Vital stats:
Format: interviews, usually showbiz-centric
Duration: 50m-3h23m
Frequency: weekly, pretty much
Archive available on iTunes: all
Kevin Pollak’s is a name I’ve long recognized, but before this week it was only as one of the supporting cast in End of Days. I think he was maybe a cop? I seem to remember his character having come to a grim end, possibly at the talons of some sort of beelzebub. But of course, one glance down his IMDb page reveals that this is a guy who’s truly gotten hisself around: The Usual Suspects, Tropic Thunder, Willow, Wayne’s World 2, Buffalo ’66, The Santa Clause 3. Consequently, he probably knows a lot of people. Good to keep in mind in case he ever needs chat show guests.
Fortunately, Kevin Pollak does need chat show guests, given that he’s helming Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show [RSS] [iTunes], a weekly conversational program that’s a pretty thick technical cut above most of its closest relatives in podcasting. I’ve linked to the audio-only feeds — this being a column on “traditional” podcasting, such as it is, that feels like the right thing to do — but it’s also available as a video podcast and a life, audience-participatory stream. As a visual program, it looks a little — well, a lot — like Charlie Rose, but hey, if you’re gonna lift, lift from the best.
Now, we all acknowledge that Charlie’s black-backgrounded set is perfection, and thus it’s expected that Pollak and his team would imitate it. But they’ve also learned another of the interviewing veteran’s lessons, one that’s less obvious and that much more valuable for it: go long form. I can’t tell you how delighted I am that Pollak and company evidently realize that twenty-minute “conversations” usually aren’t worth the effort they take to record. Like the best of Charlie Rose, several KPCS interviews go for about an hour: the premiere with LeVar “Reading Rainbow Burton [MP3], for instance, or an illuminating sit-down with Adam Carolla [MP3].
But Charlie Rose‘s medium and means of distribution puts a serious cramp on it to which podcasts aren’t subject. None of Rose’s conversations, for instance, can pass the hour mark. Pollak, however, is not so leashed. One hour? Psh. Mere frippery. Try 90-ish minutes with screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie [MP3] or director Jane Campion [MP3]. Still too insubstantial for you? Pollak does two-hour stretches with the likes of Rob Corddry [MP3] and Seth MacFarlane [MP3]. But c’mon. I want real talk, not that birdseed. Give me two and a half hours with Dave Coulier [MP3], best known as Uncle Joey from Full House and as the dude Alanis Morissette was screeching about.
The guest list is, as yet, heavily informed by who Pollak happens to have encountered in his career, and as such the talk can get pretty showbiz insider-y. But I’ve got to admit that he and whoever helps him pick out interlocutors show an uncommonly strong nose for interestingness. But then again, if you’re intellectually probing someone for hour after hour and you focus on always-fascinating topics like how they got their start and built their artistic identities, how could the conversation avoid interestingness? As an interviewer, it almost brings a tear to my eye.
None of this would work, it goes without saying, if Pollak didn’t have the interviewing chops. I’ve come to learn that he’s a lot more than a doomed guy in a Schwarzenegger movie: he’s a comedian, a possessor of a flatly sardonic sense of humor and a hell of an impressionist. I didn’t even know people were impressionists anymore. This can get tiresome, sure, but it’s worth it for the epic bravura moments like when he and Coulier, an even higher-level imitator of famous voices, improvise their way through a conversation between Albert Brooks (Pollak) and Bob Einstein (an uncanny Coulier). (There’s another tear brought to my eye.)
I never would have suspected Pollak of being the future of interviewing, and it must be said that he wastes a fair amount of the show’s beginning and end time on extraneous non-interviewing business. (There’s a regular segment about doing bad imitations of Larry King, for example, that gets old with surprising haste.) But hey, I guess he’s just an all-around surprising fellow.
[Want to hire Podthinker Colin Marshall to Podthink at your company barbecue? colinjmarshall at gmail.]