Video: Turning Show Biz into News

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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.