A Day on the Show-Biz Beat With ‘ET’ : Behind the cameras of ‘Entertainment Tonight’ as it comes up on Show 2,000

“E ntertainment Tonight” will air its 2,000th show on Friday. Although thumped by critics since it debuted on Sept. 14, 1981, the syndicated program has survived. Entertainment reporters are now as common on TV as weather reporters, in part because of “ET,” which has remained television’s leading news show devoted solely to the entertainment industry.

Last September, at the start of its eighth season, “ET” introduced a new format, with glitzier graphics, strobe-light pacing and two new features--its opening Inside Story and the ET Insider, a gossip-column-style commentary by co-star John Tesh.

While some observers say “ET” is as lightweight as ever, insiders contend that the format change has given the show a “harder edge” and credit it with pumping new life into the enterprise. As evidence, Paramount points to a 25% rise since November in the number of stations airing “ET” in the coveted hour before prime time--to 53 stations in the top 100 markets (it is carried by a total of 165 stations). Critics may not like “ET,” but, if ratings are to be believed, 10 million people who watch television do.

Following is a behind-the-scenes look at how a typical day’s show--in this case, No. 1,984, the April 20 edition--is put together.

It is a few yawns past 5 o’clock in the morning. The sun hasn’t risen yet on the Paramount lot’s huge blue-sky backdrop, but in the Mae West Building, Jim Van Messel is already presiding at his second meeting of the day.

As the “ET” machine shudders to life in the pre-dawn hours of April 20, 1989, all eyes are on the videocassette recorder in the office of Van Messel, the program’s senior producer. The start of a typical day. . . .

The shape of any day at “ET” is determined by the fact that the show must be ready shortly after noon to be fed to the outside world by satellite. The daily 12:30 p.m. deadline is a time bomb beneath the feet of the show’s 125 staffers as they work throughout the morning. “We are mice on a treadmill,” Van Messel says as he reviews the story lineup for Show No. 1,984 with members of the “ET” staff.

The basic elements of the show were determined at an early afternoon meeting the day before. Now the lineup must be firmed up, the taped stories given final form, a script fashioned for co-stars John Tesh and Mary Hart.

One of Van Messel’s first decisions this morning is to kill a tentatively scheduled story. It is an interview with the girl who always had her back to the camera as Patty Duke’s identical cousin on Duke’s 1960s ABC show. “ET” had expected to see the woman who actually doubled for Duke. Instead, the piece, done for “Nick at Night” on the Nickelodeon cable channel, is an unfunny spoof.

Van Messel moves through the lineup story by story. Today’s opener--Inside Story--is on Steven Stayner, kidnaped in 1972 at age 7 and sexually molested over the next seven years. Stayner, who eventually escaped his captor, is the subject of a May miniseries on NBC.

The Stayner piece, which includes clips from the miniseries, interviews with stars and a few words with the real Stayner on location, runs just over three minutes--an epic by “ET” standards, where most stories run 90 seconds, tops. A dozen staff members have been working on the piece for almost a week. Now, only a few hours before air time, Van Messel decides an exchange between Stayner and the actor who plays him doesn’t make sense. “You have to think too hard,” Van Messel says of the present version.

Changes are ordered in other stories. Van Messel wants a reference to actress Geena Davis changed in a piece on Jeff Goldblum. In the current version, Davis, Goldblum’s co-star in “Earth Girls Are Easy,” is described as his off-screen partner. “He’s married to Geena Davis, isn’t he? Partner implies (the living arrangement of) Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn.”

Today’s show will also include a breaking story, of sorts. Early every morning, “ET” staff members study the entertainment stories sent out by the wire services and read the industry news in a stack of papers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Herald Examiner, the New York Times, Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Van Messel and others also look over the East Coast gossip columns faxed out by “ET’s” New York office.

This morning, a morality-in-media item in the New York Post has caught Van Messel’s eye. The news staff is already checking it out. In the next few hours, “ET” will whip together a segment on the close scrutiny that fundamentalist Donald Wildmon plans to give “The Wonder Years” and other popular TV shows for evidence of sex, violence and anti-Christian stereotyping.

All day long, information flows into “ET” through its four segment producers--one each for movies, TV, music and publishing, the last based in New York. The segment producers are the ones who keep in touch with the publicists who control access to most celebrities.

Whatever others may think of “ET,” the people who work here view it as a news show. “We’re news guys,” Van Messel says of himself and David Nuell, executive producer of the show. Most mornings, Nuell is beside Van Messel during the meetings with “ET” director Ron de Moraes, supervising producer Barry Berk, segment producers, writers, directors of varying rank and dozens of people with the word producer somewhere in their job titles. But on April 20, Nuell is vacationing in France.

Nuell and Van Messel, who have headed “ET” for 2 1/2 years, have worked together for 15 years, most recently as station manager and news director, respectively, at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. During their tenure, WRC broke some big stories, including the asbestos danger posed by hair dryers. Nuell and Van Messel are a team, with complementary interests and gifts. Nuell, who is “ET’s” CEO, is large and voluble and likes to schmooze. Van Messel is small and intense and focuses on efficiency.

Neither Nuell nor Van Messel claims “ET” is “60 Minutes.” “This isn’t investigative journalism,” Van Messel says (“It isn’t?” Tesh, who overhears, says in mock disbelief). But both producers insist “ET” is newsier than it has been in the recent past. Both speak of “ET’s” harder edge.

“We felt people wanted to have meat, “ Van Messel says. “We’ll start with something hard and then come right back with something soft and cuddly.” Today’s meat includes, besides the Stayner story, a piece on how talk-radio hosts are urging their listeners to boycott Exxon. Today’s cuddliest story--adorable to a fault--is a 35-second segment in which Corbin Bernsen of “L.A. Law” hugs dogs that can be adopted.

With an estimated $500,000 to spend weekly, “ET” has the resources to chase the stories it wants. It recently worked the phones on three continents to nail down a genuine scoop: evidence that a 3-year-old Yugoslav orphan, hired as an actor, was mistreated during the shooting of a concentration-camp scene for the ABC miniseries “War and Remembrance.” (Producer-director Dan Curtis denied the allegation.)

The management will woo a big star for an interview for a year or more, but it won’t pay for one. Van Messel acknowledges that celebrities are willing to talk to “ET” because they know they won’t be embarrassed on camera. “People realize they are not going to get hurt,” he says.

But before Don Johnson would give “ET” an interview on the set of the movie “Sweet Hearts Dance,” he asked for a written agreement that the interviewer would not ask him about ex-girlfriend Barbra Streisand, drugs or “Miami Vice.” “ET” decided it could get by with what it already had on Johnson in its vast tape vault. “Don Johnson could not command that kind of leverage,” Nuell told Tristar Pictures, producer and distributor of the film. Today’s ET Insider contains a joke mentioning “Don Johnson’s ego.”

Many “ET” staff members have had far grittier news experience than the show’s content sometimes suggests. Bob Flick, the grizzled, Hemingwayesque man who is writing gags about Geraldo Rivera for today’s show, was head of the NBC news crew ambushed near Jonestown. “I did El Salvador next, and then I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t have the nerve.” Flick has no apparent regrets about leaving network news. “I don’t think there is any hard news anymore.”

“We succeed when we accomplish a visceral response in the viewer,” says Nuell, who makes no apologies for the show’s sometimes odd blend of show biz and news. “ET” is put together with the understanding that it must grab the viewer, often a woman between the ages of 18 and 49, who has a remote control at the ready. As Van Messel explains, “ET” doesn’t have “appointment viewers”--people who set aside time to watch the show. “ET’s” potential viewer is spinning the dial, trolling the airwaves. Hot graphics help “ET” mesmerize the dial-turner, and so does “the inside concept.”

“ ‘ET,’ ” Nuell explains, “was the first show that consistently took people inside show business.” The management does not believe, however, that viewers want to go so far inside that they have to hear about daily fluctuations in ratings and other news the industry dotes on. The show attempts to stay “viewer-friendly,” which is to say of interest to a viewer who is not an entertainment insider, not a media historian and not necessarily a New Yorker or an Angeleno.

“When I think of the viewer, I think of myself the day I got here,” Van Messel says. “I don’t know every movie that was ever done. I have this book of Leonard Maltin’s to tell me.”

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The Talent doesn’t have to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning. The Talent can sleep till 7. Typically, Mary Hart and John Tesh arrive at Paramount between 8 and 8:30 to do voice-overs and promos for upcoming shows.

On April 20, Hart,who has been the show’s star since 1982 and is said to be asking for $1 million to renew her contract, comes to work in aerobics shoes, white athletic socks and black-and-yellow exercise clothes. Her hair is pulled onto the top of her head and fastened with a butterfly clip. The former Miss South Dakota wears no makeup. She is still beautiful, but in a fuzzy, ill-defined way.

At 10 a.m., the Talent, still in civvies, sit down in the conference room with Van Messel, the director, the script supervisor and a production assistant to read through today’s script. Script supervisor Shirley Alberti uses a stop watch to time each of Hart’s and Tesh’s “ins and outs,” the lines delivered before and after stories.

While it is hard to imagine Hart pitching “Silas Marner” to bored teen-agers, the fact is she taught high-school English for three years, and she reads the script with both an actor’s ear for what works aloud and a schoolmarm’s eye for the subject that doesn’t agree with its verb. Van Messel and the others mark up the scripts in front of them as Hart untangles the syntax of one of her lines.

Across the conference table, Teshie, as he is frequently called by female staffers, makes sarcastic, albeit resonant, comments. On the surface, Hart and Tesh look like minor variations on the theme vanilla. But Tesh, who has been on the show for three years, insists he has a darker side, “a really black sense of humor.”

Tesh says he likes “ET” because “this show never pretends to be more than it is.” He doesn’t know most of the celebrities he reports on, he says, and he maintains a certain ironic detachment from the industry. “I’m very cynical about this business. It’s fun to make fun of this stuff.” He has always been irreverent, Tesh says. “There was a lot of detention for this kid.”

Hart moves in celebrity circles, and there are stars, including Frank Sinatra, who give her exclusive interviews.

Tesh, a Grammy-winning composer and keyboardist, has his own following. “Sting,” Nuell says, “only wants to be interviewed by Tesh.” Music is Tesh’s passion. Tesh is ebullient today because singer Michael McDonald is going to drop by Tesh’s studio after “ET” to do a vocal for an album.

Although Hart and Tesh share most on-camera duties, Tesh has one small venue of his own: the ET Insider. “Mary was so established we wanted to have something for John that he would be associated with,” Van Messel says.

Tesh has no problems with today’s Insider script, but he requests and gets a change in his lines following the Stayner piece. Tesh thinks it is inappropriate to editorialize about the kidnaper’s prison term. “We’re convicting him twice,” he says.

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At 11:30 a.m., Hart and Tesh are on Stage 28, ready to take their places behind the smoked Plexiglas desk on the “ET” set. The desk hides the fact that, at 6 foot 6, Tesh is a foot taller than his co-star. In suit and tie, Tesh looks much as he did during the read-through. But dressed up, made-up and coiffed, Hart is transformed. She gleams. Her red-leather suit is simultaneously ladylike and sexy. Instead of aerobics shoes, she wears bad-girl shoes with three-inch heels.

At the stage manager’s signal, Hart smiles and Tesh begins: “The real-life ordeal of a kidnaped child held captive for seven years comes out of the shadows and into prime time. The Inside Story on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ . . . April 20th . . . 1989.”