THE ACTION AT ‘E.T.,’ COMING UP NEXT . . .

It’s taken more punches than Rocky, more flak than Rambo. It’s been parodied endlessly on “Saturday Night Live” and accommodated comics in need of one-liners.

It’s a guilty pleasure within the show-biz community--no one except publicists ever admits to watching it (like nobody ever voted for Nixon, right?). But it’s a bona-fide hit everywhere else.

“Entertainment Tonight,” America’s No. 2 syndicated TV show (behind “Wheel of Fortune”), is broadcasting’s foremost source of show-biz news and not-so-news.

It runs weekdays on 160-plus stations. “Entertainment This Week,” the weekend version, is broadcast even wider--to 18 countries, including Australia, Colombia, Hong Kong, Italy, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Yugoslavia.

Its debut in 1981 spawned new slang as critics strained themselves for just the precise vitriol: “Newzak” and “Infotainment.” It was “a publicist’s dream.” Even publicists had a joke: “If you open your refrigerator door, ‘E.T.’ will come cover it.”

In the pilot show, Robin Leach, who now hosts “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” reported that he had “heard” about a white-slave trading ring operating in Hollywood: “Starlets are being hired by unscrupulous talent agents for nonexistent movies in the Mid-East, but it’s an out-and-out ruse to provide sex for the sheiks.”

In another story in the pilot, actress Jacqueline Bisset was the target of the probing question, “Do you fear growing old?”

Her revealing answer: “Well, I’m not thrilled about it. . . .”

There was the brief period when celebrity astrologer Joyce Jillson (recalling Sybil the Soothsayer in “Network”) revealed what the stars had in store for the stars.

Four producers, five co-hosts and countless staffers later “E.T.” (which it instantly adopted from Steven Spielberg’s extraterrestrial) has become--as they say in the biz--Big. It has many imitators but no competition, and seems destined to become a national institution. These days, with less froth and more news, even the most acerbic “E.T.” critics have softened. Several said the show is pretty good. For what it is.

Calendar paid a visit to the reigning queen of schmooze news.

What’s the latest disease to turn into a TV movie? Find out in a minute.

‘Any interest in Lina Wertmuller? She’s got two films coming out and she’ll be in town in a couple weeks. . . .”

“But you can’t understand her.”

“Yeah. . . . Yeah, she’s foreign.”

“We could get Dino De Laurentiis to translate. . . .”

“E.T.” staffers sat around a large conference table, discussing pitches from Hollywood’s massive publicity machine.

Once a week, “E.T.” segment producers meet with producer Jack Reilly, news director Gary Herman and weekend producer Stu Crowner to discuss the so-called “soft news” side of the show. From this session will come interviews, behind-the-scenes pieces and other features for Reilly to arrange around the real news.

Crowner ran the meeting fast and loose. At times, it could have been a comedy routine.

Pete Hammond, in charge of film features, talked about a pitch to interview Michael Anthony-Hall.

“He’s got a new project, a dramatic feature that he’ll do at the same time he’s doing ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” Hammond explained. “I don’t know if he quite understands how time-consuming ‘Saturday Night’ is.”

“Well, if he isn’t using coke now . . . he will be,” someone retorted.

Laughs all around.

Producer Suzanne Roth was next up: “I only have one thing,” she said, wincing at the anticipated reaction her “thing” will draw.

“I got pitched on ‘Television’s Greatest Hits,’ which features 65 TV theme songs.”

Sniggers began.

Crowner asked, “What would we do?”

Roth paused. “Well, that’s what I told the guy . . . that it wasn’t very visual.”

This brought down the house. As inside jokes go, pitching a record album to a TV show is like suggesting a story with no words to a writer.

Roth explained that the gentleman who pitched the album was a former Harvard law student who spent a quarter of a million dollars (his own) buying the rights and now was doing a booming business selling them out of his home. The laughter stopped. Roth’s story would be assigned.

Crowner didn’t let segment producer Jane Ebell utter a word before asking, “Any diseases?”

“Yep,” she answered. “Here we go.”

The giggles already had started.

“Marsha Mason, Kiefer Sutherland--Donald’s son--and Ron Silver star in ‘Silent Range,’ that’s the working title, but it seems to me I’ve heard. . . .”

Crowner interrupted, “Jane, they all sound alike.”

Laughs.

Ebell (reading): “It says here ‘the efforts of a psychologist specializing in Elective Mutism to cure a teen-age boy. . . .’ ”

Crowner (over raucous laughter) in disbelief: “Elective mutism? You mean they choose not to speak?”

Ebell had more.

“Another disease?” Crowner asked.

She mentioned a TV movie in production called “Slow Burn,” which features Eric Roberts and Beverly D’Angelo.

Crowner: “Is that about burn victims?”

In a moment, Calendar goes behind the cameras for an in-depth look in -s ide “E.T.”

For five hours a day, the action emanates from the central meeting area of the office, behind a hefty conference table. An entire wall is covered with name-filled scheduling boards. The names of everybody who is or has been or wants to be anybody in the entertainment biz has passed over these boards.

Among those to be covered by “E.T.” crews this day: producer Sherry Lansing, CBS executive Harvey Shephard, Peter Fonda, Joni Mitchell and Ann Sothern.

Completed interviews scheduled for an airdate include Lucille Ball, Tom Selleck and rocker John Cougar Mellencamp.

“E.T.” director Ron De Moraes sat at the table, a stationary presence as he held quick meetings with staffers from a variety of departments.

“Today’s--uh--what’s her name’s birthday,” De Moraes continued, “the Statue of Liberty--so get something for that.”

Birthdays are an “E.T.” tradition and--at least for members of the research staff--sometimes a headache, given the complicated methods that some celebrities use to calculate their ages.

(Reilly thinks the birthday segment of the show is kind of silly “but the viewers love it.” He recalled the time he decided to stop having the anchor people read the birthdays and instead, just flash them on screen: “But then I got a letter from a blind woman who wondered why we’d dropped the birthdays--her favorite part of the show.”).

And speaking of letters, next up, co-anchor Mary Hart’s hysterical leg letters!

Dear Mary: When you sit in front of the TV camera so your knees and legs show, you would look more graceful if you learned to cross your legs this way: body facing left cross R leg over and vice versa. Try it.

Dear “E.T.”: Is Mary Hart able to uncross her legs? She has the tightest, most persistent leg-cross I’ve ever seen. Could she be persuaded to relax?

Mary Hart laughed: “I guess I’ve crossed my legs in a certain way since I started the show--it’s a ladylike way to sit. It’s just one of those fun things. Usually we are so prim and proper and news-like that I guess when people finally have a chance to see a little bit more of us and my legs. . . .”

She started laughing again.

“It absolutely shocked me. I got a phone call from Long Island about six months ago. They said, ‘We’re on the air and just want you to know that you’ve just won the best legs on television award!’ ”

Hart isn’t bothered: “I think it’s kind of nice when people pay attention.”

She, after all, is a bona-fide celebrity.

“Both Rona and Mary are celebrities,” People magazine’s L.A. bureau chief Martha Smilgis said during an interview. “We all attended a seminar recently and people were asking for their autographs. They’re much bigger than you realize.”

Hart, a former talk show hostess with no journalistic credits, is also an actress. She confirmed reports that Paramount is looking for the “proper vehicle” for her. She’d like to do a dramatic or comedy TV series.

“I haven’t had the time to pursue the acting,” she said. “My basic job is to co-anchor the show along with Robb (Weller). I’m responsible for conducting the time between stories. I lend an amount of personality as well as being a consistent factor in the show.

“I don’t think that I would want to deny that both Robb and I are seen as television personalities. I always wanted the image of being seen as a journalist. But I think a big deal has been made about all those phrases and titles anyway.

“People have an interest in what we’re like, that’s why we get the letters. I hope it helps the profile of the show.”

Credibility has been the “E.T.” Holy Grail since the beginning.

“A press agent’s dream,” jeered TV Guide critic Robert MacKenzie in his initial assessment. “Thirty minutes of shameless show-biz plugs. . . . If a publicity man can’t land an item on this show, he may as well go back to his old job on the copy desk.”

Then-producer Andy Friendly maintained that the show was credible. But Paramount, smarting from the media barbs, did not. Friendly resigned two months later, citing meddlesome executives (“the moles” to staffers) as one of his biggest complaints.

Paramount next hired Los Angeles Herald Examiner managing editor Jim Bellows to bring some journalistic integrity to the show. Bellows, maintained then-Paramount chairman Barry Diller (now chairman at 20th Century Fox), produced the greatest single change in the show.

“In that period the show was still not right, but at least it stopped being silly,” Diller said recently. “It got somewhat credible.”

But when Bellows left to develop a news magazine show at ABC (that never aired), Paramount again changed directions. Credibility was all very well and good, but the show needed numbers. To that effect, producer George Merlis, a known ratings “fixer,” was hired.

Merlis, too, caught credibility fever once he was ensconced at “E.T.”

“I wanted every single story to have a reason other than the fact that there was 22 minutes to fill,” he said in an interview. “I wanted to know the reasons. I banned the use of the word ‘hot’ and ‘in the business.’ I didn’t want to go to parties unless there was a real reason.”

Merlis’ feistiness and self-admitted hotheadedness resulted in his firing later. Paramount replaced him with the milder-mannered Reilly, 60.

Reilly lends an almost fatherly presence to the 100-plus, mostly under-35 staff. His low-key approach works effectively in a traditionally ego-intensive business.

A one-time actor who turned to producing in the early 1960s, Reilly worked for “Good Morning America,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and “The David Frost Show” before joining “E.T.” in 1983.

News director Gary Herman figures “E.T.” is very credible: “When it first started, I looked at it and thought, ‘What a piece of crap, I would never want to work on that.’ But by the time George (Merlis) took over, it had evolved to a point where it was becoming something that was interesting to me.”

Now, “We’re the ‘CBS Evening News’ of entertainment. We cover everything that comes up in the way of entertainment on a daily basis news-wise. It all doesn’t get into the show, but we’re aware of it.”

Then there are stories such as the one that featured crooner Barry Manilow singing “Happy Birthday” to Mary Hart and presenting her with a tiny cake and candle during a performance in Texas.

Would Dan Rather do that? Herman deferred to Reilly, who made the decision.

“I had a relapse,” Reilly said, chuckling. “I looked at it and thought it would go well at the end of the show, when we usually have something light or funny. I wasn’t enormously pleased with it, and I’m not sure whether I would do it again. But I try everything and then learn from my mistakes.”

Herman was pragmatic. “It would be good if you were doing a show that was just for the industry, but we can’t do that. We’re playing to Dubuque and Moline.”

One night last week, for example, Dubuque and Moline saw stories on Kevin Bacon promoting his new movie “Quicksilver,” Elizabeth Taylor at a Scottsdale, Ariz., AIDS benefit, Michael Landon hyping an upcoming episode on “Highway to Heaven” and one of a multi-part series called “The Guns of Hollywood,” about how TV shows and movies exploit gun power.

The previous week, it did a multi-part series on selling sex in rock ‘n’ roll. Well, conceded news director Herman, the news was “softer” than usual but that’s standard procedure during this February ratings “sweeps” period.

Coming up: Our exclusive report on the storm of gossip that’s rockin’ Rona Barrett’s boat!

One of the most interesting voices heard criticizing “E.T.” in its first year belonged to Rona Barrett, who at the time was launching (not successfully) an entertainment-oriented show of her own: “I think (“E.T.”) is awful,” she said at the time to Washington Post critic Tom Shales. “It’s a wonderful idea and very horrendously executed. It perpetuates the myth that Hollywood is silly, that Hollywood has no substance.

“There’s no point of view on that show.”

Shales had spoken with Barrett after an NBC party in her honor hosted by company Chairman Grant Tinker. Barrett added, “Now, ‘E.T.’ wasn’t at that party, but if they were, I guarantee you they never would have said what should have been said about a party like that.

“They would have said. ‘Oh, guess who was here last night?’ It’s ‘Guess who?’ and it’s so surface-y.”

Guess who ended up joining the show last fall? It was a Paramount-generated addition that brought to “E.T.” offices a lot of what Miss Rona was once famous for--gossip. And it centered on her.

Management, some staffers claimed, were very pleased--until they found out about the terms of her contract . . . highlights of which were printed in October in the New York Post’s gossipy “Page Six” column: “Rona Barrett is reportedly making $700,000. If her TV reports run longer than 18 minutes, she’s also said to be getting $1,200 per extra minute. Some E.T. employees are indignant that she is being treated like a TV queen. Others complain that she used other reporters’ material without credit.”

Some insiders said that the details were furnished by New York correspondent Barbara Howar, who supposedly was miffed by Rona’s title of “senior correspondent.” Although she seemed amused by the rumor, Howar wouldn’t confirm or deny: “I learned a great deal from Barbara Walters,” she said. “And I’m going to steal one of Barbara’s standard lines (in reference to Barrett) and say that I never comment publicly on that woman.”

But Howar seemed to be referring to Barrett when talking about the kind of interviews she (Howar) did not do.

“I don’t do running mascara interviews . . . I loathe groin journalism. I always feel you can get a different, more interesting interview without going for the jugular.”

Some “E.T.” vets remember the “Barrett Report incident”: In November, 1982, then managing editor Bellows got a letter inviting the show to subscribe. Bellows had a check for $600 sent--which was returned with a letter stating “We appreciate your interest in our publication, but at this time the publisher considers it inappropriate to accept your subscription order.”

“Look,” Jack Reilly said wearily when queried about the talk, “too much has been made of this already.”

(A snippy US magazine article, which described Barrett as “ ‘E.T.’s answer to the sizzling ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ ” seemed to rankle him in particular.)

“In any newsroom there are egos. The fact is, we’ve added another on-air person to the show. That means that there is less air-time for the other reporters and there’s bound to be grumbling over that. I’m aware of it and trying to handle it the best I can.”

Since her debut, Barrett’s appearances each week have diminished, giving rise to more rumors that she might be leaving.

“Basically she’s busy doing a special for us right now,” Reilly explained, although he conceded that “We’ve come to a decision to be selective about what she continues to do. She will continue to do reviews and inside pieces, when they merit a story and, of course, her interviews on the weekend show. I think we’re still trying to find out how everything will work.”

Barrett declined to be interviewed for this article.

Calendar digest for Sunday asks the question: What do you think about “E.T.”?

Martha Smilgis at People magazine: “The show’s made us tougher. I wish we could do those ‘wet kiss’ kind of interviews, but the public is more sophisticated now. ‘E.T.’ has times when it’s just fluff and times when they have some in-depth pieces. It’s no longer a publicist’s dream, but it is a terrific vehicle for celebrity happy-talk.”

Times critic Howard Rosenberg: “I savaged the show when it first came out, but their reporting has improved vastly. The show has changed, but my expectations have been lowered. I guess it’s probably what America wants to know about the entertainment industry--entertainment news squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste.”

Tom Shales: “The first 10 minutes are great, when they give you news and the ratings and what show’s been canceled. I thought their obituary on Yul Brynner was the best seen on broadcast TV of any kind.

“Oh! And I love that last shot of Mary Hart crossing her legs. I’m not trying to be a sexist or a lech. That closing shot--it’s become like Johnny Carson’s monologue or Walter Cronkite’s ‘That’s the way it is.’ ”

With such high praise, “E.T.” probably will be around for some time.

“The show has its franchise now,” said Barry Diller. “It does a very good job, but I always wanted it to be more critical and skeptical. I hardly ever watch it. But, if they don’t screw around with it, it could be around for the next 30 years. “

Or long enough, as one-time “E.T.” producer John Goldhammer quipped, to put a bureau on the moon.

Next week . . . More stories on that biz that there’s no biz like. . . . Bye!