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Fans of movies, TV and music are enjoying an era when they can access an abundance of news about their favorite stars by just looking at their phones.
It’s a big leap from the decades before internet and cable, when network TV news rarely covered show business outside of occasional interviews on their morning shows. When Barbara Walters started interviewing celebrities on her prime time specials for ABC in the 1970s, pearl-clutching journalistic purists were aghast.
A shift came in 1981, when Paramount launched “Entertainment Tonight,” the first daily program that looked at the news through a pop culture lens. It was also the first syndicated show delivered via satellite, enabling TV stations to air episodes on the days they were taped and provide breaking coverage.
Now distributed by CBS Media Ventures, “ET” has surpassed imitators and survived the seismic changes to the TV landscape, still reaching an average of nearly 3 million viewers nightly, according to Nielsen, and last month it racked up 1 billion views on YouTube. The show is currently in its 45th season and is co-hosted by Kevin Frazier and Nischelle Turner.
“ET” co-hosts Nischelle Turner and Kevin Frazier on the Grammys red carpet earlier this year.
(Entertainment Tonight)
But what truly sets the program apart is how it has accumulated a massive tape archive that serves as a repository of show business history, thanks to years of having camera crews at every major movie set, press junket and award show red carpet.
Going through the 200,000 hours of video in the vault is like a trip in a show business time machine where you’ll find:
— Jane Fonda, dressed in ‘80s aerobics garb, giving a power walk lesson.
—Michael Jackson making his iconic “Beat It” music video.
—A 19-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio interviewed on the set of the ABC sitcom “Growing Pains.”
—Arnold Schwarzenegger getting his makeup applied before shooting a scene in “The Terminator.”
—George Clooney’s first interview in 1985 and the 164 others he’s done since then.
1. Leonardo DiCaprio in 1991. 2. Jane Fonda in aerobics garb in the ‘80s. 3. A makeup artist applying Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” prosthetics. 4. William Shatner at Marine World in Vallejo riding a whale in a segment from 1987. (Entertainment Tonight)
When “ET” executive producer Erin Johnson talks about the curiosities in the vault, her go-to example is a 1987 segment with William Shatner who rode on the back of a whale at Marine World in Vallejo. Shatner participated in the stunt to promote the Endangered Species Act.
In recent months, “ET” has undertaken a massive project to digitize and preserve all 11,600-plus episodes made since its founding host Mary Hart first signed on when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. There are hours of unseen interview footage as well.
Trucks have shipped video tapes cross-country from a storage facility in Burbank to a new facility in New Jersey that houses the CBS News archives. The tapes will be restored and transferred to digital files.
“We’ve uncovered things that we thought might have been gone,” Johnson said in a recent interview.
The makers of “ET” had the foresight to keep everything they produced, avoiding the heartbreaking fate that many celebrity talk and late night shows of the ‘60s and ‘70s, when tapes were not archived but routinely erased and reused to save money. The archive reflects how “ET” has always thought of itself as a news program.
“They call us the toy department a lot of times,” said Turner, an “ET” co-host since 2014. “But this is a news organization. It’s been that way since it started.”
“ET” co-host Nischelle Turner with George Clooney, who has done more than 160 interviews with the show.
(Entertainment Tonight)
“ET” has long been culling the archives for the career retrospectives that air on weekends under the title “ET Vault Unlocked,” which are also available on demand through YouTube. They have also been an invaluable source when a star dies — an “ET” tribute to comic Bob Newhart was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award.
The vault has also become a revenue generator as well, thanks to the boom of celebrity documentaries and specials on streaming platforms in recent years. Careful readers of end credits will see acknowledgments of “ET” footage at the end of Apple TV’s “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” the Netflix docs on Schwarzenegger and Wham!, Hulu’s “Brats,” and HBO’s cast reunions of “Friends” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
“Today we were talking about doing something about the Kennedys, and it was like, ‘in the vault, there’s this time we went to Hyannis Port onto the Kennedy compound with Ethel Kennedy,’ ” Frazier said. “Literally name a person, and we can connect the dot and show you something about their life from that ‘ET’ vault.”
The archive also contains spontaneous encounters that became landmark moments over time. Frazier recalled covering the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas in 2007 when a publicist came to him with a request.
“She said, ‘Hey, I have this new client. Will you interview her? She’s a young girl and I think she’s gonna be great,’” Frazier said. “And it was Taylor, Swift.”
Kevin Frazier and Taylor Swift in 2007 on the red carpet at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas.
(Entertainment Tonight)
Frazier and Turner both say they get warm thanks from actors after they see a vintage red carpet that shows them with a relative who has since died.
The digitization of the archives is being done to make it easier to access the tapes. Finding shows made before 2008 required a production assistant to search through shelves of cassette cases, some with only a Post-It note to identify what was inside.
But the process will also create opportunities to make the material more widely available online for consumers who want to go down the rabbit hole of watching every available segment with their favorite stars.
“There are definitely conversations about that,” Johnson said. “I think there’s a huge appetite to see these stars that we all know and love in that different light. They are kind of like the best of their home movies.”
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