Ed Murrow meets...

During George Clooney's excellent black-and-white drama Goodnight, and Good Luck about the clash between Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy on live television, one aspect of Murrow's broadcasts that was briefly covered in the film was his occasional interviews with famous celebrities, which "pay the rent" as Murrow (David Straithairn) jokes.

Watching some of these original "Person to Person" interviews from the 1950's, I was struck at how down-to-earth Murrow tries to make them seem; although such a thing is impossible with someone as glamorous as Marilyn Monroe, she does nonetheless come across as someone who could just be a person in an ordinary job like anyone else, and a young Marlon Brando also comes across as a likeable sort of person who enjoyed his Hollywood lifestyle, before his colossal ego and even bigger waistline got the better of him years later.

This interviewing technique of making the subjects feel at home (which indeed they were) was hardly the most penetrating, but it's certainly much more interesting and "realistic" than Oprah or the like, and Michael Parkinson benefited by following a similar style in his celebrity interviews.