.

-- By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.