Word of Mouth with Eric Burns : A Different Hollywood Talk Show

They aren’t exactly George Will, Sam Donaldson and David Brinkley, and their show is probably seen by only several people each week, not several million. But Eric Burns, Richard Schickel, Van Gordon Sauter and Merrill Markoe are out to stir up the world of entertainment. Or at least make their several viewers laugh once or twice.

“Word of Mouth With Eric Burns,” a half-hour panel-discussion show in the tradition of such political round-table programs as “This Week With David Brinkley” and “The McLaughlin Group,” airs each weekend on Movietime, the basic-cable channel known primarily for its ‘round-the-clock promos of Hollywood’s latest films and interviews with the stars.

Only this show, which purports to examine the social implications of news and events from the wide, wide world of entertainment, leaves politics to the big boys in Washington. Well, mostly.

On a recent episode, the panel ruminated about the infamous Rob Lowe videotape, in which the actor allegedly had sex with a minor in Atlanta while attending last year’s Democratic National Convention. After airing a segment from the tabloid magazine show “A Current Affair,” which included excerpts from the video, complete with strategically placed black squares, Burns, the creator and moderator of the program, asked Schickel, Time magazine’s film critic, to review the movie.

“There’s this huge black square covering most of the movie,” Schickel said. “I don’t understand that. You wouldn’t get more than an R rating for this.”

If this is all Lowe has learned about making movies after all his years as an actor, chimed in Markoe, formerly the producer of “Late Night With David Letterman” and a columnist for New York Woman magazine, he’ll never make the transition from actor to director. “It’s out of focus. He got no coverage, no reverse shots, no close-ups.”

“This is why the Democrats cannot elect a President,” interrupted Sauter, formerly the president of CBS News and a proud Republican. “At these national conventions, the Republicans are so dreadfully stuffy, all they have to worry about is getting votes. On the other hand, the Democrats have all these marvelous convention diversions.”

“To slightly revise my critical judgment,” Schickel said, “this video is marginally more interesting than a Republican convention. They might have put a black box over most of that too.”

“Word of Mouth” was born out of Burns’ frustration that no one on television ever talks honestly about popular culture. A former NBC network correspondent and commentator at “Entertainment Tonight” and KTTV Channel 11, Burns has made several stabs at critiquing the entertainment business, only to find himself stymied by the conflicting realities of covering Hollywood seriously on TV.

“My commentaries for ‘Entertainment Tonight’ lasted about two months until I did one that really annoyed them,” Burns said. “It had to do with the coverage of the Sean Penn and Madonna wedding, in which my employer was one of the egregious participants. So I was suddenly switched to celebrity interviewer, and that just made me more determined to find an outlet to be irreverent--or just to be honest.”

Burns produced a pilot of “Word of Mouth” last year for KTTV, where his commentaries on the station’s nightly newscast were similarly phased out, but, he said, the business people at the Fox-owned station decided such a program would lose money. After leaving KTTV earlier this year, Burns shopped it around and last April found a home on Movietime, where he could produce it cheaply and control the content entirely.

Movietime likes the show so much that the company just renewed it for another 26 weeks. But now that HBO has taken over the management of Movietime and has plans to thoroughly revamp its programming (see accompanying story), the future of “Word of Mouth” is uncertain.

Until now, Movietime has relied mostly on trailers and celebrity interviews to fill its 24-hour-a-day coverage of Hollywood. Launched two years ago, it claims to be available in 14 million homes. But not all of those homes can get the service all the time. Each installment of “Word of Mouth” airs five times each weekend (Saturdays at 10:30 a.m., 4 and 7 p.m., Sundays at 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.), but Burns said that on his cable system he can only watch it once because the space on the dial is shared with the Jewish Network, preacher Gene Scott, Fred Sands Realty ads and Iranian programming.

Still, Markoe, Schickel and Sauter all said that in recent weeks people have been stopping them at parties and on the street to say they caught a glimpse of the show. And Markoe has adopted the mystical “if you build it, he will come” sentiment from the film, “Field of Dreams,” to explain who does and who doesn’t watch the program. “If you are meant to see this show, by some act of God or fate or something, you will,” she said.

The show is far from slick, and the cast makes jokes about the undisclosed, picayune stipend they receive from Movietime for appearing each week. But they put a million dollars worth of acumen, hot air and wit into every topic Burns throws their way.

They pontificate seriously on the state of Hollywood journalism, concluding that all reporting on entertainment is just a sorry excuse for celebrity publicity. They complain about Ringo Starr’s attempts to stop the release of an album he recorded while he was drunk on tequila. They argue the merits of TV newscasts being used in schools, tabloid television and Diane Sawyer.

And they offer some “brilliant” Hollywood ideas of their own. While decrying the film industry’s use of catchy movie titles to mask dubious story lines, Markoe pitched this new movie: “Easter--Who’s Risen This Time?” And when asked to comment on TV newswoman Linda Ellerbee’s hawking of Maxwell House coffee in commercials with Willard Scott, Markoe pulled out a bottle of juice from behind her chair and said: “I’ve given this a lot of thought and whenever I think seriously, I like to drink Mott’s Clamato Juice, a deliciously seasoned blend of clams and tomatoes. It’s the one to be drinking when you want to be thinking.” The camera then cut to Schickel and Sauter holding their bellies as they laughed uproariously.

“It’s my Thursday night poker game,” Sauter said later, explaining why he shows up every week. “You come down here. There are people here that I really like. And we sit around and we sort of belch and scratch and laugh for a couple of hours and go home. You don’t lose a lot of money. You don’t make a lot of money. And it’s a good evening.”