A Brush With Celebrity : Celebrating 10 Years of Celebs : ‘E.T.’ Feeds on Appetite for Entertainment News

Touted by its producers as revolutionary when it premiered 10 years ago this week, “Entertainment Tonight” has lived up to the hype. The flashy, sometimes trashy news show tapped into mainstream America’s seemingly voracious appetite for celebrity news and created a whole new industry on television.

Where once TV reporting on Hollywood existed as an occasional tidbit at the end of a network newscast, the success of “E.T.”--seen by an average of 11 million viewers a night--has spawned myriad imitators and challengers. Today, most local newscasts report on movies and celebrities, CNN produces daily show-business programs, tabloid shows are filled with celebrity gossip, the network morning programs constantly interview famous faces and Fox launched its own version of “E.T.” this past summer, “E.D.J.”

“They have certainly helped make the entertainment beat something that the average person on the street is interested in,” said Lee Masters, president of E!, a 15-month-old cable channel devoted full time to news and hype from Hollywood. “Now you have people on the corner who can name not only the stars of ‘Terminator 2,’ but they can tell you how it opened that first weekend.”

Or as “E.T.” critics put it: A lot of people who can now name the top five films at the box office last week could not name five members of the Supreme Court.

Those responsible for the program counter that neither “Entertainment Tonight” nor Paramount, the studio that produces the show and has reaped the financial benefits of its success, is to blame for the public’s seemingly endless fascination with Hollywood instead of weightier matters. They contend that Paramount has merely capitalized on the public’s increasingly pressing “need for escape” from wars, crime, pollution and economic hardship.

“We were never in the business of telling people about the Supreme Court or covering presidential elections,” said Frank Kelly, Paramount’s executive vice president for programming. “Sure there’s been a tremendous growth in information about entertainment since we’ve been on the air, but there’s also been a parallel growth in all kinds of information. CNN recently celebrated 10 years as well. You’ve seen more and more reality programs and news programs as well as shows about Hollywood. ‘Entertainment Tonight’ has been in the middle of a tremendous wave of information of all kinds on television. In fact, it probably encouraged it.”

“I don’t think that the people who created ‘Entertainment Tonight’ could have envisioned what the communications revolution has brought us in the way of information overload,” said David Nuell, “E.T.’s” co-executive producer, with Jim Van Messel, for the past four years. “Events break incessantly all over the world and it has created a need for people to have a reliable friend, an alternative to the hard news side, that can give them some relief. People really do need this kind of thing to maintain a balance in their lives.”

It’s not that the escape to such trivia and the constant parade of upbeat celebrity faces is in itself dangerous, but that practically all of TV has come to resemble “E.T.,” said Mark Crispin Miller, media critic at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the book “Seeing Through Movies.”

“It would be one thing if we had a TV spectrum that was sobering and objective and challenging and within that was something like ‘Entertainment Tonight’ to escape to,” Miller said. “But the fact is that TV generally aspires more and more to the condition of ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ Look at the way the Gulf War was covered, or not covered. News was suppressed. You had happy talk from the military and promotional video tape for defense contractors. It ended up like a big party. Political races are the same way, with flag factories and balloons.

“I’m not saying that ‘Entertainment Tonight’ is directly responsible for this, but I will say that people are so habituated to a certain level of hysterical cheer, so habituated to a constant stream of happy endings, that it has become harder than ever for them to tolerate any downbeat or discouraging reports or images.”

“Entertainment Tonight,” which celebrates its aluminum anniversary with a retrospective Sunday at 6 p.m. on KNBC Channel 4, was born when Paramount executives, headed then by current Fox chairman Barry Diller, saw an opportunity to capitalize on the public’s growing consumption of celebrity hype and gossip in magazines such as People, Kelly said. It was also the first syndicated program that was recorded and then fed by satellite to be seen the same day, which permitted the show to be as timely and topical as a nightly newscast.

Though Kelly refused to reveal either the budget or revenues, he said that “E.T.” has been profitable from the beginning. Many in the industry consider it Paramount’s most reliable “cash cow.”

Nevertheless, about four years ago, “E.T.” was in trouble. The program had drifted in tone over the years--from a newsier edge to very soft and gossipy to several points in between--and ABC-owned WABC-TV in New York decided to drop it in favor of “The Hollywood Squares.” The perception soon spread among station managers across the country, Kelly said, that if the show was having problems in the nation’s biggest market, then maybe they should dump it too.

About the same time, the buzz surrounding a new syndicated program, the now defunct “USA Today,” proclaimed that it would be the show to kill “E.T.”

“There’s no other way to put this except to say that ‘USA Today’ failed so badly and looked so bad in failing that it made us look better,” Kelly said. Since then, the show has flourished, airing in 190 markets across the country--including again on WABC--and consistently ranks as among the Top 5-rated syndicated programs.

One of the most successful changes Van Messel and Nuell instituted following their arrival in 1987 was to refocus the spotlight on the show’s three primary personalities--Mary Hart, John Tesh and Leeza Gibbons. In the process, these anchors have become as famous as many of the stars they cover, and Van Messel concedes that because his anchors must take care to cultivate their own nice-guy images, stars feel secure that “E.T.” will treat them “fairly.”

Though Kelly and the show’s producers insist that “E.T.” often offers “criticism and controversy,” they admit that it is not nor was it ever intended to be the “60 Minutes” of the entertainment industry.

“While I . . . might be fascinated by how Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (the producing team behind ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Days of Thunder’) operate,” Nuell said, “our audience only wants to know ‘What product did they produce that we can go and see?’ as opposed to ‘How did they get the studio to let them do this or that?’ That’s a legitimate story, but it’s not our story.”

Such friendly treatment of celebrities and their projects has made “E.T.” the most coveted media outlet whenever a studio has a new movie to promote and sell, said Greg Morrison, president of worldwide marketing for MGM-Pathe. “The people who watch it are avid moviegoers or avid record buyers, and when clips from one of our films accompany a story they do prior to its release, we look at that as an extremely valuable part of the launch of the picture.”

Publicists who grant or deny access to their celebrity clients also view the program as vital whenever their clients have a project to peddle. Though the several press agents contacted for this story did not want to be quoted by name, and a couple of them complained that “E.T.” sometimes demands too much time and special treatment, most agreed that “E.T.” is good to and for their clients.

Such friendliness, however, has become the standard that celebrities expect from all media outlets, even those committed to a harder, less promotional look at their business. Competitors complain that whenever questions or procedures differ from that pioneered, at least on television, by “Entertainment Tonight,” the stars and their publicists grow nervous.

“The system is set up for everyone else to be a poor imitation of ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ ” said Bill Knoedelseder, executive producer of “E.D.J.,” a rival syndicated entertainment news program produced by Fox that endeavors to report more seriously on Hollywood. “Access to famous people has become more and more controlled. If you want to talk to someone, they say, ‘We won’t do it until my movie comes out.’ Why should they talk to the press if they have nothing to sell? They’re stunned that you even asked.”

But after just a couple months of putting out a daily show of his own, Knoedelseder said that he doesn’t blame “E.T.” for acquiescing to the publicists’ demands. The grind of putting on a daily television show, he said, forces TV producers to make compromises.

Compromised too is any critical appreciation for the art of movie-making, writing books or singing songs, according to several reporters and media analysts. “ ‘Entertainment Tonight’ is owned by Paramount, whose primary business agenda is to encourage the audience to consume entertainment product,” said John Horn, an entertainment writer for the Associated Press.

Nevertheless, “E.T.” producers predict that the next 10 years will bring more of the same--a lot more. Van Messel foresees an entire “Entertainment Tonight” channel, a Saturday morning “E.T.” designed exclusively for children and a late-night version focusing on racier celebrity talk and issues.

As for the show in its current form?

“As long as there is an entertainment industry, as long as there are celebrities, as long as there are TV sets,” Van Messel said, “there will always be an ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ ”