The apotheosis of movie gab

You don’t have to flip terribly much these days to find someone -- an actor or director or agent or producer -- in middiscussion about the difference between doing an independent film versus a Hollywood blockbuster and talking as if the distinction were a matter of national security. So there was Daryl Hannah on something called “Henry’s Film Corner,” saying that she’d always wanted to do indies but “that there was actually somewhat of a concerted effort on the part of my representatives at the time to keep me going in that vein,” the blockbusters, “because that’s where they make their commissions, that’s where you stay in that game.”

The whole indie versus Hollywood thing was getting a similar workout this month on AMC’s “Sunday Morning Shootout,” on which Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, the married stars of the new indie release “The Woodsman,” were having a loose discussion about life in the Hollywood sausage factory with “Shootout” hosts Peter Bart and Peter Guber. Former studio men (Bart is now editor in chief of the industry trade paper Variety and Guber is chairman and founder of Mandalay Entertainment Group), the two do a strange kind of show -- “Meet the Press” meets public access meets the notion that if you walk into Campanile or Ca del Sole on a given weekday you’ll be lucky enough to overhear the No. 2 guy at Fox Searchlight talking about the global take for “Kinsey.”

Nowadays, you get the feeling that more people can tell you how an independent film gets made than how a bill becomes a law. You don’t have to see a movie and form your own relationship with it anymore; you can just become part of its insider trivia, and TV is here to help you. The new movie talk on TV isn’t just a gussied-up form of celebrity gossip, and it isn’t inexorably linked to the publicity machine of what’s in current release, which makes it different from, say, “Entertainment Tonight” or “Charlie Rose.” That’s what’s notable about the trend -- the way it offers up movie-making talk as an ongoing, even compulsive conversation. On TV, there’s talk about the business of movies over food (IFC’s “Dinner for Five”), in book club form (AMC’s “Movie Club,” hosted by screenwriter John Ridley) and as Everyman rant (the aforementioned “Henry’s Film Corner,” hosted by former punk rocker-writer-radio-host-social critic Henry Rollins.

Granted, these shows are on cable movie channels. But like squatters moving in to abandoned buildings, entertainment shows have increasingly come to occupy the time slots -- and the formats -- once filled by news. CNN Headline News recently announced that in February it will launch a program called “Showbiz Tonight,” while MSNBC readies “MSNBC at the Movies,” described as an “in-depth look at the movie industry,” featuring the all-important “behind-the-scenes information on the latest independent and art-film releases.”

Neal Gabler, author of the book “Life: The Movie,” was one of the film critics on the old PBS film debate series “Sneak Previews” after Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert left, and he has a theory: “ ‘Sneak Previews’ in its original incarnation created the ‘Crossfire’ format for politics,” he said by phone. “ ‘O’Reilly Factor,’ ‘Hannity & Colmes’ -- that kind of point-counterpoint thing was not in existence on television before ‘Sneak Previews,’ ” at least not as the form of an entire show. So it may be coming full circle.

Of all the new shows, “Shootout” is the one that most directly displays the shifting paradigm. Here Bart and Guber sit in what appears to be a cafe, at a table piled with newspapers and magazines (Bart’s Variety is usually not hard to notice). In fact the series is taped at Raleigh Studios, across from Paramount on Melrose Avenue, and those people at other tables not eavesdropping even though Bacon or Kevin Spacey is in the room are extras.

“Shootout” grew out of a seminar series that Guber, a former studio head at Columbia and Sony, and Bart, who had tenures at Paramount and the former Lorimar Films, conducted at UCLA’s film school.

They do not call movies “movies” -- they call them “pictures.” The first 10 minutes are given over to “McLaughlin Group”-like topics: Has the producer credit lost its value? Have PR firms become the tyrants of the movie promotion business? As Bart and Guber kibitz about, say, whether Hollywood is turning out too many horror pictures, helpful “facts,” always a dubious notion in Hollywood, appear on-screen. “Fact: The Academy’s main concerns are parties given to influence votes,” I read, as the duo debated whether the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences should have stiffer rules governing Oscar-season influence-peddling. (Guber argued for more regulation, Bart gave the it-has-always-been-thus-in-Hollywood argument, though he failed to mention that his publication, with its “For Your Consideration” ads, profits greatly from Oscar politicking.)

“Fact: Most A-list celebrities are in the hands of two firms -- Baker/Winokur/Ryder and Interpublic” appeared on-screen the other week as Guber, who talks very fast, playing the more excitable one to Bart’s measured approach, carried on about “the cabal between the media and the PR business.

“They need those stars’ punims on their papers!” Guber exclaimed about the print media’s acquiescence to movies’ publicity machines.

The show feels, anyway, refreshingly unpolished, featuring two guys who probably don’t belong on TV in the first place.

“We don’t want it to get so inside as to be inaccessible,” Bart said by phone. But being inside is the starting point: Guber and Bart can land “National Treasure” star Nicolas Cage and the film’s director, Jon Turteltaub, in part because they all have a history together.

“Shootout” draws only roughly 300,000 viewers on a network -- AMC -- carried in 86 million homes. But it can get Spacey even if “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” which draws seven times as many viewers, struggles to book guests. Although Bart and Guber were on “The Late Late Show” two Fridays ago.

Foreign markets

Guber, who teaches graduate courses in the producers program at UCLA, sees his mission as partly to “pass on the legacy of filmmaking. Not just how to make films, but how they get made, and sometimes, frighteningly, why.”

“Movies are a sleight of hand, but everybody wants to know how the magic was done,” he said.

He said that “Shootout” would soon be heard on Sirius Radio and seen on Delta flights longer than two hours.

As he has argued on TV (“Five billion, 800 million people outside the United States!” he shouted at Bart a few weeks ago, and later added “This business serves the world!”), he argued on the phone that Hollywood is driving the global culture. He gave several anecdotes to prove this -- including the vacation in Thailand where “some kid on an elephant is asking me a question about Pierce Brosnan.”

The kid, Guber said, wanted to know how come they changed the Bond guy.

“I said they get older. He said, ‘What do you mean?’ ”