Mary Hart Talks Oprah, Michael Jackson & Saying Goodbye to 'Entertainment Tonight'
After almost 30 years hosting
'Entertainment Tonight,' Mary Hart is signing off for the last time on tonight's show.
With the show from the very beginning, Hart has had a million adventures and interviews that you could pick her brain about all day long, but one vivid memory from the show's first months is truly hard to believe. "I remember very well traveling from city to city around the country, convincing station managers to keep the show on the air, that we were going to be a ratings winner for them," Hart said. "I mean, it took personal convincing."
Can you imagine now, in this age of entertainment news at every turn, not having a staple show dedicated to just that? Not to mention the 20 others out there ...
I talked to Hart about those early years, her most cherished interviews, her least favorite part of the job and her quasi-rivalry with another TV personality signing off soon, Oprah Winfrey. "Well, I do have her beat by a few years!," Hart said with a laugh.
Honestly, how do you say goodbye?
You know, I am wrestling with that at this moment. It is the most difficult thing, the one that wakes me up at 4AM almost everyday now, going what am I going to say. I don't have the answer ... I don't think I'm going to have the answer until the day of my last show. But believe me, I've already agonized about it, because this show has been such an important ... it's been my life for almost 30 years. I have known some of these people that I've worked with for that long, and that makes it very difficult to walk away.
After that long, it's like a family.
Absolutely. We've gone through everything together. In some cases, some of us have spent more time together than we have with our families. We've traveled together, we've met our spouses, gone through marriages and breakups and the birth of children and deaths in the family together. It makes it a part of my life that is almost impossible to say goodbye to.
Everyone's talking about Oprah's last show -- Oprah this and Oprah that -- but yours is just as momentous, if not more.
Well, I do have her beat by a few years! [Laughs] Here's the other thing that's something I'm very proud of -- we created a genre of television. 'Entertainment Tonight,' when we first started doing the show, even our producers weren't quite clear what direction to take, what the show's identity would be. Critics, for the most part, said, "This show can't last. There's not enough entertainment news to fill a half hour every night." [Laughs] Nobody had done it before -- we were the first to do it -- and looked what happened. It exploded.
http://www.tvsquad.com/2011/05/20/mary-hart-interview-leaving-entertainment-tonight/