One of my favorite shows was AMC's "Shootout" with Peter Bart and Peter Guber. The two long-time influential Hollywood players would have a little discussion to start the show and then launch into some interesting interviews with actors and directors. They would discuss the movie business and often touch on topics that most lightweight interview shows would steer away from; the interview with George Lopez was especially interesting as Lopez was able to weight in on the difficulties of being Mexican in Hollywood and how few roles there are. Even when the Peters tried to get soft with their interviewers, they'd get called out. When Guber remarked that James Caan had a career "lull", Caan immediately cut him off and said, "Lull?! It was drugs!" This isn't to say that these were hard hitting interviews but they were interesting insights into the minds of filmmakers and interviews that you wouldn't see anywhere else.

The show has since moved to Starz and renamed the wildly out of date "In the House". The show's improvements have pretty much all made the show worse. The show still starts with the opening "debate" which is obviously scripted beforehand. It's basically like watching two people give lectures to one another; they don't really seem to even listen to one another; they're just waiting for their time to speak. The old show was like this but there was an occasional lively debate in those whereas these seem to have had all of the life rehearsed out of them.

What might be the biggest change, and worst move, is that Guber and Bart don't interview people together anymore. One of the highlights of the show was having the two of them in the discussion; often times, a guest's answer would incite a disagreement between the two. Also, the two had a nice one-upsmanship going on. Now we're just stuck with rather flacid interviews.

The only time the two are together are for a viewer mail segment which, like the opening discussion, seems to prepared and isn't all that intriguing. They've also added a host of sorts, a young woman who intros the show and runs an interview segment with beat writers and journalists. To me, this makes zero sense. If I am tuning into a show with two guys who have run studio in this town, I don't want to see a random hostess interviewing a journalist about what might be going on. On top of that, the discussions are pretty bland and haven't yet proven to be worth the screen time that they are getting.

Basically the show went from being hosted by two guys who were once in the middle of the fracas to a show with two guys who seem to be over it (and their sidekick was never even in it to begin with.) It's too bad because there are so few shows on TV with interesting interviews anymore. I'm going to keep it on the DVR for now but it seems like one of those shows that will have episodes pile up before I decide to just delete it completely from the To Do list.

Anyway, most of the good interviews aren't even on the AMC site anymore but here are some clips that I liked. Cuba Gooding Jr. explaining how he screwed up his career.