Mary Tyler Moore joins Bravo! for "Inside the Actor's Studio"

By Michael Squadron
CNN & Entertainment Weekly Producer

(CNN) -- For producers of entertainment news, nothing beats scoring an interview with a big star. You can move from your boss' doghouse to penthouse if you can score a sit-down with a Julia Roberts, Steven Spielberg or Meryl Streep. But stars of this magnitude talk to reporters about as often as a women's soccer team gets on the cover of TIME.

So when we found out that James Lipton, host of Bravo's "Inside the Actor's Studio" series, had interviewed not only Roberts, Spielberg, and Streep, but also Carol Burnett, Anthony Hopkins, and Susan Sarandon (not to mention Sean Penn, Danny Glover and around 50 others), we put aside our jealousy and tried to learn his secrets.

After spending a lot of time with Lipton over recent months, I can tell you that his "secret" boils down to one word: education. "Inside the Actor's Studio" is actually a televised seminar. The stars come to be interviewed by Lipton and answer questions from students, who are candidates for a Masters in Fine Arts degree. We get to look in, courtesy of Bravo cable network.

We were allowed backstage at the Mary Tyler Moore, Billy Joel, and Jerry Lewis seminars. What stuck me was how relaxed the evenings were. Normally when shows like ours interview a big star, there are time constraints. Someone has to catch a plane, there's another interviewer after you. You get to ask a few questions and you're out of there.

At "Inside the Actor's Studio," celebrities spend three to four hours with Lipton and reveal some of their deepest secrets -- secrets that not even the top entertainment reporters can uncover. And the stars say they love every minute of it because they're sharing it with students who are serious about the craft of performing on stage.

When I think back to my own college years the lectures usually aren't what I remember. But, then again, I never went to a school like James Lipton's.