Home Box Office, one of the channel's 10 owners, took over management of Movietime last year and decided to give it a badly needed face lift. It recruited [Lee Masters], the MTV executive credited for breathing new life into the music network, to be the president, and he engineered the transformation to E!

"This is going to be a lot broader than Movietime," Masters said in an interview. "It's going to have a sense of fun. It will cover anything to do with entertainment."

"We have had good response from performers-much better by far than with Movietime," Masters said. "We try to make the interviews more fun for the actor and the audience."