Inside the Actors Studio
| Inside the Actors Studio | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Starring | James Lipton |
| Opening theme | Angelo Badalamenti |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of seasons | 22 |
| No. of episodes | 270 (list of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Jeff Wurtz |
| Running time | 60 minutes; 120 minutes |
| Release | |
| Original network | Bravo |
| Original release | August 14, 1994 – present |
| External links | |
| Website | |
 Inside the Actors Studio
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Inside the Actors Studio is an American television show on the Bravo cable television channel, hosted by James Lipton. It is produced and directed by Jeff Wurtz; the executive producer is James Lipton. The program, which premiered in 1994, is distributed internationally by CABLEready and is broadcast in 125 countries around the world reaching 89 million homes. It is currently taped at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University's New York City campus.
The program began as a televised craft seminar for students of the Actors Studio Drama School, originally a joint venture of the Actors Studio and New School University in 1994, with Paul Newman, a former Actors Studio president as its first guest, and soon became Bravo's flagship program. At first taped at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in Greenwich Village, New York City, blocks away from Actors Studio's home in the theater district in midtown Manhattan, it was shifted subsequently to its present location, Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University's New York City campus. The program is presented as a seminar to students of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University.
The show deliberately uses a slower pace in the interviews as compared with a typical celebrity interview, thus cameras usually record a couple of hours of conversation, later edited to one or two hours, a trick used by Groucho Marx on his 1950s quiz show You Bet Your Life. The result, as a New York Times article put it, "In Mr. Lipton's guest chair, actors cease being stars for a while and become artists and teachers." Though sometimes, some interviews go longer; Steven Spielberg's 1999 visit, for example, stretched to four hours, and was later shown as two episodes of one hour each. The interviews are guided by Lipton's trademark index-card questions, which sometimes reveal his well-researched knowledge of guests' lives, often startling some. On one such occasion, Billy Crystal told Lipton, "You know you're scary, don't you?" On another occasion, Martin Sheen asked Lipton, "How do you know all this? This is extraordinary." And Sir Anthony Hopkins, upon learning that Lipton knew the exact address where the former had been born and raised in Wales, turned to the audience and remarked, "He's a detective, you know."
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