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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